Push the desks back. Today the network is made of you: each student is a device, each length of string is a cable, and messages are index cards that travel hand to hand along the string. No message may move except along a string, and no one may speak — the cards are the only signal. Now: get a message across the room.
The task
Round one: build any network you like with the string you are given — there is not enough for everyone to connect to everyone — and deliver a card from one corner of the room to the other. Round two: the teacher cuts one string. Deliver again. Round three: the message is now a full paragraph, too big for one card, and cards may take different paths. Deliver it so the far corner can read it — intact and in order.
Getting started (click to expand)
- A star with one student at the centre is fast to build. What is it like to be the centre? What happens when the centre sneezes?
- After the cut: could the sender even tell the link was gone? What would they need to hear back to know delivery happened?
- Big message, many cards: what has to be written on each card for the far corner to rebuild the paragraph?
What tends to surface
The room invents networking under pressure. The cut string forces spare routes nobody wanted to “waste” string on — redundancy, priced in effort. The paragraph forces numbered cards carrying sender and destination — packets, invented because one card cannot hold the message. When Networks and Connectivity supplies the vocabulary, it names decisions your room already made — and the crowd of gadgets in Connected Devices lives on exactly these ideas right now.
An extension
Appoint two students as routers who alone may choose paths, then flood the network: every corner sends at once. Where do cards pile up? What does the pile-up feel like from inside — and what would you change about the network to drain it?
The answer is not on this page
There is no diagram of the right network here. Every class builds a different one, breaks it differently, and repairs it with its own ideas — which is how the real internet grew, too.
Curriculum connection
B4.2
investigate hardware and methods used to establish networks and connectivity, and assess the benefits and limitations of increased connectivity with reference to everyday life
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