Welcome to the first ‘window’ of the CS4FN Christmas Computing Advent Calendar. The picture on the ‘box’ was a woolly jumper with a message in binary, three letters on the jumper itself and another letter split across the arms. Can you work out what it says? (Answer at the end).
Come back tomorrow for the next instalment in our Advent series.
Wrap up warm with our first festive CS4FN article, from Karen Shoop, which is all about the links between knitting patterns and computer code. Find out about regular expressions in her article: Knitters and Coders: separated at birth?
Image credit: Regular Expressions by xkcd
Further reading
Dickens Knitting in Code – this CS4FN article, by Paul Curzon, is about Charles Dickens’ book A Tale of Two Cities. One of the characters, Madame Defarge, takes coding to the next level by encoding hidden information into her knitting, something known as steganography (basically hiding information in plain sight). We have some more information on the history of steganography and how it is used in computing in this CS4FN article: Hiding in Elizabethan binary.
In Craft, Culture, and Code Shuchi Grover also considers the links between coding and knitting, writing that “few non-programming activities have such a close parallels to coding as knitting/crocheting” (see section 4 in particular, which talks about syntax, decomposition, subroutines, debugging and algorithms).
Something to print and colour in
This is a Christmas-themed thing you might enjoy eating, if you’ve any room left of course. Puzzle solution tomorrow. This was designed by Elaine Huen.
Solving the Christmas jumper code
The jumper’s binary reads
01011000
01001101
01000001
01010011
What four letters might be being spelled out here? Each binary number represents one letter and you can find out what each letter is by looking at this binary-to-letters translator. Have a go at working out the word using the translator (but the answer is at the end of this post).
Keep scrolling
Bit more
The Christmas jumper says… XMAS
cs4fn 
22 thoughts on “CS4FN Advent – Day 1 – Woolly jumpers, knitting and coding”