Interactive deck
GLITCH! presentation
A projector-ready story with facilitator notes, smooth reveals, adjustable experiments, and optional extension slides.
Open full-screen deck →A 90-minute interactive mathematics mission
Can mathematics repair a broken message?
Begin with an impossible card trick. End by building Hamming codes, testing noisy webpages, and meeting Golay and Reed–Solomon codes.
- Grades 6–10adjustable challenges
- No prerequisitesdiscovered from puzzles
- Live activitiesgames, reveals, and experiments
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+ parity evidence
Teach it your way
Course materials
Everything runs directly in a browser or prints on ordinary paper.
Topics
From parity to modern codes
Binary messages, parity, repetition, Hamming distance, Hamming(7,4), sphere packing, Golay, and Reed–Solomon.
Printable practice
Four student worksheets
Each packet mixes approachable warm-ups with deeper challenges and includes the original 16-message codebook.
Codebook & Binary
Read, encode, and reason with the original four-bit message system.
Download PDFDetection & Repetition
Use parity watchdogs and majority voting to detect and repair noise.
Download PDFHamming Repair
Place check bits, calculate syndromes, and repair Hamming(7,4) words.
Download PDFLimits & Noise
Investigate minimum distance, packing limits, and realistic channels.
Download PDFGo beyond the lesson
Papers and further reading
Original papers sit beside accessible examples of the codes at work.
Foundational paper · 1950
Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes
Richard W. Hamming
Foundational note · 1949
Notes on Digital Coding
Marcel J. E. Golay
Foundational paper · 1960
Polynomial Codes Over Certain Finite Fields
Irving S. Reed and Gustave Solomon
Real-world explainer
How QR codes recover damaged data
DENSO WAVE
Deep-space application
The (23,12) Binary Golay Code
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Deep-space reference
Reed–Solomon encoding and decoding
NASA Deep Space Network
About the instructor
Dr. Mudassir Shabbir
I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at LUMS. My work centers on graph machine learning, discrete geometry, and robust networks. I build visual, activity-led lessons that let students discover the mathematics before meeting its formal name.