Cloth

We use cloth in a variety of ways, from clothing, to design and upholstery, to cleaning up messes in the kitchen. Cloth is an ever present aspect of our lives. It appears across race, gender, ability, space, and time going back thousands of years! We use cloth, textile, and fabric interchangeably depending on our setting, so before we dive in, let's define the different ways we discuss cloth.

Cloth is a pliable material made usually by weaving, felting, or knitting natural or synthetic fibers. The word “cloth” can apply to the cloths used in the clothing industry to make clothing articles

Textiles are types of cloth, especially a woven, knit, or felted cloth. Can apply to many different industries including cotton textiles in the clothing industry and to nylon textiles in aquaculture (i.e. fishing nets).

Fabric is a cloth or other material produced by weaving together cotton, nylon, wool, silk, or other threads. Fabrics are used for making things such as clothes, curtains, and sheets. Note that these are often a combination of materials.

The production of cloth and clothing have been important parts of societies for centuries. Beyond being a practical way to keep warm, cloth production is embedded with practical uses of mathematical and computational knowledge. This CSDT explores the computational knowledge, specifically computational thinking knowledge, of these early algorithms.