Routing and Deadlock
Computer networks are based on passing messages from computer to computer. This sounds simple in principle, but in practice all sorts of contention and bottlenecks can occur.
This activity gives some first hand experience of such issues, with a game for a group of students.
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The Routing and Deadlock game in action, from a poster at a conference in Japan
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The Routing and Deadlock activity can also be set up as a board game
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A nice variation of the orange game was developed independently by Gottfried Vossen and Richard Bell. Rather than have labeled o
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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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The Mathmaniacs web site has a similar activity (lesson 16)
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Kinesthetic Learning Activities QwikiWiki has an activity called Network Routing on Strings where students simulate the operation of a network (of routers) using notecards to represent packets and string to represent network links.
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Video: Warriors of the Net? is an engaging short animated film that shows how packets move around the Internet
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The Orange Game is demonstrated using Flash animation by Hiroki Manabe .