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What Should 10-Year-Olds Know About IT?
stephendl writes "I have been asked to give a computer based talk to a local primary school. It is part of an after school science club and I have a pretty free rein to talk about whatever I want for 10 minutes. The children will be aged 9 and 10 and will come from a range of backgrounds, there will be a parent of each child present too. My initial thoughts for the subject included the history of computers, the components in a computer and what computers are used for. Does the slashdot community have any suggestions, experience in this area or tips?"
You might look around the room for examples of computing technology. Calculators, cell phones, watches, etc. might be som good, concrete examples of how technology is all around us.
You might also want to explore video game consoles as computers. You could look at the evolution of video games from the Pong days to now. That's a simple, easy way to show the development of computing technology for this audience. Most 10-year olds won't know or care about Linux distros, but they're probably familiar with video games.
There was recently a small study here in Norway about childrens attitude
to information on the internet. Most of the childes asked, believed that
what they found on the internet is true, 100% fact, and they had no training in spotting what's not facts or how to check the sources.
So, teach them to be critic of information, there's so much bogous information out there, anyone can be confused.
I used to do something similar with elementary students. The district had bunches of old toasted computers and I would let the students take apart everything they could (aside from the PSU which I removed ahead of time) and answer any questions they had about the components they found inside.
The kids really enjoyed it and it gave them a basic understanding of the innerworkings of computers.
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Drawing pretty pictures in logo was a good start as to how one needs to give "instructions" to the computer; it's immediately rewarding to see a nice house on screen. The thing is to make it somehow rewarding in the extremely short term; you can't expect a kid to work for weeks with the vague hope of some abstract result.
Logo also taught me computers need precise instructions; enter the wrong command and the picture wasn't pretty anymore! By the time they get bored with it you'll know whether any of the kids has the skills to move onto basic or something similar.
I understand there's something known as Squeek which is a similar language build specifically for this very goal. Apparently it's quite good at it too.
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"That will take more than 10 minutes to go into any depth.
History is the least interesting part.
Talking about components is the most interesting part. Also talk about applications, directories, files, and aliases."
I'm still a believer that programming gets a bad rap. I don't care about what you tell me a computer can do, I care about what I can tell the computer to do. (You know what I mean). Been that way all my life. If you have a demo, then find some sort of open source video game that enables you to hack up easily visible changes (like skinning the characters or something else quick and easy to demonstrate). If you don't, then start writing on the whiteboard and go with logic problems. Maybe do Towers of Hanoi in long hand. Give them a problem, let them solve it, and then show them how they basically just wrote a computer program. Or "missionaries and cannibals" or one of those others that has some good visual quality.
The advantage to taking that path, by the way, is that you're least likely to run into the "We already knew that" argument that you're gonna get if you plan to talk about information that can be found on the Internet.
Barring that, go science fiction. Talk about the Mars Rover or something that they may know about, but not necessarily have realized can be connected back to the same computers they use every day.
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I say you show what you can do with a computer. Here are a few ideas:
1.Schedule a Skype call with a friend you have as far away on the globe as possible. Explain how a computer takes audio information and transfers it over the internet.
2. View the solar system in 3D (I think there is some open source software that allows you to do that). Explain how a computer can take loads of data and draw it for you.
3. If the classroom has dictionaries tell everyone to look up a complicated word up and race them with the computer. Explain that the computer's strenght is it's speed not it's intelligence. Tell them that you cannot ask a computer to draw a bird but you can use it do store and manipulate a bird picture.
4. open up the computer and explain how each module has it's own specialty: graphics card, audio circuit, network circuits, etc... They'll feel like they've done something really cool.
5. turtle! :) Install Python with the turtle program and challenge them to draw a square with a turtle. Explain to them that a computer is a tool for automation and that is why it is used. Humans still are the ones that have to think to make them automate tasks we ask them to do.
The computer alone can captivate your audience but the great thing is to make them participate. Make them feel like they changed the world by doing something. Let them give you the obvious answers.
You didn't really go into any sort of depth as to your audience other than their age, so it's diffficult to give any really good advice, as the best presentation you can do is always one tailored to the existing knowledge of your audience.
However, being an after school science club, I'm going to assume that these kids are pretty smart, want to be there, and probably already know what the inside of a computer looks like, or how to surf the Internet, or how computers are used in society today.
As such, I'd strongly consider teaching them something practical that they can use and build upon, and teach them some really elementary computer math and theory.
Ten years old was the age I started programming at -- completely self-taught -- in BASIC on a Commodore 64 at school. But it wasn't until I was much older that I was even introduced to binary or hex number systems and math. And yet these things are the real underlying basis of how all digital computers are designed and programmed.
Given you only have ten minutes, I'd give them an introduction to the binary number system and simple binary math, and how computers use binary information to do everything they do.
Most kids like learning about how things work, and with a quick intro to binary number systems you can explain to them how computers add numbers, how CDs store music, and how networks inter-communicate (like explaining the basics of Quadrade Amplitude Modulation).
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Much like the science club in the original article- extra-curricular, not part of mainstream studies, and stuff the kids might enjoy. These kids are already science geeks- even if they're still at the "Bill Nye The Science Guy" stage.
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The only thing they need to know is how to turn the computer on and off. My parents didn't know anything about computers but they bought me a C64. I taught myself everything from scratch. I'm sure your kids can do the same. The only thing you need to do is make sure you can see them playing on it so you can be sure they're not looking at porn or something. Better yet, don't give them their own net connection at all. If they don't want to figure it out themselves then they just aren't into computers; not everyone is and that's ok too.
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It was fairly common when I was kid to go on field trips to various workplaces, or have people come in and tell us what they do.. You see that kind of thing on sesame street. I remember when I was a kid checking that kind of stuff out was very interesting to me because I had a curiosity of how everything worked.
You're just exposing them to things, you aren't shoving it down their throats and forcing them to become IT slaves. Not all education is some kind of indoctrination plot. Simply giving them a little exposure to something isn't really the same as drilling it into their brains. A think that a wide exposure to many things is really healthy for kids, if they don't know what a wide world it is where knowledge is valuable, they can't see any point to their education.
Interesting side note, one field trip that virtually every kid in the city went on at some point was to tour the tidy didee diaper company, a cloth diaper cleaning service, which was probably the largest volume of foul smell I've ever been exposed it, even to this day. I think that was some kind of weird scare tactic trying to teach us that if we weren't capable of skilled work thats where we'd end up, they didn't present it that way though, they took it all very seriously and the operation was quite complex.
Well, one of the greatest things (well, probably the only good thing) about being so totally decieved is that it's the only way to become critical and suspect of new information.
My sister went to a school where they had a very unusual song that they'd occasionally sing. It was something along the lines of "Don't trust the weatherman" and had little anecdotes about how the weatherman was wrong on various occasions. Apparently the teacher and the kids came up with it themselves after a field trip went bad because they were rained on after a sunny forecast.
It's the only example I can think of in elementary school education of trying to teach kids to be critical of information they get from a supposed authority. I don't know if the song had any broader implication for any of them, but I do know they never trusted the weatherman.
It all depends on the teacher.
When I was first introduced to flowcharts in high school we had a lot of fun with them. When I saw them again in college it sapped my will to live.
Presentation can make anything interesting. That's the real genius of Bill Nye.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I feel that adults' minds are very similar to that description, it's just no longer cute, so instead of fascinating, it's frustrating.
A guy I know keeps falling for crap like "You are a great poet! Be immortalized in the hall of fame! ** $50 plz", and virtually all multilevel marketing schemes that he happens to encounter. He must be on the "World's Greatest Suckers" mailing list. I just utterly cannot comprehend whatsoever, he simply does not want to listen to reason, there is some kind of fantasy to it all that is so much more enjoyable.
The most amazing aspect of it all is that absolutely every single last one of these weird things all lead up to one massively predictable point "Aaaand, lemme guess, they want some money from you?" Somehow or another he can just instantly believe the rationalizations created by slick marketting.
Maybe the only way I can hope to fight back is to create some cool pamphlet describing all the similarities? He has been mildly scammed so many times, and have had so many people tell him way ahead of time that these things are scams that I have to wonder if he lets himself be scammed as a kind of rebellion against what he might see as oppression from his peers? It's really strange.
Of course, pointing out that computers are ubiquitous now will probably be more fascinating to the parents than to the children. At the age level we're talking about, the pervasive presense of computers in modern society may very well be taken for granted.
It may be more illuminating to go on for a bit about how these are great automating machines, and that whereas today we can do all these cool things because of computers and the internet (of which they probably won't need many examples), it wasn't that long ago that these things weren't possible, or had to be done manually with great effort by lots of people.
From there, the obvious conclusion -- which the kids should be steered towards but which they might figure out before you have to say it -- is that this has been a continual process for decades now, and it is only accelerating. Anything that can be automated, will be automated. Barriers to communication will keep falling. New possibilities will keep emerging. Nearly all of this will come as a surprise to everyone, but will seem obvious in hindsight. As examples, maybe point out things like digital music -- which they'll all already know about -- being a big change from the little silver discs you've been using for 20 years now, or how VoIP is making calling cheap or free (and how expensive long distance used to be), etc.
In any case, the point is that kids today don't really need to be told that computers are everywhere, any more than people a generation or two older need to be told that electricity is everywhere. It's not novel to these kids, but you have to make it clear what a big, drastic, and world changing difference this is from only 10 or 20 years ago.
There's a great Douglas Adams quote that the kids might like here:
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Show them Morse Code.
Show them how information can be sent using a whole bunch of yes's and no's, on's and off's.
Show them that 1's don't really get caught going around the corners of cables,
that they don't need to sink $30 into a "digital audio" cable when any RCA will do,
that data can be sent using light, radio, or current without giving you cancer or cramps,
that extremely simple adds up to extraordinarily complex, just like the rest of the universe.
Show them that there's no magic involved.
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