Learning logic without screens: 5 activities to print
Logic does not need electricity: a pencil, some paper and someone to talk to are enough. Here are five activities for the kitchen table or the classroom, from the simplest to the most prepared, with what each one really involves.
Why screen-free?
Our circuits are played on a screen, and we will not pretend otherwise. But on paper, you cannot click at random until the lamp lights up: you have to think ahead. And around a table, people talk more. None of this replaces the circuits, but it helps the ideas stick. The first three activities are free and take ten minutes to make; the other two are more prepared.
1. Human logic gates
You need at least four players. Two children are the inputs A and B: arm up for 1, arm down for 0. A third is the gate, holding a card that says AND, OR or NOT. A fourth is the lamp, and stands up when the gate says 1. The leader calls out “A up, B down”, and the gate thinks and decides. Then swap roles and cards. With more people, chain two gates: the output of the first becomes an input of the second. It is noisy, it is funny, and the OR rule (“both up works too”) is never forgotten again.
2. Dot cards for counting in binary
Cut out five cards. Draw 1 dot on the first, then 2, 4, 8 and 16 on the others. Lay them in a row, from 16 on the left to 1 on the right. A card face up counts as 1; face down, it counts as 0. To show 6, turn up the 4 card and the 2 card: 00110. For 13: 8, 4 and 1, so 01101. Challenge: what is the biggest number you can make with these five cards? (31, all face up.) This activity, widely used in “unplugged” computing clubs, leads straight into binary addition.
3. Truth tables in pencil
Copy out an empty table: two columns A and B, four rows 00, 01, 10, 11, and a column S. Read out a sentence: “the dog goes out if it is sunny AND someone is at home”. Everyone fills in the S column, then you compare. Next, turn it round: someone writes a random S column, and the others look for a sentence that fits it. It is harder, and much more fun. Our page on the truth table explains the method and has worked tables to copy or print from the browser.
4. Logic puzzles
Print our article 10 little logic puzzles to solve as a family: ten puzzles from easy to fiendish, three of them with AND, OR and NOT gates. The answers are at the end: fold the page so nobody peeks.
5. A ready-made escape game or lesson
For a complete activity with nothing to invent, two of our printable escape games, Professor Volt's Lab (ages 12 and up) and The Fireflies' Forest (ages 10 and up, 8 and up with an adult), are played almost entirely on paper: puzzles, hint cards, a map made of two overlaid sheets. To be precise: the final code is typed on a phone, tablet or computer, without internet. That is the only screen moment in the game, and it lasts a minute. They cost €12 each.
For a class or a club, the Teacher Pack (€15) includes photocopiable student worksheets, a paper test for each lesson and an introductory lesson with four student worksheets. Its 50 circuits, on the other hand, are projected on the board: the pack is not “screen-free”, but a good part of each lesson is done in pencil.
One tip for all these activities
Always ask for a prediction before checking: “do you think the lamp will light up?”. A mistake made out loud and then corrected teaches more than a right answer found by chance. And let the children invent their own sentences to turn into gates: that is often where they are at their most creative.