Consider Using Pop Culture to Illustrate Computer Science

At a small Computer Science education conference I attended a few years ago, the dinner speaker showed how the lectures we give could be enlivened by music such as songs he played on his guitar. But what if you’re not so talented? What can normal people use to ‘jazz up’ their lectures?

Answer: YouTube, AFV, movies, and other elements of popular culture! (;-)

Of course, some television programs, movies, etc. naturally illustrate Computer Science by explicitly featuring computers, robots, programs, discrete mathematics (as in Numb3rs), etc. Using such material is obvious. My point here is for you to consider further pop-culture material that you could use to illustrate Computer Science even though it actually does not explicitly feature computers.

Here are some examples:

• My favorite material from popular culture usable for teaching Computer Science is the following scene in the 2001 animated movie Shrek:
  

  

  Shrek: “For your information, there’s a lot more to ogres than people think.”
  Donkey: “Example?”
  Shrek: “Example? Okay. Uh… ogres… are like onions.”
  Donkey: “They stink?”
  Shrek: “Yes. No!”
  Donkey: “Oh, they make you cry?” [...]
  Shrek: “No! Layers! Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.”
  Donkey: “Oh… you both have layers…  You know, not everybody likes onions.  Cake!  Everybody loves cakes!  Cakes have layers. [...]  You know what else everybody likes?  Parfait.” [...]

  Consider showing that clip to enliven an otherwise dry presentation about networking or “the interacting layers of a typical computing system” [ACM/IEEE, "Computer Science Curricula 2013"]. (One albeit low-quality copy of this scene is available on YouTube via
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZhAhuknUho.)

• In an introductory course, when you present “||“, consider showing the video “It’s a pause” from America’s Funniest (Home) Videos / AFV
  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl8PP5bsCtI).
• If you display the alphabet, e.g. demonstrating how a char variable can run through the values of the alphabet via a loop, consider showing Sesame Street’s Big Bird singing “AB-CDEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QR-STUV-WX-YZ” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTvhKZHAP8U).
• When you present recursion, consider showing some of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back; e.g.:
• If you present coin-flipping, then consider showing the beginning of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjOqaD5tWB0).
• If you teach your students both Java and C (or C++), then when you present how “.” means slightly different things in Java versus C/C++ (“->” is pertinent), consider saying that “.” in Java and “.” in C/C++ are “false cognates” a.k.a. “faux amis”, with illustrated examples in English and another human language you know.  Here’s such an image for French:
  (The most pertinent example there is “biscuits”, which means something related but different in American English and French.)
• If you give an assignment to solve a maze, then consider including a picture of a maze from a movie such as Labyrinth or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
• If you give an assignment to write a program which would ask the user several questions, then consider illustrating it with some material featuring the Bridgekeeper of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• If you want to illustrate how a binary search tree (BST) can become unbalanced, consider showing some material from Chicka Chicka A B C / Chicka Chicka Boom Boom; e.g.:
  
  (The tree is initially straight, then adding letters makes it lean — and then things collapse!)
• Lastly here, if you present deletion of a value at a BST node which has two non-null children, involving obtaining a replacement value by traversing one step one way and then a longer jump (many steps) the other way, consider showing the Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show:
  
  Dr. Everett V. Scott: “It’s just a jump to the left.”
  All: “And then a step to the right.”
  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg-vgGuTD8A)!
• These are just a few examples of pop culture usable for teaching Computer Science; I’m sure you can find more. I think a yogurt commercial once illustrated inclusive disjunction; Jeopardy once illustrated the least-common-multiple function (which one could present in a course on Discrete Mathematics); and so on. This material certainly is silly. But remember: a common suggestion for doing a presentation is to start it with a joke!

Regards,

Hugh

P.S. There’s one such piece of material I’m actually trying to find: I vaguely recall seeing a movie starring someone like Jim Carrey or maybe John Cusack who keeps trying to win a radio contest involving choosing a sequence of about seven directions, left-left-right-left-…. I want to use this material to illustrate navigating a BST. If you could help me find this material, I’d appreciate it.