High school students discover computer science without a computer

On Thursday 22 October, students from three Gateway schools came to the UNSW Kensington Campus with one goal in mind; to expand their views of what computer science is without using a single computer.

Approximately 100 students from Beverly Hills Girls High, Cecil Hills High School, and Ingleburn High School came together to learn about computer science, discovering that it’s so much more than just programming. The full-day CS Unplugged program was facilitated by the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering in collaboration with LLMs Unplugged–a project at the Australian National University which helps people understand how AI language models work through hands-on activities and without computers.

Academics and students from the School of Computer Science and Engineering facilitated the first two workshops of the day. Students first explored data representation and coding, where they learnt about single-bit parity correction and binary representation. This allowed them to physically enact a computer fixing an error, and explore how bits in a machine can represent information. They then participated in a workshop on searching and sorting, exploring a physical sorting network and moving through the algorithm to better understand how comparisons are made. They also hunted for numbers, learning about logarithms and divide-and-conquer techniques.

The last workshop was facilitated by LLMs Unplugged, where students trained their own small language model. By using children’s books and coloured tokens, students were able to generate brand new sentences that sounded like Dr Seuss could have written them.

The CS Unplugged initiative was led by UNSW Lecturer Dr Henry Hickman, who has an interest in improving the equity of programming education globally.

Dr Hickman was pleased with the students’ energy and interest throughout, saying, “Not only did we get students to think more about computer science, we got them to have fun while doing so!”

Held for the first time this year, the CS Unplugged program was awarded a UNSW Engineering EFFECT Grant, which supports educational innovation, teaching enhancement, and student experience projects. The EFFECT funding will allow the program to be analysed and scaled for future years, ensuring more students can benefit from engaging, hands-on opportunities to explore computer science. Funding and guidance from the UNSW Engineering Student Equity and Education teams also helped to shape the 2026 program and enabled students from underrepresented backgrounds to participate in a meaningful and memorable way.

Throughout the day, students rated the activities using sticker sheets. It was evident that students had fun while deepening their understanding of computer science, broadening their view of the field and discovering new possibilities for their future.