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Lesson 6:

Sharing

Year 8 – Computing systems

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Objectives

Lesson 6: Sharing

In this lesson, you will:

  • Take a quiz, to assess learning
  • Explore the implications of sharing programs, and learn about free and open source software

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Summative assessment

Assessment

You will now take a quiz, to assess your learning throughout this unit.

Good luck!

3

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Summative assessment: feedback

Assessment

4

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Activity 2

Use a program

Follow the link to visit the ‘Naughty elf’ program in Scratch.

The elf will allow you 4 tries to guess its lucky number, which lies between 1 and 20.

The elf picks a different number each time you play and claims you will never be able to guess it.

Take 3 minutes to run the program and explore what it does.

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Activity 2

See inside

On the project page, you can run the program and interact with it.

You are the user.

Did you use this button while exploring the program’s behaviour?

What does the button do?

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Activity 2

See inside: being able to study how a program works

On the project page, you can run the program and interact with it.

You are the user.

The See inside button takes you to the editor, where you can study the program instructions.

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Activity 2

Remix

On the project page, you can run the program and interact with it.

You are the user.

Have you ever pressed this button on another person’s program?

What does the button do?

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Activity 2

Remix: being able to adapt (a copy of) a program

On the project page, you can run the program and interact with it.

You are the user.

The Remix button creates a duplicate of the project that you own and are able to modify.

This attribution will appear on the project page of your copy of the remixed project.

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Activity 2

Implications (Think, write, pair, share)

Questions .

What do you like about being able to ‘See inside’ and ‘Remix’ projects?

How do you feel about other people being able to do that with your projects?

I don’t want to reveal how my program works.

What if people think my code is not good enough?

I don’t like others stealing my ideas.

I can see how an interesting program works.

I can help spot errors and improve programs built by others.

I can build on other people’s ideas.

I can look for malicious code.

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Plenary

Free and open source software

The creators of a program can choose to provide access to its source code: anyone can ‘see inside’ the program to understand how it works, check for errors, suggest improvements, and ‘remix’ it.

This is called ‘free’ (as in ‘freedom’), ‘libre’, or ‘open source’ software.

Sometimes abbreviated as ‘FOSS’ or ‘FLOSS’

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Plenary

Free and open source software

Search for examples of free, libre, and open source software.

Can you find any familiar programs that you already use?

Firefox

browser

Chromium

browser

Scratch

programming

LibreOffice

VLC

media player

GIMP

image editing

Audacity

audio editing

Inkscape

vector graphics

Python

programming

Android™

OS

Ubuntu

OS

Linux

OS

Note: These are examples of popular open source programs for personal devices.

FLOSS is also used extensively in science, space, machine learning, supercomputers, the internet and the World Wide Web, and many other fields.

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Summary

In this lesson, you...

Took a quiz, to assess learning

Explored the implications of sharing programs, and learnt about free and open source software

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Unit objectives

Investigated different layers of computing systems:

  • From programs and the operating system
  • To the physical components that function together as a system to execute these programs
  • To the fundamental binary building blocks that these components consist of

In this unit, you...

Software .

Hardware .

Logic .