This artifact is a worksheet for a game that my team designed as part of EE276: Information Theory. While this class focuses on the bases of information theory at a graduate level, it culminates with a symposium at a middle school in East Palo Alto, where each team teaches students about a different concept of information theory. 

This assignment reminded me of what I had to do to turn my literature review about the Transformer into an explainer video: my team and I had to adapt the concept of error-correcting codes to be understandable by a lay audience: middle school students. After looking at ways to efficiently teach younger children, we decided to build a game. In this game, an artist tries to send a painting to a museum curator, but an art thief modifies the painting. The goal is for the artist and the curator to find a way to safely transfer the painting. This game is an analogy of the classic “noisy channel” paradigm in information theory, but framed in a much more appealing way.

Throughout the game, we challenge students to come up with ways to protect the painting, and we guide them in this worksheet to find one of the most common solutions used in the real world.

While we were unable to test this game as the outreach got cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was very proud that we were able to communicate some very fundamental tools of information theory through such a simple game. I think that our worksheet is a clear step-by-step guide of our game, and I hope that the students that ended up using it enjoyed playing this game.

If we had more time on this project, I think we could have improved the framing even more by designing a more-professional game set with more robust pieces, a more elaborate game board, and a game logo. This would have helped us to make the content even more appealing to middle school students.

This project was done in collaboration with Madison Hurr, Colleen Dai and Diwakar Ganesan.