Disc Driving the Electronic Mall - Expanding Your Horizons

Category: Computing | Career: Disk Drive Engineer

Disc Driving the Electronic Mall

Purpose: Through this board game, the students will learn how maneuvering through a shopping mall is very similar to the way data commands are processed through a hard disc drive.

Supplies:

1 color copy of the 3-page board game (attached) per every 4 students.
1 copy of activity cards sheet (attached) per each group of 4 students.
A set of two standard dice per each group of 4 students
Tape
Pencils (at least 1 per group)
Scissors
Small colorful candies (i.e. Life Savers, M&Ms). Enough for each person in a group of 4 to have a different color.
Laptop computer and overhead projector - recommended but optional

Pre-Activity Prep:

Assemble the 3 page board game pieces together using scissors and tape so game fits together in one continuous board game piece (i.e. level 2 page is on top, level 3 and level 1 pages are at the bottom). Assemble one board game for each group of 4 students that are expected.
Separate the six activity cards into individual cards using scissors to cut. Have one group of 6-activity cards per group of 4 students.
If using laptop to show introduction, set up computer and load provided introductory presentation.

I. Introduction and Career Definition (10 minutes):

The activity should begin with an introduction. The first step should be to gather the girls and make a definitive statement that the workshop is going to begin

“Hello, my name is _______ and I am a _____ engineer. Today we are going to learn a little about what a computer hard disc drive is by playing a board game that involves shopping for electronic equipment in a mall.

Before we start the game, I would like to ask how many of you know what a computer hard disc drive is? A hard disc drive is the part of your computer that stores your operating system (i.e. Windows), your programs (games) and data (pictures, letters). It looks like this (put up picture of disc drive). Inside of the ‘black box’ there are multiple disks (the quantity depends on how much data the hard drive has capacity to hold). These discs have to stay really clean because even a small speck of dust can cause problems inside and make you lose your data. Hard drives get a command to do something from another piece of your computer called a processor or controller and does what it is told to do.

Hard drives are not just in your computers anymore. They are everywhere. They are in games (Xbox), cameras, video recorders, cell phones and cars.

So “What is a hard disc drive engineer?” You don’t usually see that as a degree in college, so what type of education do you think is needed to be a disc drive engineer? Well we pretty much use all type of engineers such as Computer Engineer, Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Chemical Engineer, Magnetic Engineer and Mathematician. Each play an important part of designing, building and selling our disc drives. For example a mechanical engineer designs/tests the physical characteristics of the drive (make sure all the parts fit together right), a chemical engineer designs things like the lubrication that goes inside the drive and a magnetic engineer works on the magnetic properties that are very important in making a hard drive be able to read and write.

So let’s learn a little about hard drives by playing the Disc Driving the Electronic Mall game. At the end we will discuss further how actions you take in the game relate to actions a disc drive takes in processing data.

II. Hands-on activity (30 minutes):

Please divide into groups of 4. Each group should have a game board, a set of six activity cards, two dice and 4 candy pieces that will be your game pieces.

First of all, each of you will need to select one of the activity cards. This card will contain three items that you will need to obtain from the mall. (1 item per floor).

To start the game, each person rolls one dice. What you roll indicates what level you start on (i.e. roll 1 you start on level 1, etc). If you roll a 4, 5 or 6 then you lose a turn and cannot enter the mall yet.

The object is to move around the game board (in counter-clockwise direction only) and get to each of the stores that are listed on your activity card.

You must use the escalator/elevator to go between the levels. You must roll exactly a combination 19-21 to be able to move onto the next level. Once you get to a count of 15 you can use one dice to roll the remaining steps.

After you have been to all of your stores, then you must proceed to the exit. You do not have to have the exact dice roll to finish the game. Play continues until all players have completed their activity card and exited the mall.

Game rules are listed on the board game to help you. I will also be going around the room if you have any questions. We will play this game for about 25 minutes, which hopefully allows everyone to complete their activity sheet and exit the mall.

III. Wrap-up (10 minutes): So how was the game? Did everyone finish the game? Who were the winners in each group?

So how is maneuvering through a mall similar to a data command maneuvering through a disc drive?

First of all before you could start you had to obtain your Activity Card. This is the same with a disc drive; you cannot start until you receive a command from your computer.

Did any of you Not get to enter the mall on your first turn? If so, you were told the Mall wasn’t open yet. This is similar to the drive not being ready. A disc drive will not accept a command until it has powered up and did other necessary steps to get ready for your command. Sometimes this can take a multiple ‘retry’ before it is ready just like you had to wait your turn to retry to roll a 1, 2 or 3.

As you will notice the Mall floors are circular. Information is stored on round discs inside of the disc drive. On these discs are circular tracks. What we are showing you is how three floors of a mall are similar to three tracks on a disc (or could be on different discs). Disc drives contain thousands of tracks

Data on each disc drive track is split up into different sections called logical blocks. This is similar to how a shopping mall is split up into individual stores.

You were told to move only in a counter-clockwise direction. That is because a hard drive only rotates in a counter-clockwise direction

A disc drive moves between tracks in order to locate different pieces of information it is asked to find by the computer. When it moves it needs to stop exactly at the right track location. We tried to show this by requiring an exact roll of 20 steps (+ 1) to exit an escalator/elevator to reach the next level of the mall.

A disc drive also moves slower as it gets close to the right track, that’s why when you got within 5 tracks you used only one dice.

A disc can have bad spots on it where information can’t be stored. When it finds a bad spot like this it moves the information to a new location on the disc that is good. When this happens it takes longer for the drive to find the information. In the same way, in the game there were places on each level of the mall that caused you to go somewhere you weren’t planning on (food court, video arcade, etc) that caused you to take longer to get to the store you wanted.

Once a disc drive finds the information it was told to find by the computer, it sends the information back to the computer. In the game, once you completed your shopping list you needed to leave the mall with your completed purchases.

IV. Conclusion (5 minutes): I hope you have now learned a little about a hard disc drive operations. As I indicated, disc drives are not just in computers any more. They are in cell phones, video recorders, games, cameras and automobiles. Uses for disc drives will continue to increase so the need for engineers to design, build and sell disc drives will also increase.

We have a hand out that contains these same analogies that we discussed here, some terms and some fun facts. Thank You.