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Sneakers (1992) Movie Guide

Sneakers (1992) Movie Poster

Sneakers (1992) Movie Poster

As a graduate school requirement, my wife and I were given the option to create a detailed movie guide. After much time and effort, we have achieved the following movie guide for the 1992 movie, Sneakers starring Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, David Strathairn, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell, and Ben Kingsley.

Introduction

The activities in this guide align with the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS). Focus areas are in computers, information skills, and technology literacy. This study guide is intended for grades 9 – 12, but can be used with other grade levels. These activities can be modified as needed by the teacher based on student aptitude and prior knowledge. Sneakers is rated PG-13 for brief sexual references.

This movie guide is 17 pages long and follows Gavriel Salomon’s Interaction of Media and Cognition and Learning (1979) model called AIME, the Amount of Invested Mental Energy. Teachers should follow the AIME strategy when implementing this study guide to maximize the educational learning potential and understanding for students.

Movie Overview

Sneakers is a light-hearted heist movie with plenty of comedy and romance about computers, hacking, ethics, government espionage, security, secrets, cryptography, deception, betrayal, and little black boxes. The characters model critical thinking skills and creative thinking about technology. On an ethical level, it’s an account of how computers have changed our daily lives both for the better and for the worse.

Despite the fact that its debut was back in 1992, Sneakers has aged surprisingly well. The surveillance techniques and other technical aspects that appear in the movie can still be found today nearly two decades later. One wonders how this movie got so much so right so early.

Plot Synopsis

Marty is the leader of an unlikely team of professional computer hackers that hire themselves out to company executives in order to test their company security systems. This happens to be a real job called Sneaking (as opposed to Hacking, Cracking, or Phreaking) hence the title.

Based in San Francisco, the team is contacted by two NSA agents who want them to steal a top-secret black box containing a homemade computer chip capable of breaking any secret code. The team decides to accept the job and eventually acquires the black box.

Once they discover what the chip is capable of doing, they become entanglement in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between the National Security Agency and organized crime who also want possession of the chip. They end up handing the chip over to the wrong people and must recover it to clear their good names and prevent themselves from going to jail inside the high-stakes world of government espionage.

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Money Deposit Worksheet

Money Deposit Worksheet

This is a simple worksheet I made to organize the various bills and coins received from school fundraisers. It can be used two ways: either digital as a functioning spreadsheet that automatically calculates amounts or printed and filled out manually. It has simplified my efforts considerably and more than made up for the time I spent creating it. I hope you can benefit from it too.

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Total Points to Percentages Lookup Sheet Generator

Total Points to Percentages Lookup Sheet Generator

Ever used one of those old-fashioned slide rules to calculate a grade out of 100% when you had an odd number of questions? Well, I didn’t know about those things when I first started teaching. So, the very first year I taught I made my own using a spreadsheet.

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Instructions

  1. Open the spreadsheet
  2. Enter the “Total Number of Questions” (and “Total Curve”, if desired) in the boxes indicated.
  3. Select the “Percent Grades” tab to view and print.

How to take Student Computer Work Home

How to take Student Computer Work Home

Sometimes students need to take their computer work home with them. This guide explains how to pick the right format to save in and the right media to save on for Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint Presentations, and Windows Movie Maker Projects.

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By the way, if you are interested in installing a FREE OFFICE SUITE that includes programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more then download and install OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org.

This file uses images from Refresh Cl Icons by TpdkDesign.net and Aqua Candy Revolution Icons by McDo Design available from Icon Archive.

A Better To-Do List

To-Do List

A Better To-Do List

Today, I’m absolutely SWAMPED with things to do. Since I had so much to do, I made a To-Do List in Microsoft Excel 2003. I needed to keep track of a list of tasks, their deadlines, other things that needed to be done before I could complete them (dependencies), and also be able to put them into groups. The To-Do List I made came out so nice, that I thought I would share.

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