Information Theory
Computers are all about storing and moving information, but what actually is information? How do we measure the amount of information in a message?
This activity uses some intriguing variations on the game of 20 questions to demonstrate how we can quantify information content, which in turn shows us how to store and share it efficiently.
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Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel has programmed the Twenty Guesses Binary Search Unplugged activity in Scratch which can be downloaded in a zip file of the complete set of activities . Please read the ReadMe.txt for documentation.
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An older version of this activity can be downloaded in PDF format here. The content is similar to the current version, but there's some extra technical information.
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Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), an American electronic engineer and mathematician, is known as "the father of information theory. Check the Wikipedia page on Claude Shannon
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Claude Shannon's Experiment to Calculate the Entropy of English is aimed at determining the entropy of an English letter (the amount of information in bits that we obtain on the average when we learn one letter of English).