During quarantine I designed a paper-based system for making QR codes by hand. Everything is very papery and bureaucratic, but also fun. Tables to look up bytes, long forms for calculating Reed-Solomon, and even transparent sheets of paper for comparing different masking patterns.
My goal is to film a video of generating a QR code without any computers or even calculators. It's possible, just might take two hours or so.
This was the main inspiration! Also, the fact that I couldn't find anyone going through EVERY step of QR code generation manually (even if CPU-assisted) and in detail.
It's a great way to learn. In my cryptography classes we did all of the algorithms by hand (often shortened, so 16 rounds of something would be dropped to 3 or min bytes dropped) on pen and paper as homework. Hard but it really did make a lot stick in my mind about how things worked.
I've written video/image codecs and when things go subtly wrong, decoding the raw bitstream by hand and comparing carefully with the decoder output has been the best way to figure out the problem. It can be quite tedious, but as the phrase goes, definitely "builds character".
Or as someone else put it, "How can you tell the computer what to do, if you can't do it yourself?"
My goal is to film a video of generating a QR code without any computers or even calculators. It's possible, just might take two hours or so.