Every time I teach “intro” I dread, but also love the “binary encoding activity” This is about trying to get students to think about what they need to do to encode first a limited set, but then open ended messages in binary (no spaces! no line breaks!)
They quickly reinvent concepts like “code should be in chunks of uniform length” and ways to signal the start and end of different encoding methods. It’s kinda chaotic but went well today.
