Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA
Students find their assigned groups of three to four students, and work cooperatively on an in-class activity worksheet to discuss how messages are anticoded, and experience practical issues with incommensurability barrier by attempting to analyze content in a fictitious message from an extraterrestrial advanced technological civilization.
Start out with going over the original Arecibo message (and presumptive crop circle reply in Chilbolton, England, 2001) in a whole-class discussion. Point out to or ask students about the key features of these messages: counting (binary); height and population of inhabitants; schematic representation of planetary systems and communication devices (radio dishes and supposed crop-crushing apparatus).
With these clues, students then start working in their groups.
This is a truncated version of a much longer in-class activity which also involves counting systems and arithmetic operations used in anticoded messages.
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