On Friday, I got to lecture my ENGR 1110 kids on networking. Considering we have a whole semester on the subject and I was having to give them a crash course in one afternoon, I took a breadth approach. One of the topics we covered was packet encapsulation. At the end of the lesson, I had them break up into two teams. They raced to see who could make the encapsulated packets the fastest. Each person represented a layer in the reference model. We also used TCP (connected) and UDP (connectionless) to add a touch of excitement. If they drew connected, their packet was safe, but could still be considered corrupted if it was poorly constructed. If they drew connectionless, they had to roll dice to see if their packet got lost in the network (it didn’t count). The kids actually had a blast doing this. I think team South Side ended up winning.
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