For work today, I had to go to SFU Surrey for the Surrey Open House. Of course, I went representing Computing Science as we spread the word about the pending-Senate-approval Software Systems program in Surrey, SoSy for short, and, of course, the good word about Computing Science.

I did something that Diana Cukierman, one of our professors at SFU who is currently teaching CMPT 120, did for one of her lectures. This is the “make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” exercise.

For those not familiar with the exercise, which I first did in high school in English 8, here it is:

1. Ask your audience (in my case, the individual(s) who came in and checked it out) to write instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
2. Get the instructions from them.
3. Make sandwich based on their instructions

Of course, with computers, one needs to realize that they are not as smart as we would think they are. You need to be precise and detailed with your instructions, as the computer would not know how to do something that you would consider simple.

To illustrate what I mean, I will take my favourite example (which unfortunately was not said):

1. Take the bread
2. Place peanut butter on top of bread
3. Place jelly on top of peanut butter
4. Place bread on top
5. Enjoy!

That will result in something extremely silly, with a whole loaf of bread squished by a jar of peanut butter and a jar of a jam of your choice (strawberry for me) with another loaf of bread on top.

Some interesting things from running the exercise for around four hours:

• Talked to an elementary school teacher. This pretty much gave her inspiration to do something similar with her class. She also mentioned that doing computing science outreach with elementary school teachers, which would be quite interesting.
• Someone wrote on the instructions: “Now do the PEANUT BUTTER JELLY DANCE“. Needless to say, I did not do it because a) I did not have a banana suit and b) although it would probably have been fun, I was at work.
• I got my picture taken at random. I think my face kinda said “what the?” in said picture.
• Someone else wrote on the instructions “Say I scream for ice ice cream aloud” (that’s what it said – no typo here). This was due to the fact that co-op was giving out free ice cream during open house and dressed up WIL Fraser in an ice cream cone (basically, a large-ish cutout of an ice cream cone with ice cream, then cut out a section for WIL’s face to show)
• One of the instructions I got was “make sandwich”. “Sorry, can’t do that. I don’t know how!”

It occurred to me that something was missing (besides the banana suit and music track if we wanted to make this silly) was some great geek humour. And of course, what better to related to Computing Science than this timeless classic on XKCD.

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