harmonizing cs unplugged activities and teaching logo as cs plugged

[Nnaemeka David]

I wonder if anyone has done this before.
I intend teaching cs unplugged activities to kids and then extend it with Logo programming as "cs plugged" activities, so to say.
In a way, making the cs unplugged activities the theoretical angle and Logo programming, the lab angle.
Has anyone done this before?
Does anyone have a curricula or guideline on how this can be done?
Logo as language is not hard-and-fast; can go with scratch, snap!
Thanks

[george boukeas]

Hi David. I think the closest thing to what you are describing are the
implementations of unplugged activities by Moti Ben-Ari
(http://code.google.com/p/scratch-unplugged/).

Personally, I believe that some of the activities do not transfer well
when they are "plugged". In addition, some of the inherrent
limitations of scratch (i.e. not being able to accept input from
files) make some of the implementations feel somehow unnatural.

However, as a project it generally sounds very compelling and I wish
you the best of luck.

[Nnaemeka David]

thanks. will go through the files on the code.google.com

[José Carlos Márquez]

I did something like this, during last December. We divided the course in two tracks students worked on in parallel. We taught them some theoretical CS concepts using the unplugged activities and taught them basic programming skills with Karel. We tried to have both tracks somehow related to each other, but this is not always possible. It is easier at the beginning when students are getting introduced to their first programming languages. We used the unplugged activities to discuss the nature of computer languages and how computers differ from the way humans think. Both tracks started to get more and more distant from there.

We used the unplugged activities about programming languages, binary numbers, search algorithms (With this activity we introduced them to the notion of time complexity). We added some other disconnected activities from other sources to explain how the Internet works (a topic our students were very interested on) and about programming ("My Robotic Friends" from Thinkersmith)

[Nnaemeka David]

You didn't mention harmonizing both activities using a curriculum of sorts, even an ad hoc one? You just improvised, I guess.
David