19. Boring Pixels!/Using numbers

By giving Roby instructions to form a picture square by square, pixel by pixel, we discover that when many squares in a row have the same colour, we can use numbers to make it more interesting. Computers do the same...

Required material: squared notebook, or 5 × 5 chequered board drawn on a piece of paper, felt-tip pen. To represent the code of the drawing you can use a pen and paper.

Questions

Try to make a chequered design and represent it with RLE encoding. The size of the design is equal to the number of squares, but what is the size of its RLE representation?

If you are interested in more unplugged activities, or activities in different programming languages, robotics, micro:bit etc., check out the EU Code Weeks “Learning Bits” with video tutorials and lesson plans for primary, lower secondary and upper secondary schools. Also have a look at the EU Code Week Learn&Teach resources, where you can find free, high-quality resources from around the world for teachers and students.