Unplugged Activity | Getting Loopy

Hi! My name is Miral Kobt.

I'm the creator of iLuminate.

In my work there is something I use in both dances

and in programming light suits. And that is... loops!

Loops are repeating an action over and over.

When you repeat something multiple times, like my actions to keep the hula hoop spinning,

I'm performing a loop of that action

This is a loop

Today we're going to have a dance party. We'll act out loops with a new dance: The Iteration.

We're going to learn about loops using a dance.

You'll learn a couple of easy steps and then repeat them over and over to complete the dance.

Here are the steps you'll need to learn:

clap your hands, put your hands behind your head

put your hands on your waist, lift your left hand up

lift your right hand up

Pretty simple, right?

Head, waist. Head, waist. Clap clap clap.

Do you see how some steps are repeated? Such as clap? That's a loop!

We need to do it two more, ready?

You will discover that you can shorten the directions by putting some dance steps in loops.

Are you ready?

Now we're gonna do a belly laugh, ready?

We actually do use loops in our dancing

The dancers are wearing computers and they're all in the same network

So I might loop the lights through the same dancers over and over again

So in the loop I might have an iteration, I'll say you wanna go

loop through these 6 dancers over and over again and then within the loop

you'll want to increase the speed so that

you're both looping through the same dancers but you're also increasing

the speed of the lights so that it kind of plays a visual trick on the audience.

And that's all created through loops.

Loops are important in computer science because they make our work shorter and easier.