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What Interests High-School Students?
Jim Willis asks: "Our IT Division happens to be populated with some civic-minded people who are interested in making time available for local high-school students interested in science and technology. Question is, we're not sure the best way to do it. We're mulling around the idea of sponsoring a robotics competition or some sort of programming fair/competition. Unfortunately, we've been out of high-school long enough to not know what excites students about technology. Slashdot readers (esp. those of you in high-school): Where should we focus our attention and donate/volunteer our time?"
Involve one of the three and you're ok. Two and you're set.
How to make their Sims peeps stop pissing themselves?
Sex, Drugs, Rock and/or Roll?
Wang33
PAGERANK++ Robsell.com
Yep.
Better/faster ways to find more porn
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Burn things. Especially fun things like cesium.
The "Proper Hyphenation Club" was extremely popular.
boobies?
As I recall... I was a walking hormone.
HighSchool students love Pr0n.
1) Sex
2) Girls who give head
3) TV
4) Shitty music (a la Good Charlotte)
5) Getting High
6) Counterstrike
Get some activities with prizes like free mp3 players and such.
They like video games, a lot. If you can include games in it in any way, they'll be all over it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Duh.
Providing your time [and more likely, some sort of facilities support and supervision] is more than enough. The best thing you could probably do is simply provide the environment for them to be creative and learn.
Did you really have to ask?
American kids are already very interested in the metric system. Perhaps some sort of competition to see who can measure out a gram blindfolded?
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
The important thing is that you aren't bitter...
This is a new high for /. me thinks, to say nothing of the value of having knowledgeable (or atleast technologically aware) geeks in Government offices.
Hope the assumption here isn't that /. is full of highschoolers though (not to bilittle them in any way whatsoever).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
What interests high school students?
Breasts.
pr0n. Plain and simple.
It's a joke, but you know it's true...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
pussy and beer.
duh!
just outta highschools (hs), and went through three diff ones, so i knew a lotta hs kids. but really, every geeky kid in hs loves to steal software/music/movies etc, so maybe something regarding hacking/cracking? maybe a hacking competition, though most hs kids don't know that much. hs kids like anything dangerous or illegal, but you prolly coulda guessed that. =p
You're forgetting.
/.
This is
And you're posting saying that people WON'T be interested in something like a robotics competition? I know at my high school at least (which I'm currently attending), given the funds the entire tech lab "poplulation" would LOVE a robotics contest. Note that tech lab is roughly 40 students per period, 8 periods a day, per 2 teachers. Do the math yourself, just note that a grand MANY students would love the idea. "High technology" in the average US public school would be welcomed open-armed, imho.
I'm in High School, and am currently enrolled in: Multimedia III, which is a class where you do a bunch of crap with computers in. Such as: Reason, Cinema 4D, Flash MX, etc. :D I love it, as do many others. But that suggestion about Car Audio... Cha-ching. :)
END
High school nerds are only concerned with one thing: using computers to get the girl . Just make sure you put the contacts on the Kelly LeBrock doll, not the rocket.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Graphics I would guess. (I'm three years out of high-school), especially if related to video games. Of course, lining up a bunch of Alienwares and having a huge lan-party is probably not what you have in mind, but maybe showing some examples of simple 3d animations, or guest speakers who work with making video games.
CowsAnonymous: We're here to help moo.
The best place to start would be robotics, not many people are going to have any ambition to visit something about programming. A course or something of the nature in which you build a car controller during, would interest 3 groups of people: programmers, car nuts, and robotics kids. This would probably be the best bet as you have to have a number of people interested to do, and this brings a rounded interest, while allowing interaction and learning between each of the "groups" during learning.
Andrew Hodel
www.andrewhodel.com
Since everybody else in this thread seems to be focusing on the silly (though, sadly, accurate) let me suggest that you perhaps get involved with a home-school group or a *worthwhile* private school. You're much more likely to get the sincerely interested kids. You could also have interested public school kids come out. Apparently, that's now allowed, though I don't have all the legal details.
Avril Lavign and Linkin Park.
If you think
Because surely no one has ever had to engage high school students before.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=o ff&q=getting+high+school+students+interested+in+sc ience+and+technology&btnG=Search
Are you asking because you want to foster interest in highschool students out of altruism, or are you just trying to market your company's brand name to a captive audience?
If you really want to give back to highschool age kids, offer them part time jobs after school. This way the ones who are really interested in what you have to offer will come to you. Whatever you think you can teach kids can't be taught in a classroom or a school anyway.
Focus on the results? Goals? Things you can DO with computer knowledge? The reason I'm somewhat knowledgeable about computers is because I wanted social power online...so I found a way to make me a mod, and then an admin, and then I got sucked into building online communities for things I was a fan of, and this meant I had to learn HTML, webdesign, ftp, servers, chmod (for the message boards), how to read a bit of perl and php, how to install pre-made mods/hacks for message boards, etc. Now I'm a happy little tyrant over a userbase of 100 regulars and semi/seasonal regulars. Oh, I learned marketing too, how to get the people to visit my site. And I'm trying to save the funds to build my own computer (one I'm on now is pre-made sony vaio). Power is always attractive. ;)
Building a prom date
Try contacting your local schools and ask them what they're looking for. You might find that they have programs set up already and that there are rules you'll need to follow to participate.
Ignore the cynics posting here, you'll find plenty of kids interested in science and projects. Play top your strengths though, don't get involved in stuff that doesn;t relate to what you do or know.
You might consider something simple like a lecture on networking, followed by having them help set up a lan.
Sex, Drugs* and Rock n Roll
*In my case my drug was DnD. In those days, I had an 5th level Elf.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When I was in High School (graduated in 96), I had very little real world experience with technology. We programmed on 286 PC's in Pascal, and I did personal research in C for my senior year. There was no realistic connection to outside technology and what was going on in the world. I found myself experimenting with using EMS/XMS memory, and interfacing with the PS2 mouse using pascal, and meanwhile out in the rest of the world, windows 95 was getting ready to be released. I was working closer to the hardware level and the industry was moving toward abstraction and API's. I had no understanding of this at the time.
This continued in college, btw. LOTS of theory (which I know is important), but not a lot of substance. Now I find myself with a CS degree and no real world experience. I answer phones for a living, at the moment.
Do something to inspire people. Something that can connect them to a project, to something useful.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
... Porn excites high school students/ university students.
Learning clients for BitTorrent, usenet, Napigator are highest on list.
that and how to rip DVDs to DVD-R media.
With BitTorrent, usenet, Napigator the high schoolers can get pretty much what interests them most : pr0n, xbox media, ps2 media, mp3 albums, warez, etc
everything else is far fasr less interesting to students.
though occasionally a couple students wish to learn how to construct a simple video game using exisitng sprite libraries and play soundeffects and perform collision detection.
but thats only 2 kids out of 400 usually.
all the rest want to learn how to use BitTorrent, usenet, and Napigator
Enough with the joke posts, true as they are. Me and my friends do BEST robot competitions, build rocket/robot things, etc. We're very tech minded. Stuff like that, things that involve science, technology, but not in a nerdy un-fun way. You're not gonna want to make it TOO formal or class-like, we'd shun away. Things that seem like fun projects are great, and I certainly would go for em. As well, IT programs in general would certainly arouse my, as well as some other (non-aforementioned) friends who are into computing(and I don't mean AIM). As much as the main high school populace is dominated by the "gangstas" and whatnot that everyone else is posting about, those of us who do care about tech and science exist. I'll post back later as a reply to this, if you want to see it, check back in a few hours (I need to go quickly).
Oh boy, asking such an open-ended question to teenage geeks...what are you folks thinking?
.NET).
The answer is Britney Spears in an afterschool Halo 2 Frag Fest, duh!
It has been quite some time since I've been in HS but I'm willing to suggest that a sanctioned "hackathon/pen-test" would've been one of the sweetest things the school could have. Of course it would never happen.
As for the programming fair thing, you can look to the ones done by Sun and MS (that tank AI thing for Java and the bug propagation competition in
I live in Atlantic Canada (Nova Scotia) and an annual robotics competition (http://www.dal.ca/~robots/) for high schools has been hosted by Dalhousie U. every year since 1996. Most central schools around here even have robotics clubs and I'm sure if we have stuff like this in the sticks of NS, that places like Ontario has tons of it.
Use the firerox Extesion downTHEMAll
When I was that age (and into computers, kinda) I was interested in hacking, file sharing, games and server room stuff. so, if its not too much of a risk, show them around your server room, show them your networking shit, show them some terminals and shells, teach them about the kind of hardware you need to play wicked-cool games. that kinda stuff. :D
I know i'd be interested, if i was a teenager.
*I am the anti-sig*
I am a high school student, so I beliewe I am qualified to answer you.
First, be forwarned. I don't mean to sond cynical, but there is not a whole lot that has to do with science and technology that would excite most students. Even if it does, a lot of people are too scared of being called a "nerd" or a "geek" and thereby having their social status for the rest of the four years ruined to show that excitement.
There are, however, some. I don't think that a robotics competition is a good idea, however. I don't know about most schools, but at mine there are not a lot of people interested in robotics. Besides, it would take a lot of work, and a lot of the most brilliant people are inherently lazy.
I think the programming fair was a great idea, however. Every time I write a program to do the simplest thing on my TI-84+ graphing calculator (such as convert celsius to fahrenheit for instance) people gape at me with awe and amazement and ask, how did you DO that? This includes jocks, socialites, and various other groups of people who would normally not be caught dead showing an interest in the "nerdy" fields of computers or technology.
If you put on a programming fair, you are not going to be able to teach anyone computer programming in a day, but you will spark their interest. Give away a few CDs with C tutorials on them or something, and maybe, just maybe, a few kids will try them out.
Also, expect the bit-head population to turn out in force at your fair. You can even put some of them to good use, having them help the newbies who have no idea what's going on.
In conclusion, programming fair=good, robotics competition=bad.
Le français vous intéresse?
Short Answer: Drugs, Sex, and Rock n Roll. Nothing's changed since the 60's I tell ya.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I don't think anyone needs a special "high-"school. they can learn to get high at an opld-fashioned junior high or high school.
Extreme Makeover:Home Edition is growing in popularity. Find good people & do something great for them. Do you wonder why so many companies & celebrities want to be associated with it? A lot of those blue-shirted workers who demolish the home in the first few days donate their time. Even the craftsmen & women do their work for free.
Build it and they will come.
Test signature: Brett Walker
Most high school students are interested in games and other forms of competition. Mostly though, it has to be fun and entertaining otherwise they probably won't do it.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
I agree about the idea for a car modding thing, even geeks like cars. Knowing how to fix or at least know the insides of a car is one of the most important things you can know, so I think you should go with that route.
Im in Highschool. Try doing something like a computer awareness and robotics fair thing. It could teach kids how to use a computer and how they work.
By reading this sig, you are now pwnd.
the best way to get high schoolers interested is to provide opportunities. open up the science rooms after shchool, allow kids to use the video lab on their own time. have an a+ class. start some computer or science clubs. there is the interest. there allways is, but usually kids like me dont have the recources to get something started
Nuff said.
In one word: SEX!
i dont know what type of IT you or your buisness does. BUt i dont know at my high school a lot of the kids are intrested in audio video feild. We started doing the announcments throught the tv system last year. It works nicely sometimes, but other times the signal is really bad, and the green screen needs a little tech help. Just a thought tho...
3 is always to late or to early to do anything
girls.
Being a highschool student involved with science\tech I would suggest becoming a mentor for a FIRST Robotics team in your area. It's a great way to help the kids, and the community in general. the website:http://www.usfirst.org/
I'm 21, so I haven't been out of high school too terribly long. The world wide web seems to appeal to just about everyone so I would suggest a web development contest of some sort -- preferrably data-driven sites. None of this MS FrontPage crap.
I wish my school had held some sort of PHP competition. Will it attract everyone? Certainly not, but I doubt you would want to. A great many high school students ARE just focused on scoring, rims and car stereos.
Are you an open source warrior?
but the previous 3 posts summed it up just fine.
Too Easy (Score:2)
by cephyn (461066) on Tuesday December 14, @17:47 (#11086765)
Porn.
sex (Score:1)
by Lanboy (261506) on Tuesday December 14, @17:47 (#11086769)
As I recall... I was a walking hormone.
Pr0n (Score:1)
by DecimalThree (524862) on Tuesday December 14, @17:47 (#11086773)
HighSchool students love Pr0n.
At least when I went to high school hacking was perceived as cool somehow. Even kids that know nothing about computers may be attracted to learning how people hack into systems without authorization. Tell them about tiger teams. Talk about breaking crypto. Explain how hacking isn't just limited to breaking into other peoples computers. I was the kinda kid that was always in saturday school and detention. I would never have been attracted to computers unless I knew that I could do "fun" stuff with them.
For added effect wear a mohawk.
I graduated about three years ago. My friends, who were a pretty nerdy bunch, got very excited about chemistry and robotics tinkering, but this may have just been a product of our excellent, very charismatic chemistry teacher/tinker. Robotics stuff will always draw big crowds, especially since it requires a synthesis skills. However, it also requires a lot of capital.
If you're looking for something a little more computer oriented, I found that the schools in my area, the bleeding heart of silicon valley, very impoverished in terms of even beginning computer science. I knew a bunch of people who would have been interested in a club or something which taught programming principles under the auspices of building games.
... just don't include Canada on your list. We're not that much better. Parts of Canada are a LITTLE better. In Quebec for example, you're graded such that under 60% is a FAIL. In Ontario though, under 50% is a fail. (Would you trust ANYONE in ANY field who only knows half of what they should know?)
Other than that, you're spot on in your opinion. I went through 5 years of high school (in Quebec, Canada) where there was no such thing as a "science fair". To me that sort of thing was fiction seen on TV.
Let's face it, the average high school does nothing to make the smart ones (geeks) feel good about being geeks.
Acne removing nanite design competition
Plus if you work with an Auto Shop class you're more likely get a chance to help people who aren't white.
Fuck you, you racist piece of shit.
http://xkcd.com/386/
A lot of teanagers are very proficient at what they do, and I think they often resent not having enough responsibility to actually prove their mettle.
If your angle is computer programming, then devise a couple of applications that you could actually use. Allow teens to submit their own teams, pick which app to compete on, and the teams with the best applications get their apps "bought" by the company, and prize-money is handed out.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to have multiple difficulty "classes."
All of the computers in our engineering lab (yes, our high school has an engineering department, and it's sweet) were built by students. The teacher hosted a two hour long after school project where about 20 stations were laid out with all the computer parts. He then showed us how everything went together. It was great for people of all levels, from computer gearheads to novices. The turnout was great, if I recall. And in the two hours I probably learned more practical stuff then I learned in 4 years of High School. I'll be building my desktop for college soon.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Well, if they're geeks like me then that's what they'll be interested in. Clearly you can't teach 'box r00ting', but I'm sure you could involve it in something to do with network security. I'm running an after-school activity at my school (I'm 17, in my final year of college before university) teaching younger children about network security. Tomorrow, after a term of classes, they'll be having a hack-off - two teams, two unsecured linux boxes, we'll see who gets in first
I'm sure it would interest the average american kid if the robots had ak-47s or shotguns attached.
Get a few good students to take part. Their friends will probably check it out too. The hard part is getting the first few students to look into it, but I have a solution for that too:
Make them do it.
OK, so it sounds nefarious and oppressive. Oh well, they are students and are used to it. Their parents make them bring the car home by 10, go to sleep by 12, wake up at 7, and eat their peas. At this stage in their life there aren't many people who are self motivated to do anything other than play video games, or whatever the latest popular thing is. But they are used to being told what to do, and sometimes they like what they are exposed to and tell their friends.
To sum up:
Make the activity fun.
Ask a few good students to attend and get things going.
Ask them to bring a friend next time. Get them to name a friend who they think would enjoy it before they leave the room -- this makes them more likely to actually ask.
If it really is good, they will come back.
For starters, you need some girls with a bit of skin showing, anything involving nice cars and big stero systems to get their attention. The current favorite genres in my area are Rap/Punk with more leaning towards rap, so lean more towards playing that at anything you do. To be fair anything should have a bit of rock to it too. I.E. Jay-Z and Linkin Park remakes like the Numb/Encore song they did. Good technology shows, the technology behind spinners possibly, the teachnology behind sound systems would be very nice, and if you can sponsor some nice cars I'd go with modern day car technology and computer control (Such as controlling NOS) Hope this helps :)
Bite me. Seriously, I enjoy it.
Well Im a 17 year old High School student who is responsible for the schools web server. Every geek here is into gaming. I wish they had a game design course or something like that.
Check out this program...
http://www.sciencebuddies.com/
and become and online advisor to students doing science fair projects.
There were a few people who knew how to program (basic stuffs) in C++ (er, but it was for AP Computer Science...), and I haven't heard of anyone knowing anything about robotic or electronics (especially since no one builds stereos at home anymore, as my electronics lab professor complains). Chances are, there probably aren't that many people in a given high school (assuming, of course, a non-magnet, non-private, non-anything-overly-special high school) who are even able to participate with what they know.
That said, I don't know, I probably would have been interested in building simple robots, like a moth car. I don't think the theory behind the electronics of those stuffs are too difficult to teach (I mean, unless you want to go down to fundamental level, it's just basic things about feedback and how the components work). Or, digital circuits (in my basic semiconductor lab in college) were cool, and I think those things require even less theory to be learned than some analog electronic devices.
If anything, a workshop is probably something that more people can participate in and might even be interested (I don't think too many people have breadboards, oscilloscopes, DMM's, and things like those that you need when you are doing any electronics).
But I wouldn't get my hopes up... Especially if the high schools you are targetting is anything like my school (mine was academically mediocre, which is another way to say "average"), then you will probably have at most 10-20 people (that's just about (an overestimate, probably) how many students from my high school went to a field of science in a reputable school in the year I graduated, I think) out of a campus of 1800 who will be interested in those things.
I'm a high school student, a sophomore; I would not even think twice about taking part is a programming competition or the like. However, I don't think that the 'average' high school student would be interested in that. Someone mentioned trying out car-related products. If you were to provide a somewhat-inexpensive in-dash computer and allowed students to pit their programs against one another (for example, the student whose program gets the best response from fellow students [and is useful; not just a screen-saver or something similar]), I think you could not only get students' attention, but perhaps get more students interested in computers in general.
Really.. :)t
My suggestion would be ant-weights..
ant-weight battlebots are cheap and fun..
there is a ton of practical application on industrial design (i.e. autocad), electronics and soldering, programming can be done as well. And they are remote controlled and are a hell of a lot of fun. Not too mention it is not something they will be made fun of as battlebots are on television all the time
Here is a few links
http://historyagent.com/joeldg/&label=robo
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
What is interesting to a HS student?
Well, as has been noted above this *is* an appeal to a niche group, and so it's going to be anything that sparks the attention of all of us as nerds. Anything related to robots, electronics, encryption, etc.
My opinion would be to do a brief overview of several of these topics. Most HS students are fishing for future careers, and the ones who are interested enough to take time out of their lives outside of school will be ones most likely to benefit from this exercise in community service. So give an introduction to whatever it is you at your place of employment have expertise in, and don't worry about appealing to a multitude because you won't.
If you teach it, show it, and it has electrons. They will come.
They will be interested in something that has a useful/cool product. Things that don't result in anything are boring.
For example: Building projectile weaponry is cool, thus a teen would be interested in it.
Another example: Learning about circuitry by making a useful device has a practical/useful product, thus a teen would be interested in it.
Also, avoid things that won't be immediately applicable to them. Subjects that have no purpose in their lives are boring. If you can somehow use the subject matter to create useful/practical things (see above), then they will be interested.
I will not lower myself to using a lame-joke sig... dangit!
Take them to work with you for a day .. I think i almost creamed my pants the first time i walked into a data center. Show them what it's like to be a developer or admin or network guru. Explain there is more to computers than games and IM. It would decently cool if it was the day of a meeting .. Let the kid sit in .. Yes .. I know meetings suck .. But most of us have to do them in the real world. And sometimes they are interesting. Show them around, what you do, what makes your job interesting/mundane.
I actually think that High School students (myself included) are interested in much more than drugs, sex, and cars. I myself am both a member of the school robotics team and an employee of a local web development firm (http://www.haleypro.com).
My robotics team (team 486, www.team486.com) is always looking for people to help with everything from programming to fundraising. Of course, anything that can get us money is needed. My team itself has an anual budget of at least $40,000. Of course, we struggle to keep it at that and that is low for most teams.
As for other interests, I find that many students want to learn networking, and that the school network here and at many public schools are crap. I think a wonderful way to interact with students is to help them clean up the school network, though I understand that security would be a concern.
Haley Productions (my workplace) allowed me to come on as an intern during my sophmore year. I am now an employee, but we have started to take more students as interns. This could be a good way to involve high school students. It helps both the kid and the company.
Personally, I'm really into computer science/programming. I am taking an independant study in Assembly, an independant study in Web Programming (the web courses at my school are a joke), C++ and Java this year. I already know VB, VB.Net and C.
Personally, I would love some direction on large scale project mangement. I would really like to know how best to organize very *large* amounts of code. Often, my big project gets ambushed by previous organizational mistakes, forcing a lot of rewriting.
Alternatively, teach something like Python or Assembler. Or perhaps a Linux class. Everyone likes games, you could set up LAN tournaments.
Hope that helps.
My school has entered in a robotics compitition, unfortunatly it is part of the Gaming/robotics club. I am one of the 4 people including the teacher who are at all intreasted in the robotics part. About 30 attend. *sigh*
The programming/robotics competition ideas aren't too shabby. A few weeks ago I attended a programming competition, but the prizes were pretty dinky. I would suggest having a contest with multiple ranking catagories. Give a few nice prizes. Depending on the entree fees/etc., and iPod would sure get a fair ammount of interest among highschoolers. If you're interested in letting them learn too, hold a short (1-2 hour) programming seminar after the contest, letting those who want to stay and learn do so.
You may have more luck targeting the college level...perhaps a computer science or IT program at a local university up there in RH. Down at LSU, we have several IT/CSC interested social organizations (ACM, AITP, LUG) as well as an entire dorm full of geeks begging for the IT industry's attention. the ITRC (information technology residential college) at LSU, of which I'm a member, would adore connecting with people in the industry like ya'll.
Sadly, the poster has a good point. There is a small group of students that would be interested in the topics of math and science. However, I think these students would appreciate your help the much and you would get the most rewarding experience by working with them. Try getting in contact with the AP teachers for Physics, Calculus, and Chemistry. If they are anything like my teachers in this subject they will have tons of ideas on events you can sponsor, or ways you can help out at the school.
As a highschool student, I agree with this in that you'd have more luck in other countries, but don't be discouraged by my peers. If you give us a way to test our skills and reward us for doing well, the "small bunch" of kids (I'm part of this group) will be really enthusiastic.
Just make sure it's obvious how this will apply to the real world, there's nothing we hate more than theoretical bullshit, we get enough of it on standardaized tests.
...the more they stay the same.
High school students are interested in the same thing I was interested in when I was their age: naked chicks.
My wife, an elementary school teacher, has been coaching a Lego league team. They use lego mindstorms (the robotic kit spawned from MIT I'm sure many slashdotters are familiar with) to build a robot that will compete against other local teams robots at a variety of tasks.
The 5th graders have been very enthusiastic and there was far more interest than space available. High School kids were used as volunteers to help the younger kids and chaperone. Once again the interest was much higher than the space available.
I think that robotics is still an exciting technology and it is much more accessible than it ever was when I was in school.
Instead of thinking about what interests them the most, try thinking about what you can get the most people involved in. A robotics competition would be nice, but many students may not have the financial resources to put together a decent robot. In competitions like this, it's often the person who puts the most money in who wins. A programming competition would be nice. Leave it open, let them choose their own language/platform/whatever. They'll have a lot more fun, and you'll get a lot better projects in the end.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Porn. That's my guess.
.GIFs from local adult BBSes at 2400 baud, eventually filling a whopping 40 megabytes.
When I was in high school, we spent hours downloading
Assuming that trend has continued, and I don't see why it wouldn't, that means your average adolescent male today should have roughly 6 terabytes of porn. Perhaps you can interest them in the future of high-density data storage and high-resolution displays...
It's true.
Besides, I meant it more as derogatory towards white people who are afraid of real labor.
With digital video cams dropping in price, as well as good video editing software available for every platform (including those Macs the school is trying to get rid of), kids could make their own movies about stuff they're learning about in school.
But be sure to encourage them to be as creative as possible. A couple people tried to copy us and it usually ended up as a bunch of people trying not to laugh as they read from index cards while standing against a white background.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
How about a challenge to see who can create the most anitomically correct robotic bar maid (note it has to be able to dispense alcohol properly and perform ehem other functions also)
.. Alcohol and sex/women...
Serously this is what was most of interest to H/S students when I was in there
Sad but true.
Seriously. There is something for everyone here.
-_-
Since the early 80s in America
Smart = Unpopular
Why learn when you'll be branded by your peers.
If you want High School Kids to learn, you need to start earlier. And have a good plan.
No kid left behind acts are retarded and don't get at the core facts: Learning takes effort, and no one likes the smart kids.
Good Luck.
God spoke to me.
You're in high school, and you can actually write? I mean, without abbreviations or anything? How did you DO that? Really! That's quite an impressive writing piece for something you just whipped up for slashdot. You've restored my faith in the school system.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
When I was at school many many years ago, there was a science club.
The stuff that used to get us interested was Van de graaf generators, lasers, nice explosions and smelly chemical reactions too esoteric for regular chemistry lessons. Anything that sparked, smelled or zapped was great fun. Muxcking about with electric motors, car engines etc,
Are things really that different now? I doubt it? But I also doubt that these are the kinds of things you are really thinking of doing.
Disclaimer. I am 40. Eek
Robotic boobies.
A robo b00b, if you will.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology: http://www.bestinc.org/MVC/
Future City: http://www.futurecity.org/
I spent many hours writing programs to demonstrate aspects of science. In particular, the students loved a dog breeding program which demonstrated Mendelian genetics. Of course, I quickly realized that I preferred programming to teaching teenagers, so here I am.
Even if you're not a developer, there's tons of free educational content out there. Gathering the good stuff together and showing teachers how to integrate it with their coursework is a noble goal.
Getting the teachers involved and enthused about it is key.
Being from India, this comes to me to be quite a surprise, we always seem to identify America as a place that encourages innovation. Compared to the rot culture that we have in India. I guess Junk is indeed better than Home food.
At my high school, I thoroughly enjoy the FIRST Robotics Competition. Basically, we're given a few weeks to build and program a huge robot to compete in various games - and then we go against local schools and eventually progress to a national level. My school last year placed second in the nationals, and it was by far one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. I also suggest a nice videogame and LAN party club - we have a lot of fun (despite what the jocks say about it) and it's a great bonding experience...plus, it's just damn fun to play games! -- GamerCentric.com
Porn.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
here at my high school, we've got plenty of kids interested in science, math, technology, etc. to get kids interested in whatever you're selling, i wouldn't say to start an entirely new competition or event, but to see what already exists and slap your name on it by sponsoring it. if that's not possible, then google 'robotics competitions' or something of the like, and mimic their formats and start one of your own. sure, the kids who do this get made fun of, but if they all have one purpose through a competition, you'll get their interest.
I am teacher. My students love their cell phones. They have become quite the status symbol.
I'm not sure how IT professionals can turn that into some kind of mutually enriching project, but it is technology.
I wouldn't suggest trying to target High School students as much as targeting College Freshmen. After graduating and then looking back on my freshmen year, I saw that I was defiantly more impressionable as a Freshman than a high school senior. Like another post said, high schooler's are more involved with groups and their social lives than trying to find a career niche. But...seeing as the topic is about high school seniors, then I wouldnt try programming or robtic competions. Yeah, it would be cool for the 5 kids out of 1000 that are instrested, but your missing the other 95%. The music biz is a popular thing now, everyone wants an IPod! A how-to shop, like building a MP3 stereo would be simple enough for people who might be intrested but intimidated about the IT world. Last but not least...technology is expensive, so i dunno how pratical a how-to program would be...
as a highschooler i can tell you one thing, robots are GAY the best way to interest highschoolers is to wrap a programme around their daily interests eg car modification (how about a linux based carstereo/mp3/dvd player mediacenter) or some 1337 h4xxoring. it has to be rebellious and applealing, oterwise you will end up up with a few nerds and some desinterested jocks who were forced to show
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
pfffft, this deserves a bit o' the lip music, i mean really what the fuck are european/russian/chinese high school kids doing that is just so amazing compared to US high school kids?
If you want to help educate, and get HS students interested in IT:
-Bring them in for a chance to see the equipment you use(most students have never seen a wiring closet, for example)
-Tell them about the scope of what you do(deal with places around the world? Make the sun rise?)
-Don't tell them to go to college(that's too far in the future for most HS students to care about), instead tell them about certification programs they can begin working on today, to get their foot in the door to a job like yours.
-For a project they can do, buy some old 486/Pentium class PCs that work, take them apart, and teach them how to put them together. That way they can experience the joy of doing something themselves and seeing the end result(a working computer, hopefully).
1. Programming competitions. There was some Java game years back, where you programmed a robot and had it fight. Anything mixing programming (interesting and dull) with a game is surely going to grab their attention.
2. Multimedia. Maya PLE (Or Blender), Macromedia Flash, etc. They're very fun to learn, easy too. The best part is that Maya PLE is free, Flash has a free trial, Blender is a lot more complicated and harder to get interested in then Maya is, but it's free and GPL.
3. Digital video. This is the one you probably can't pull off, but nothing is more awesome then making your own movie, editing it on the computer, and having it turn out to be somewhat professional. If you can somehow manage to do this, go with Final Cut Pro, maybe Adobe Premiere, but editing on a Windows box (with Pinnacle) ruined my impression of DV until I tried FCP.
Hope those helped.
I think you might want to reach out more to people who are unsure of wanting to be in IT. I'm in 12th grade, and I know that the people who are going to enter a programming competition are the ones who are already going into programming. If your goal is to find the best and the brightest of that group, then that is the way to go. If you want to attract kids who are not sure they know what to do with their future education, you need something that focuses more on ingenuity and less on previous knowledge.
They just had an expo in Las Vegas where they rented out the whole floor and had hundreds of people trying to hack each other's network. Dumbify that, and you've got a good start...
1.) Don't ignore the south. There are PLENTY of people down here who are just as interested in technology as those to the north and west. All we have down here are a few competitions held by some colleges. Nothing big. 2.) Don't just cater to "at-risk" freshmen. I swear, it seemed everything our HS got technology-wise went to the damned "at-risk" students. Intelligent kids weren't even allowed inside a couple of the technology rooms at my old high school because we weren't "at-risk'.
I think it would be very beneficial to teach high school students about information security and privacy. So little is formally taught about this in school. In my experience, it is usually learned the hard way when either you or someone you know gets some extra credit card charges from another country or some other illegal use of your personal information. Why can't we make an effort to change this? Why not inform them of the rules that govern the collection of such information. Why not inform people some best practices in guarding their personal information. We should be making a step toward the students, at the time in their lives when it is just becoming important to take charge of their own information and security, instead of waiting for them to reach out for themselves.
For instance, I want to be able to deny a store from collecting my name, address, and phone number when I make a purchase without the "it's store policy" line. After all, that information is not required to provide the product or service, and I am therefore under no obligation to give it to them, and they are NOT allowed to refuse service on such grounds. If more people knew that this was the case, don't you think more stores would have to wake up when nobody would just go-with-the-flow and mindlessly give out unnecessary information without thinking?
I'm in my second year of university at this point, but I can still remember well the follies of my high school programming attempts.
Basically, in high school my nerd friends and I had a lot of one thing: ambition. We could dream up the coolest projects ever. We could sit down and discuss details and implementations for the coolest video games ever made. We could daydream for hours about how system x could work with system y. When it came right down to it though, we ended up nothing - not even any code.
What high school coders lack the most is experience - they'll have no idea what is too much or too little to bite off as a project, they'll have no idea how much time it will take or how much effort, they'll have no idea how to manage working as a group.
So what would probably be most valued is mentorship. Find the kids who know what they are doing with programming, and then give them realistic challenges based on their own ideas (want to build an IRC client using Ruby? cool! Start by doing _this_ and just this, and once you get that working we'll try seeing what other stuff we can do with your client) Any experience you can give students for managing large, challenging projects will go a long way to helping them in the future and will let them see some of their big-shot dreams come true in high school (I can still remember how proud I was of the first "encryption" program I wrote in PERL that worked)
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
The opposite sex, generally. Fitting in and being accepted. Graduation, maybe, as a distant third.
That's easy, too. It's pr0n, to judge by the large and no doubt representative sample of high schoolers we see here on /.
See what I've been reading.
The New Mexico National Labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, the universities (NMSU, UNM, etc) and others came together in a rather awesome program about 13 years ago. The Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge Program gives high school students access to modern supercomputers to do scientific programming projects. They are given mentoring and instruction by volunteers as well as volunteered CPU time and access. Schools lacking net access are provided it by the participants, etc. After all their work, there is a competition based on how much was learned, presentations, science done, and final reports. It is a lot of fun. It's really hard.
I was originally a student in it waaaay back when it was getting underway (1990 & 1991) and then acted as a mentor for the next 5 years. I had a first place team and a third place team in those five years. I worked with kids that were often C students because they were bored as h*ll in class and often after seeing what they could do would go on to work harder to improve their grades to get into some very good universities.
Kids often rose to the challenge far and above what I would have thought they'd do. If the kids needed to learn the necessary math for the scienc they wanted to do we'd crash course it. I had kids that had been doing second year algebra doing partial differential equations by the end of the six months of work and able to understand it, frex. They always learned the science and programming that was required as well. This was their work, not mine. I could give guidance and knowledge, but couldn't do the work for them. Some of the science done was thermodynamics, astrophysics, environmental science, and fluid dyanmics, frex.
Now you may not be able to donate supercomputing time, but you might want keep this in mind when you go to think about what HS kids are interested in. Kids are often interested in a lot. You just have to be willing to teach them in a way that they'll remember, show them its useful, and make it interesting.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
This may be less along the lines of what you're looking for, but I think it is important: Host an information session for those interested in persuing science and technology in higher education. Specifically, make clear the distinctions between science, engineering, and technical skills.
Case in point: When I was in high school, about to graduate, I was assured by the faculty that I would breeze through the computer science curriculum at my chosen university, given my strengths when it came to programming (fortran, at the time). Long story short, they were very wrong. Nobody cared to explain what a CpSc program entailed, and I performed at a mediocre level. Granted, I learned a lot, but I was grossly unprepared.
Maybe things have changed, but not from what I've seen. It hasn't been quite that long yet. I think it will be very valuable to explain to the interested parties what they will be up against, and the alternatives (such as HCI, Info. Systems, Technology Management, etc.) for those who do not what to pursue a degree in classical science.
ascii art
Hello, I am in high school right now... Basically anything involving video games or robotics *probably* would be your best bet. Everyone plays video games and and everyone is interested in the latest tech gadgets. A simple problem solving programming competition linked up to some robots... would be interesting.
Let the high school kids donate some of their time. It will be far more rewarding for them to get some experience or work in a real IT enviroment. Also it would be better just to ask some teacher's about who they would recommend rather than just advertising it, that's how I found some of my first summer jobs when I was in high school.
Also you can trick high school students into doing your monkey work for you and they won't even care cause they get to play with computers (if they're the right kind of student).
> car stereo
Robotic CD changer. Some music hack with supercollider.
> rims
Car rims are milled with programmable machines.
Seriously, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with interests in these things versus interest in more traditional gateways into computer science, e.g. computers as a hobby. In either case, you have two basic kinds of people - those with a passing interest, who are never motivated to move beyond tinkering, and those who get in deep and/or grasp the broad applicability of the principles and methods employed.
- Make you own gun.
- Blow stuff up.
- Make your own beer.
- Anything involving eavesdropping and/or a hidden camera.
- Anything that crashes.
- Animals that do tricks.
- Anything that'll get you a lot of cash quickly with no work.
- Make ice cream out of lab chemicals
- Construct a death ray
- Etc.
I've had some success with teaching programming from quake or other FPS source. It's really easy to start with: "Ok, this is fun, but let's say you want to be able to run twice as fast. How do you do that?" "Now, how would you go about fitting 32 shells into that shotgun?"
It's really trivial stuff, but they should be seeing results almost immediately.
It's also a nice way to handle a larger group of people. Those who are there to play games can, those who are there to modify code will.
I haven't tried this, but a 10-minute crash intro to CVS might have made things a little easier.
Competitions, this will get interest especially if there is a prize. Possible Topics: Web Design Computer Game (graphical or MUD) programming Computer Architecture (think A+) A robotics competition will have less participation. To promote a wide range of participants, you could do a technology fair, where they research current technology and comp sci in order to brainstorm future applications of this technology.
Some things never change. The rest of that is here
sigs, as if you care.
Actually, you might find that robotics is becoming more popular (and shows like Battlebots prove this point). When I was in high school, and it wasn't that long ago, we started a robotics club. It was a team for the nationally run FIRST Robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/) competition. Geeky as it sounds, it got a lot of student interest . Not just the team, but even the stereotypical jocks were impressed and came to events.
Even now I get to help out my old high school team as they continue to compete year to year.
Nothing makes a male teenager's day like getting a glimpse down some girl's blouse.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Oh I dunno....if there was a robotics class that made sexbots like in Austin Powers, I'm sure there would be alot of enthusiasm. Not just from the guys either....I graduated with a double degree in electrical engineering / I.T and I can't say I ever met a straight female student.
Here ya go:
more specific link to parts
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
when i was still in high school last year we started a rover project after the mars rovers landed. We got together and designed it, and with some help from the teacher built it, then programmed it. it has a micro motherboard on it with a via processor. UPS batteries are the main power. Using wi-fi and a servo controller through the serial port we wrote programs to remote control the machine. we spent a long time on it, we wrote programs in java and in c++. we ahve also spent time on lego mindstorms and other robotics, typically 1 project per year. It got everyone's attention and everyone learned a lot from project.
besides not shooting each other that is......
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
I'd go with something like robotics. You need to go with something that would catch their attention, out of the ordinary, so that if they're interested they'll ask questions. I mean robots are becoming celebrities now (e.g. Honda's Asimo has made many TV appearances).
When I was in the Barajas airport in Madrid, they had a life size remote controlled version of Short Circuit's robot Number Five and that drew quite a crowd.
With programming, I think the best way to catch their attention is by giving them something that relates to them, videogames. So maybe put a videogame for them to play and put information on how the game was made.
SEX.
1. The program is called RoboCode and it is still around. Really engaging and gets them up to speed quickly. My son built a little bot before he even learned any programming. He just programmed by example and cut/paste.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Kids that want extracurricular tech stuff will do it on their own, on time already available. I'm co-president of a school sanctioned robotics team, and founder of a school sanctioned computer science club. Kids that are interested in technology join. Overall we have over 50 members in a high school of about 350 kids. Anyway, the point is that if kids are interested in technology, they will, in general, seek it out themselves. I'm 16 and already work at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
- dshaw
If you want to expose them to a broad variety of tech, and keep them interested, how about general hardware/gadget hacks. Have them do some of the projects on http://www.hackaday.com/, or Christopher Murphy's "Hardware Hacking Projects". You can break into smaller groups of interest on multiple projects, and the students would get exposed to electronics, programming, schematics, etc. Teach them to destroy dad's TiVo.
I am currently a senior in high school and a very active member of my local FIRST robotics team. We participate in annual regional and national competitions. As a team of students, we are always on the search for mentors to help us through the 6-week build season. As the head programmer on my team, I have been around to see what happens when there is a poor mentor base and what happens with a strong one. More info here: www.usfirst.org My team: team250.org
true, High School students are very focused on good grades, the opposite sex and sociality. this dogged focus applies, however, exclusively to the "mainstream" High School students. others, not dissimilar to myself, are not so focused upon these things (maybe that's why i read /. every chance i get...). the question is, are you trying to get the "mainstream" students' attention, in order to interest them in IT-related subjects? or are you simply attempting to rally nerds/geeks? i can tell you straight out, the former is alot harder than the latter.
aside from that, much depends strictly upon what part of the country you're trying to get at. here in NE, at least around Massachusetts, there are quite a few large and thriving science teams. combine that w/ the programming & electronics crowd, and you've got a pretty healthy group. i can't say a word about other parts of the nation, for obvious reasons. problem is, places like here, for sure, aren't you most prime targets, as you
You're already interested in science, you say so. The author wants to know how to get kids interested in science that aren't already into it.
Lots of people are materialistic, like sporty cars, wants to be famous, thinks putting effort into anything is uncool, and being smart is uncool.
I'm glad you're into science and learning, people should dedicate their lives to causes like that. The author was looking for ways to appeal to kids that aren't into science already.
God spoke to me.
Don't expect to reach a large amount of kids.
BUT, the small group of kids you DO reach will greatly appreciate any insight or guidance you can give them.
(or hell, even any attention or positive reinforcement)
...but from the quality of "high school student" posts so far, I'd say a remedial English club would help quite a bit. Either that or a "How to hit the Preview button" seminar.
(For those of you wondering, I put "high school student" in quotes because I have no way to know if those posters are truly high school students. I'm guessing most if not all of them are; since I don't know for sure I qualified my statement.)
http://xkcd.com/386/
this is just false. not to mention kinda mean, and very unhelpful.
okay, there's lots of kids for whom it's true, but there's way more for whom it's not. there's an awful lot of kids in american schools who are actually interested in learning. science isn't the "thing" for all of them, but for many it is. i've worked with high school kids from various schools and backgrounds, and this holds (to varying degrees) across all of them. and the idea that all bright kids - or, more importantly, all kids interested in actually learning - are going to be anti-social nerds getting beat up in the back of the room is somewhere between stereotypically inaccurate and grossly outdated, likely based in personal historical issues.
to the poster: i don't really know what specifically to suggest you try, but please ignore the parent here. give your stuff a shot; you're likely to be pleasantly surprised by the response you get.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
As a recent high school graduate (2004) my expierence has shown most of the techie type kids will flock to anything labelled 'computer' list a few possible areas: programming, graphic design, web development (my personal favorite) and gear the program toward who turns up
As someone in Engineering who has been involved with highschool recruiting/outreach, I've got to point out -- don't forget about the girls. Often, science and technology types (usually guys) assume that only boys are going to be interested in things like computer science, physics, engineering, etc. As a result many high school career councilors don't even point out computer science or engineering as career paths for women, even though there are many scholarships available to students who go that route. Studying in engineering/technical areas can be very lucrative for bright young women.
There's a pretty good reason there aren't a lot of women in computer science, engineering and other technical fields! The girls get turned away, or are not encouraged when they are in high school. If you're looking for a good resource on this topic I suggest you contact IEEE Women in Engineering (your local branch) since this is right up their alley.
Are there established computer/science clubs at the school(s) you're looking to volunteer at? What level of technical abilities do you anticipate participants to have. When I was in highschool (about 8 years ago now, yipes) there were only a handful ( 10) of kids who could actually program. There were many more who knew about hardware. If you think the knowledge level is going to be relatively low, then do something like give a tour of a PC, open it up and talk about what everything does. If you're lucky enough to have a number of kids at a higher level, do more advanced activities like write a chat server and teach the students to write chat clients, or get a basic graphics package and teach let them make games. If you have enough high level interest, you could sponser a programming contest like the ACM (or even an ACM team).
The great thing about highschool kids is if they're college bound, they're frantic for line items to put on a college application, so be sure to give your club an official sounding name, and make it apparant that you're not just going to lead a class or two and then leave.
Been out of HS for about 6 yrs now but here are some thoughts... who is your target audience? If its the usual geeks, then sponsoring a robotics competition would be nice. However, most HS students don't know much about programming embedded systems, motor controls etc. The best thing I can think of is maybe look at what they are actually learning and see how we can use that to make cool stuff that they can replicate easily. This would work well for physics and chemistry projects. Most physics and chemistry labs are just plain boring.. This could favour the geeks and the hardCore wannaBe's too. Having a contest to win a prize just encourages the smart ppl and the rest won't try cause they know they won't stand a chance. Having a system where everyone gets something for producing a finished product works much better. Kind of like IT conferences where a lot of ppl attend when they know they'll get free stuff. Also, having a system that encourages students to think and come up with ideas or new ways of doing things would be good. Maybe try to take an old technology/concept and improve on it? Good luck :)
I remember back in grade school...anytime there was a "fair" or something like this, we always made something to take home. Well, the same could be true with high schoolers if done properly. Show them something they can go home, on their Windows PC, and play around with. Or maybe show them how to program something simple, and then have a few demo PCs set up to play with.
In a nutshell, don't show them how to setup and configure a MySQL database. Show them how to make a guess-the-number game and variants of such things.
As I am writing this reply, the current ratings of all replies to the post are:
-1: 171, 0: 170, 1: 116, 2: 53, 3:5, 4:3, 5:2
Maybe Slashdot wasn't the right place to ask that question after all?
Everyone wants to customize their myspace.com page or build a blog. Why not show kids how that is done and then ask if people want to learn more? You could start with an introduction to web design and work your way to doing dynamic sites towards the end of the program. Web design is both fun and easy and I imagine it would appeal to more than just the nerdy kids who program their calculators.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
this is a wonderfully great idea, as a freshman in high school, i'd love to see a programming competition. not only would i dominate ( :P ) and have fun, but id also have a great learning experience by looking at how other people code and such. :P.
unfortunatly, theres only about 30 people in my school that even know that C is something other than a letter
A few ideas that i would want if i was there:
-make it really time based, give the programmers something to program, then have them all start at the same time, and stop them at the same time
-judge them based on quality (i.e., bugs), efficiency (the speed of the program), and how small the program is (lines of code)
again, this is just how i would want to see it.
After Porn and Sex, High School Students are interested in anything that will save them money, potentially make them money, get them laid, or make their High School Career easier. Translation = File Sharing, Music Downloads, Programming, Websites, Networking, Security,..., They're much more realistic that you might realize.
Easy
Develop a contest to create new:
-Guns
-Drugs
-Ways to seduce Girls
-Themes for the prom dance
Unix its simple, but sometimes it takes a geniuos to understand the simplicity -- Dennis Ritchie
I run a non-profit (owlinteractive.org) and it has been my experience that the kids enjoyment depends on their level of knowledge. I run several after school programs where some kids want to learn the basics, have help with home work or learn security. I will suggest maybe looking for community centers that have facilities that are in need of repair as well. This helps so many people. Just use your imagination, keep them interested and the easiest way I have found to do that is to ask them what they want to do and what they like. Right now we are learning programming by creating a multiplayer text based game. It is fun for everyone.
I'm a senior in High School in an affluent suburb of NYC. If I were to try to engage a large number of other high schoolers like mysel, I would gear it towards creativity/design. Most of my friends are fanatics for pirating software: all of them have Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash, Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, Encore, and Audition, Fruity Loops, and Maya. However, few of us have a damn clue how to use any of em. If you could find a way give instruction in a few of these, a lot of students would be very interested.
Im a high school student too - 10th grade :)
I dont think either of those are a good idea for the sole reason that those are both events for one end of extremes in "geekyness".
I believe the real goal is to get the more "popular", "social", and "cool" people to join the people who are lacking in those areas...
At my school (in silicon valley) there is one thing that connects at least most of the boys - computer games. I am definately on the geekier side (look at me posting on slashdot!) and every day i talk to some of the popular types and even the class president about video games.
The correct way to go in this situation is (IMHO) hosting something like a game competition or game modding compitition if you really need the education involved.
I am a highschool student and I spend most of my freetime at the school's ham radio shack.
Amateur radio is a hobby for amlost everyone; for those with technical interest but also for those who like to improve their language skills by chatting with people from other countries.
Put spyware on every lab machine they can!
We also had a student steal the ID making machine, the camera, the printer, and the monitor. Yet he left all of the supplies (printing ribbons, cardstock, and the very necessary proprietary cables) behind. I think it is going to be the world's fastest illegal ID operation ever.
"This food is problematic."
Your mom.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
High school students are enamored with their cell phones. I am especially surprised at the number of high school girls running around with cell phones as accessories to their outfit. Find ways to show kids how to do cool things with their cell phones, things like controlling a Mac via bluetooth or writing Java games for their phone. I think you will spark some interest if you can show them how to do stuff that will increase their social status by having the coolest phone or the game nobody else has. Of course I was the quintessential geek in high school so what do I know!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
F.I.R.S.T robotics, huge time commitment, but tons of fun.
no explanation is needed
You could teach them a fun programming language, something thats a little different from the norm and one that is unlikely to be taught in regular courses. I recommend Lisp or Forth or perhaps some functional language.
Make it fun, have a few hands-on sessions where you show them the basics really quick (no standing in front of the board and blathering), and then you set them free to code some example programs or ones of their own choosing. Act as a guide, provide quick answers to their questions, and let them use the rapid feedback to get involved into the programming.
Then later on, you could have a competition if you wanted. Maybe ask them for ideas.
The previous upward modded post is right that you will have trouble pulling in a large crowd if you make it too geeky. However if you make sure to get the word out to the right people (go to a science/programming class and see who stays after to chat with the teacher). If you find the geeks and let them know, you will get a good turnout from their group at least.
If you want to do something with programming (which I think is great) it has to be impressive in a small amount of space. After taking a number of programming classes, I'm still dissapointedly stuck outputting ascii to the console.
If you can manage to let people build a project in a short time that uses networking or graphics of any sort they will be extatic. Perhaps you could build some good C++ headers that allowed a call like:
void background(blue);
which would handle all the drawing of a generic blue backrgound screen.
Probably too much work, but netcode and graphics are what we will find really interesting. Some way to have a very basic graphical or networked program up and running quickly, with room for tinkering in the ACTUAL code after it runs, would draw in a lot of people I think.
You could give people a fresh win32 hello world application and help them add stuff to that with paint()
Its not easy to do, but I wish we had people like you near my school!
You should think about taking part in Dean Kamen ( inventory of the segway and the one axle wheelchair)'s FIRST with a local highschool
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/VOY/c ast/69088.html
I am in 11th grade and I love the FIRST Robotics competition. I have been the programmer for my team for 3 years. If there is a needy team near you you my consider finding teams to mentor or even build a cometition that uses older FIRST robots.
I hope for your sake that was sarcasm :P
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I'm highly cynical of the 'Being smart is for losers' idea. I even fell for it a couple of years and while my grades didn't fall, I didn't excel like I could have those few years. Many kids dreadfully fall for it, and propogate the culture. I have nothing against you. I was just trying to explain how burdensome the problem is. If you haven't seen it, good. Excel and try and be an academic ninja.
God spoke to me.
What do teens find interesting? Here are a few key terms that resonate with that demographic:
two words: Tomb Raider
two more words: brood war
Now, three words: grand theft auto
So, it seems clear that what you need to do
is build Laura Croft robots that steel cars
and fight off zerg attacks. Easy.
* Grabbing their crotches in public, usually on every third or fourth step while walking.
* Sports.
* Rap "music"
* Obnoxious modifications to cars, especially exhaust systems.
* Obnoxious car stereos.
* Subjecting others to rap "music" so loud that it shakes windows of houses 200 feet away.
* Playing video games on special purpose game systems.
* Watching sports while playing video games.
* Listening to loud rap "music" while playing sports.]
* Finding new and creative ways to abuse the english language (for instance refusing to allow a single subject to agree with a single verb or to recognize the concept of tenses).
* Finding new and creative ways to abuse the english language while discussing sports.
* Calling each other "dog".
* Wearing pants that force everyone to look at their butt cracks.
* Spitting about every 10 seconds while walking down the street.
* Grabbing their crotches while spitting and talking about sports.
My experience over the years trying to volunteer my IT and Network Security expertise to the local school system has been very disappointing. Most recently our Board of Ed decided every kid in the high school should have a laptop. Many of us felt strongly that the decision was made without the proper research and thought. They had visited one single school and decided to adopt that school's plan verbatim.
The results have been poor, the kids have had a field day loading porn and games onto the computers. The school has accused many of the kids of using the laptops to cheat. They have had to hire three full time employees to fix the laptop's OS (Yup you guessed it, Windoze). They never looked at any other operating system, and they blew off any suggestion of evaluating Open Office, though they could not tell us why they absolutely needed Microsoft Office. When I suggested desktops instead of laptops so that the image could be reloaded nightly as other schools do, I was rebuffed. They actually implied that I didn't want the kids to have computers. They assumed that every kid would have a printer that worked with the laptop (A Sony model that doesn't show up on the Sony site or Google.) Tests have had to be postponed because teacher's computer's have failed, imagine they don't have back up machines for the teachers. Once they realized that they would have to provide printers for at least some of the kids they scrambled to get a printer on the network, no luck so far. The laptops sound is software controlled so the first 15 minutes of each class is spent listening to 20 or so laptops booting up. I could go on but I think you get the point.
In short it has been one disaster after another. Tonight my wife and I will be attending yet another Board of Ed meeting. I will be announcing the formation of a committee to elect a competent Board of Ed. Maybe then you kind folks can come here and help us clean up the mess.
Your're from the State of Rhode Island, Secretary of State's Office?
1. Rhode Island is the Ocean State. So anything about boats. Design a boat, create a model and race it.
2. Assuming you handle the state's DMV, teach the students a bit of simple queing theory using a simulation language.
3. Revise the old BASIC game of Hammurabi. You are the mayor of Providence and you have to run the city. Given your budget, how should you divide the funds among pork barrel projects, graft and cleaning up Hope Street?
Get them into the Team America Rocketry Challenge, and compete for $40,000 in scholarship money. Application deadline has passed for this year but there's plenty of time to prepare for next year. You have to simulate the heck out of these things to have a prayer of winning, so sponsoring a high school team would be right up your IT department's alley. Check it out at www.rocketcontest.org.
Doug Pratt www.pratthobbies.com www.flyhybrids.org
Question is, we're not sure the best way to do it.
If I were in your position I would start a special internship program where hardworking high school cheerleaders are assigned to members of the IT staff, and just follow them around at work learning stuff. I really wish we had a program like that when I was in IT. Especially when I was working the night shift.
When I was in high school, I was only interested in two things:
Alas, #2 tends to negate your chances of #1, unless you learn to make certain concessions in life - like dating chunky band chicks who think your 18th level elf ranger kicks ass.
A tip for the young geeks out there: Hot cheerleaders treat you like shit. Chunky band chicks put out.
War games work basically as such:
Take 2 computers with the same operating system (Linux is preferrable due to the wide range of coding tools available), both teams are allotted time to secure their computers however they see fit (short of changing the operating system). First team to break the other's security is the victor.
If this doesn't seem appealing, just be creative. Think of something that you would find entertaining and they will more than likely agree, high school students who are interested in math/science are (in my experience) fairly mature. Don't try to think on their level, often you'll find they're thinking on yours.
Physics makes the world go 'round.
I volunteered as a technical inspector at a regional FIRST Robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/) competition last year.
It involved a few hundred enthusiastic students (and, amazingly, a few hundred enthusiastic fans).
The actual project was pretty well thought out for high school students, i.e., it was pretty simple to get *something* working, but there was plenty of opportunity for scale up to more complex designs to keep it interesting. Some circuits, some programming, some mechanical design.. really something for everybody.
I felt like it was a pretty good experience for the students, and it has a pretty low entry barrier ($$$) for corporate sponsorship. Depending on the level of interest, you can sponsor individual teams or whole competitions, and "expert" volunteers are alwats needed.
Doesn't run the whole IT gamut, but it's been really successful, and needs more sponsored teams to scale up...
im in canadian public high school right now, and computer classes downright suck. teacher gives a paper and students type in in word. yeah, fun. But that might be due to the skill level of the average student in computers. I don't know how familiar people are with computers in your area, but around here, some people have yet to learn that the shift key makes capital letters.
Anyways, here's what that interrests me:
I suggest a 'hacking' class. Teach em how networking works. Throw in some crypto, and maybe even teach them basic programming techniques in a simple language such as python.
Well, im currently in highschool and here is what interests me
:)
Robotics
Programming
Game Development (ie: modelling, the engine, texturing, scripting, etc)
Computers.. building computers.
HOWEVER, what i wouldn't recoomend, is a robotics competition. why? because there are so many already (botball, FIRST, etc). instead i would either give some presentations on botball,first, etc or find some representatives and tell them about your fair. if you made your own it would most likely have a lot of bugs to kink out and take a few years before you got a large enough base of teams to make joining it worthwhile.
programming.. can be interesting however, especially if you had lots of different types of programming represented. so people can pick and choose what they wanted (tho expect more in the game programming and stuff like that than anything else)
other competitions
best calculator programming
best model/texture in photoshop
best pong (fairly easy program, could use like dev c++ which i think is free)
someoone building a computer would prolly also attract a crowd, especially if he had soething playing on it afterwards
one thing that i think WOULD be a sucess is if you had a workshop where the highschoolers had to build the best map on like unrealed 3.0 (for general simplicity) and have a tournament on the best one. so they would get a feel for what that stuff is like (especially if the more enterprising ones try to make a new mesh, or load up some textures), you get a tournament (competition always a good thing) and they get to play afterward.
otherwise.. the goal would prolly be to include every nerd thing you can think of, that people can get started without taking a lot of thier time. we highschools have SUCH great attention spans after all, and highschool has a s**tload of hmwrk (at least for me)
I'm just out of graduate school, but during high school I was a science buff, involved with groups like science olympiad and such. And an opportunity like this would have been welcomed.
And those "science fair" kind of nerds are going to be your target audience, so don't feel the need to "dim it down". Cater to your audience. They will appreciate it.
As for ideas, robotics is ideal since it encompasses a multi-disciplinary outlook on designing, building and functioning. Perhaps making sure students go through various steps in their creation of a robot will help them broaden their perspective on networking different areas of science and technology. These methods have become common practice in various scientific fields. And will give them a chance to explore new areas as well as show off their particular skills.
Oh and don't forget about including chemical and biological sciences. Most students interested in these aspects will forget that they can easily cross over into technological advancements. So encourage them to join in as well.
So good luck and perhaps talking to a few high school science organizations might be a good clue at what might excite and interest their members. And what may have already been done.
How about you do a design competition for the best interface for a cellphone or PDA?
That can involve the boys AND the girls... it can get as technical as it likes (designing user-friendly menu systems) and it gets them to think about things that are important to users that software developers often forget about.... ease of use!
Design is a VERY important thing to teach kids, and it may spurn them onto techie jobs!
Couldn't stand the weather
Tits, mostly.
sic transit gloria mundi
while your posts stinks of hatred... how about a customized car stereo thing, explaining what stuff does? amplifires, specialized cable to reduce interference, frequencies put out by certain speakers, etc.
also, how about a DIY car mp3 player connecting a laptop to a car stereo or something?
you really have a poor idea of what the majority of american students are like. just because TV has shows like pimp your ride or whatever doesn't mean that's what the kids are like. sure they're fun to watch, i've watched it, it's cute. a lot of people who are into that stuff are also into science and computers. i'm not even touching on those who are into cars and know all the mechanics of it (which is a pretty high percentage of high school students).
i think you should give them more credit. a lot of what they do in their spare time has nothing to do with what they're really into half the time. a lot of what they watch is just to say they watch it. so don't judge people on what they watch on tv or what they listen to for music...
please me, have no regrets.
I'm a high school student, and I can say that roughly 10% of students are at least marginally interested in technology and science. Lego mindstorms is definitely an interesting idea; coding C is not (Simpler languages like Lisp and Python are better). Perhaps you should go to a high school, tell them about IT, and ask them what kind of event they would like.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
Wow !!! You are indeed from india. Pray which part do you hail from? Bihar? or maybe the northeast like Assam?
Mainstream india, especially the south have a very robust culture.
Or maybe you came from india looong time back (say 40-50 years back).
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Well, at my high school (Stratford High School in Houston), my friend and I have tried to form a club to educate people about Linux, but little success has come out of that.
Honestly, it's all about the games. A good 90% of the people I ask tell me honestly "I would switch to linux in a second if games were released on it"
Not to belittle the current games, but NATIVE ports (no wine-layer) of Warcraft III, CounterStrike, HL2, etc. would have made all the difference in the linux revolution, so to speak.
basically, I'm saying what *should* be focused on by the open source community, if support of teenagers is sought, is a broad petition of blizzard to include native linux support- or a library with at least the capabilities of DirectX so games could be developed without the limitations of OpenGL.
not meant to be flamebait, but it has been noted that GL does trade-off functionality for portability.
+5, Truth
Auto - Avg HS kid is into the import scene
Tech - Car PC type of systems with navi and DVD / PS2 / 10 inch touch screens.
These HS kids are spending thousands on sub woofers and DVD screens and Clarion Systems, games, etc. All of this involves technology in a way that they enjoy.
So teach them how to build / install car PC systems that includes the navi sys w/ touchscreen GUI. They will learn how to install an OS without really knowing it.... (*Nix I hope)
When I was in highschool, I had a great physics teacher. She covered the syllabus, but went that little bit further.
When I had my tesla obsession, she updated her (long standing) teaching notes, to stand corrected to overlooked tesla / edison 'facts', encouraged me to make my tesla coil etc.
The reader that suggested TI-programming could be onto something interesting as well.
Esentially, I think It's not specifically what is taught, but how it's delivered.
Just get them to try to design a chamber with the fastest plant growing potential. I guarantee you that they will be interested.
;-)
To grow various types of plants, of course. Herbs for their kitchens, I'm sure.
Stiny! Get me a danish!
BUT... there are some things that will always get their attention. Some have bene noted already.
- video games and cool graphics
- computer controlled light and sound
- radio scontrolled cars, planes, etc
- model rockets
- things that blow up and explode
- anything really loud
If you can combine a bunch of these, you have it made. Other than the legal hurdles and paranoid parents. But lots of high schoolers seem to be aware of things like Burning Man, robot wars, pumpkin chunking contests, etc. We've used the latter and video games to good effect to get kids' attention. We're stll looking at how to do something along the lines of the first two on a small scale, with a very limited budget, without having trouble with the neighbors, government, etc.Another thing to look for is the Have Nots. For instance, if you have a school where few people have computers, get businesses to donate their older computers, and either set up labs (with cool graphics and sound) at schools, or even just give them to the kids (or at least libraries and clubs). You'll want to install a variety of software to do interesting things, and have mentors available. You could have a series of computer workshops, where you learn about computers and build your own from the Big Heap O' Components, install software (FOSS looks awfully good here!), and learn certain applications. After completing all the steps or trials (don't call them lessons or tests. ``This is too much like school" is something we have learned to dread.) they get to take the system home.
You can tie in technology-lovers with the schools like the first one I mentioned. If you can get people doing video editing, or computer-controlled light and sound, or both (or whatever), to work with a dance group or band (for example) you draw both worlds, you get a certain synergy level going, and you get crossover interest from kids you wouldn't have attracted otherwise.
Speaking of bands, there's lots of opportunity with electronic instruments. Teach them how to repair and mod amps and effects, or design their own. (http://www.ax84.com/isagreatplacetolearnabouttube amps,forexample).Teachthemhowto(forexample)setupag uitar,butalsoopenitupandcleanthepots,usingthistime toexplainaboutshieldingthecavity,groundingthebridg e,shieldedwire,andthebasicsofresistanceandsignalfl ow,withapotentialbonusoflearningtodesolderandsolde r,anduseofbasicelectronicstools.Getafrequencyanaly zerandplaywithdifferentstringsetsonaguitar.
A shop on how cars/motorcycles/scooters work with hands on tune ups will be a good draw. For areas near water, do the same with boats and jet skis and such. Talk to the Civil Air Patrol or a nearby air base or airport about starting a club to learn about airplanes.
Run a "job fair". Get folks to show what they do for a living (with corporate help to get the cool stuff there!) Cover teh goals, the fun of the job, and the potential eranings. (Kids spell love two ways" t-i-m-e" and "m-o-n-e-y".)
I've been involved at some level with every one of these over the last 20 years, with church youth groups, Boy Scouts, home schooling, community groups, public school groups, and others, and seen good results.
Places to grow weed, places to hide weed, ways to use weed. Also things that might help me get laid, and things that might help $female stay unpregnant.
Also how to download great music, like what they play on MTV.
(Can you tell I hated high school?)
Not if s/he went to my high school.
Oh wait, there was one token black boy and girl.
Bullying / being bullied by other high school students (although the latter may not be so much an 'interest' as an 'unavoidable symptom of unpopularity')
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Sorry, but if you had a 5th level Elf, I have a hard time believing you had a girlfriend ;-)
see this quote.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
as a high schooler myself, I think you should make a game programming competition. And by "game", I'm thinking minesweeper or adventure or half-life mod. I live in a small town and only a few kids at my school can program, but a lot of people can make half life mods and easy hacks of games. Maybe you could make some science thing for the geeks who aren't that into computers?
everybody loves women (girls in this case) get the girls, throw in some robots, shazam! instant hit with th' geek students. seriously, lots of brilliant highschool "nerds" need more social interaction, help with that, cause they can understand most anything else.
How about a competition where the winner gets dating tips and then is set up with some hot chick (or guy)... That'd get them interested, I expect.
Robots are fun, but very engineering oriented. Since kids are not programmers, you are looking at out-of-the-box robotic kits or a good investment in time and effort. Not all kids are interested in robotics, either.
I would recommend computer games. Not the high-tech kind seen in industry, but 2D scrolling-type games. Student interest, even among younger kids, is high in this area (actually, for younger kids I think _any_ theme is a good one - so long as you do it _right_). Games involve both artwork, logical thinking, music and narrative so you can involve both creative and logical kids. I've been developing a gaming engine especially for the purpose of educational instruction (GameX, currently being used at Cornell U.)
We also developed a grade-level proposal called "Games for Kids" in which a team of college-level student programmers in CS (provided by collaboration with a university or tech-company) are teamed up with groups of kids. The kids develop the artwork, game idea and layout while the CS team implements the behavior/code.
Sorry for the plug, but this is an area i'm very passionate about and think there are lots of opportunities for kids here. I got interested in CG myself from wanting to make computer games as a kid.
Rocket engines are cool.
So are Servos.
Cars are too.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I remember when I was in high school, we made cars out of blocks of balsa wood. It was a little like the Boy Scouts' Pinewood Derby, except more high tech. We'd make the cars as light as possible, paint them with dozens of coats of lacquer, put skinny wheels lubricated with graphite on them, and throw a CO2 cylinder in the back. One hit with a hammer and nail, and BAM! I think my car went over 70 mph. They had two eyelets on the bottom so they'd stay on the track made out of a single strand of fishing line. This appeals to all kinds of people who love to trick out cars, work with wood, or nerdy engineer types who come up with the best aerodynamic shape.
As mentioned several times I would suggest actually sponsoring the US FIRST ( usfirst.org ) robotics competition. You could also sponsor chess competitions held by the USCH, I know I'm trying to get my school to finally start a chess club although the proposition has been rejected several times which truly is a shame. Of course, to really win the support of high-schoolers rather than just let them know about it (that is, my fellow nerds), I suggest that you "dumb down" some of the open-source language. It's wonderful to have an ask slashdot sect but if people ask questions that seem like rtfm gtfo newb wtf oh then they won't get posted and in the unlikely event that they do the internet will make their email explode into small fractals all over this half of the internet/universe-as-we-know-it. If Slashdot had a glossary I think it'd be much easier for people to get around. FAQ sections and "More Info" usually seems misleading to me. Perhaps it could just be maintained by good-doers of /. that would keep it up-to-date for younger or even less-experienced readers to be able to follow things that are actually significant. Histories of OS's and processors, etc.
Or I could be the only one that just doesn't get some stuff and in that case you should feel free to make my intarweb go anal via email.
Get a FIRST team going.
In 25 years of science and tech teaching, I've never seen kids work harder by choice.
There's little goals and big goals, and it's solid. The great teams will knock your socks off. The tiny teams are inspirational. The great middle is great fun and hard work.
FIRST teams are made of nerds, but they look like sports teams enough to table the nerd edge off it.
It's enough of a recipe to be easy to navigate for first-timers, as long as you have the techies to support them and you show them what's possible (get the promo tapes).
The kids who already know they want an engineering ed will be really gung ho, some others will discover they want a tech career, and the rest will just have a whole lot of fun and team building - which is as important as the tech stuff. Not knowing your stuff is the second most common reason for leaving a job in the first year. The first most common reason is not being able to get along with your coworkers.
Make sure in addition to the technical background, you have good leaders who have some experience with HS kids - scouts, coaching, etc. The kids will stay interested as long as you keep them on task.
HS kids off task can put you on the front page faster than a cure for cancer.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Being only a few years removed from high school, I can tell you that the robotics would probably go over well. There is an annual Robotic Egg Hunt here at UMass Lowell that is pretty cool to watch. For anyone who has done the simplest bit of coding you get the sense that what you are watching took _a lot_ of time and effort and is quite impressive to see in action.
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
Being a sophomore in high school myself, all I can say is that the only technology-related things that interest me at all are computers, the Internet, and video games. I am interested in Web design, Web browsers, and PC gaming, more specifically. I use Firefox. I love reading about alternative browsers to IE (such as Firefox, Opera, or Safari) and people's opinions on them. Well, that's what interests me -- not robots, not space travel, not science. Just computer tech stuff.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but as a teenager and knowing my friends who both are interested and uninterested in Science they would all say one thing that could or does interest them: Explosions or Pyrotechnics. Now they could be small explosions or even things like a potato gun would work.(I know not a real explosion but to some would be the same thing)
I'm a former church youth-director and am thrilled at the idea of this conversation.
The bottom line is most HS tend to follow the crowd. So, you have several options. Here are two simple ones:
1. Find the most popular kid in school and get his input on what is cool.
2. Get a good collection of the HS people you intend to work with and get 'em talking. The coolest kid will tend to lead the crowd and you'll get the same results as option one.
Some warnings for you though. HS students will rise to the maturity level you expect of them. If you expect them to act immaturaly, they probably will. Likewise if you put a great deal of expectations on them, they'll do amazing things. In my experience, when I treated the youth as Adults, I didn't have any problems with their behavior.
If you want a successful program you can put a ton of effort into it OR you can find 3-4 students that have a drive for success and work with them while they do the leg work. Unfortunately because you now fall in the "old" category, you are uncool. The only thing that will make you cool is allowing the students to make you cool. Follow their suggestions, keep their conversations mostly on track, keep them from doing anything dangerous and enjoy their company.
On behalf of the students, thanks for taking an interest!
Then we would know that Slashdot had finaly made it.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
As being a high school slashdotter myself, i find that, in my high school at least, most kids are not interested in anything that will make them look nerdy. Maybe this is just an east coast thing, but i know that the biggest thing that happens to my school is the football games (Jocky, but more so popular), with a close second being the Pep Rally (Funny).
I think the main thing is to please the masses by being funny first, with a dash of amazement thrown in on the side... only then do you hit them with the science part.
You will be surprised how many people's interests you will catch with that plan of action. That's just my two bits, but what do I know... I'm just a dumb teenager.
do the girls at your school wear seifuku?
I'll be right over, I have some ideas.
Poker and gambling is very popular right now. Anything with a focus on probability that would allow students to practice their skills a real game would go over well.
I was in highschool only a few years ago, and have many sibblings attending it right now. If you really want to get the whole highschool interested with whatever you choose to present its going to have a lot of visual aids with it. Get some highschoolers to help make posters to put up around the school for this event your going to have.
Technology with video games will get a lot of the male populous to show up. You can appeal to the art and music crowds to showing off some technology they can get their hands on to help improve their music/art. Although I love all the aspects of computer technology I don't believe showing off programming is going to get you a huge crowd. If your trying to appeal to a highschool as a whole your going to need lots of cool visuals and some sort of insentive for showing up.
Free food always seems to work well, or a randum pie eating compitition.
have a video game tournament with Counter Strike: Source, Battlefield: 1942, FarCry and whatever other good multiplayer games anyone can think of... just as many computers and LAN games as possible... And prizes for the winners and runners-up... I'm a high school student... I should know what we like :p
they would like their future jobs to not be outsourced. They like T&A. They like drugs. And music that relates to them. They like trustworthy friends. Ahh, that's about it.
I competed in programming contests in middle school, high school and college and it was a great experience.
At one of them the guy presenting the award wasn't part of the school system. He was just some programmer who wanted to give back. I'm not sure quite how he got involved, but he gave a cash award out of his own pocket. On monday, kids who normally would have snarled 'dork' were actually quite congratulatory when I was able to explain I had won $100 for programming.
Your biggest investment will be your time, but a small cash prize goes a long way towards eliminating the geek factor. You can't really avoid that it will be the geeks who come to something like this. But if you can help them walk out with a sense that maybe it isn't such a bad thing. Being a geek tends to pay well, and if more kids learned that earlier, a few more might work a bit harder in school (or more valuably, outside school).
Make sure that the problems play to different skills (math, physics, music) to ensure that teams with a breadth of skills do well. Do what you can to minimize the effect of having one great programmer and 3 kids just sitting there watching him/her type. Doing so will help ensure that a few kids who only think they're good at math get pulled along, and may see additional opportunities.
And if you really want to give back, consider offering a paid summer internship to members of the winning team.
ACM should have lots of old problem sets online. Don't just reuse these, as good teams will have practiced against these. But use it as a jumping off point for creating your own.
Generally they took place on Saturday mornings. Teams were made up of three people sharing one computer for a 2 hour competition. Traditionally, there are 18 problems. 6 problems in each of three difficulties worth 2, 5, and 9 points each. Of course, feel free to have any points system you'd like. There are also usually two divisions (one for first-year [novice] students and the other for everyone else [advanced]) with different or overlapping problem sets. For example, one division's 5 pointers are the other's 2 pointers and its 9 pointers are the other's 5 pointers. The other problems are unique for their division.
Problem submissions should be sent via floppy disks with source code that will be recompiled on judge computers. Have a uniform naming system to make judging easier. Batch files can help run problems. Generally its good to have novice 2's and 5's taken from keyboard input while having only advanced 2's taken from keyboard input. Have the rest of the problems come from file input. If you want to appeal to novices / casual coders, make input data easy to take in. Specify how many numbers there'll be or specify a number or phrase that terminates the data or dataset.
They should be notified via paper whether they received the problem correct, or whether it was incorrect. If incorrect, return their floppy and say whether it was a incorrect answer, formatting error, or runtime error. If you want to be nice, you can provide details on the runtime error.
Note that this method of submission generally requires volunteer "runners" to take submissions from students to the judging room and vice versa.
Make sure there's at least a few really easy problems that anyone can get. It's not fun for casual programmers who go for the heck of it to not solve anything at all in 2 hour time period. Also, it's very frustrating to have a very easy problem packet. It's no fun to get every single problem correct in an hour then realize that everyone else has done the same in less time. Creating a balanced problem packet is not easy. Check out this page for some example problem sets that are relatively easy for the best people in high school, but can be pretty hard for the casual programmer. Just remember that not everyone is a geek to the point where programming comes naturally.
If you want some relatively hard problems, HP (formerly Compaq) runs a competition called Code Wars in Houston with their own set of rules. Browse around their site for problem examples, most of which can be pretty difficult for a casual programmer.
The basic contest went as follows:
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
they can construct Lego robots and program them to negotiate a maze. the one that makes it the furthest wins.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'm a high school student, so I'll try to help.
1)Food. You'd be amazed what people would do for free food.
2)I think that if the Robot competition was easy enough to learn, it could work. Otherwise no.
3)Gaming.
4)Gaming programming would probably be a good place to start.
I would say your best bet for getting a lot of people to show up would be to get one kid you know, and have him bring his friends, spread the word type thing. Otherwise, if people only see a flier or something, I don't think they would come.
Good luck!
This
As a person who helps administrate the functional ISP for several K12 schools, I think I have a pretty good idea of what most high school students would most appreciate:
1) How to bypass the district Internet content filter. This may include compiling a list of porn sites that haven't been blocked yet, and how to find and use public proxies.
2) How to maliciously modify network-connected resources. This may include modifying the settings on network printers to stop connectivity, and how to crash Windows workstations remotely to peeve fellow students and/or teachers.
3) How to use techology to help you cheat on schoolwork. This may include homework and report-sharing forums, accessing the desktop from a kiosk-mode browser-based testing system to look up answers on the Internet, and using text-messaging enabled devices for outside communication during tests.
Just have a couple fighting robots, then show they can be done for other stuff, etc, and you're guaranteed to garner interest IF it is promoted right. (Link up with the school's student council to get them to promote it.
Sorry, but playing with a calculator won't appeal to that many people.
I fully agree with this. That simple, and from reading a few posts below, someone else said as well, that if you start something like a robotics club up, people will join. I personally would love to have a robotics club (team, whatever) in my school. The most that we have right now is a small group of people who play Doom Friday afternoons (with gore turned OFF), and that's only if the sysadmin decides to show up. And although electrically charged harpoons aren't exactly "legal" in actual tournament competition, I'd still love to build a bot that has some, and turn it loose on some of my teachers. But that's just me.
I just graduated from high school a couple years ago, and at my school we had a robotics team, electronics team, and some other kids that competed in individual classes such as network administration and computer trouble shooting. Many students were interested, yes many of them were your average outcast geek or nerd, but others were "normal" students that where popular and such.
Every year the school would send students to a provincial level of the Skills Canada competition, and then those that qualified you then go on to the nationals level.
A: Speling and punctuation
er... if you want to interest 'normal' high school students, good luck. If you want to interest the average high school male you must include either sex or violence, possibly both. If you want to interest a female....who am I kidding, I read slashdot, I know nothing about what interests females, maby er 'poetries, or creativities something like that. The key to success is simple to understand, but difficult to master, that way you won't lose the average ones, and the smartass smart ones won't scoff.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
sponsor something to do with audio.
something to do with hip hop music, sampling, turntable mechanics. something.
if its hip hop the kids will dig it.
Here's my short answer: don't interest kids in technology! (meaning anything leading to a career in computers, IT, engineering, etc.) Why do you want all these kids to become disillusioned shells when they get out of college, $100k in debt, and there's no jobs for them, and even McD's won't hire them because they're "overqualified"?
If you want to help kids, find ways of getting them interested in law and medicine. There's lots of openings for pharmacists, and they get pretty good pay. Have a mock courtroom trial, or do some type of presentation on surgery. Americans spend huge bucks on their pets: interest them in veterinary medicine.
Don't forget that most kids won't be going to college at all (and that most of those who do really don't belong there). Interest kids in a trade-school education. Show them how they could become auto mechanics, HVAC technicians, diesel or aircraft mechanics, auto body technicians, plumbers, electricians, etc. Tell them how many of these professions are protected by licensure, so that they can make tons of money installing sinks because the government limits competition for them.
Seriously, America is not the place to be if you want a career in technology (electronics, robotics, computers, etc.). If you attract kids to these careers, you are only doing them a disservice.
Now that you have the topic, design a project.
Oh yeah, and be sure to allow a few different languages, namely Java (the standard taught in for the AP Test), C++, and even Pascal.
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
In Soviet Russia, High School interests students!
Uh, wait... nevermind.
HomeSchool groups are easy to find. There are whole organizations of them. They are the ones knocking the top out of all the competitions (spelling bees, debates, etc). When I lived in Charlotte, NC, there were 1500 families homeschooling. My Homeschool kid is now self learning programming and is jazzed about game programming because of a product called blitz basic. Art was right. Homeschool kids are motivated and will/can make it successful. Less barriers, too. No school heirarchy to get thier toes stepped on. I tried to volunteer to teach the kids at public school. The let me teach the teachers. Wow, what an eye-opener. I set them up with email and taught email ettiquite. Afterwards, they sent me porn via open cc. Gee, I'm impressed.
title says it all
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
I'm not sure if its been posted, but I'm a highschooler and the only thing that they have available at my school at least is a TSA Chapter. http://tsaweb.org is the homepage.
I vote you should start a linux geek club or something. I can't find anyone else in my entire state who uses linux. Fucking Delaware
I am in high school. Next year I plan to take AP Computer Science. This course is based around Java. I think it would be nice and even spark intraschool competition if you could use the skills you learn in class. This would be similar to a science and/or social studies fair in which you simply expand on topics that you learn in class. Many people that are in the science fair are not "geeks." However, I personally don't mind being called a geek.
One way to get students more interested is to do something cool with a subject. Science in a lot of places is tought in a rather boring manor. Teachers do not have the time to build elaborate tests. Perhaps you could have a couple of your employees work with a some science teacher and build / design /setup some sort of entertaining science experiment that the teachers would not have the time to do. MythBusters does a lot of basic science stuff that adapts right into the text books, and some of those experiments could be duplicated.
Mathematics and Sex ?
I may really be able to help you out with a few things, because I am currently a High School student at a tech magnet school interning at a "regular" HS. What I can tell you is, if they aren't interested and do not see the application already, they will be hard to reach, as with any other subject. For a long time, it seemed like the driving factor to our magnet was money. Now when I'm talking *nix distros with freshman, I see things are progressing in the area quickly. Basically, my advice is that it will take time to see results. Relate as many things as you can, and try to avoid the onslaught (It will come) of "HEY CAN U FIX MY COMPUTAR LOLZ" and begging for freebies. http://www.irvingisd.net/academy/ is the website of the magnet, and may be worth a look.
"It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
I am inclined to say that most people would not be interested in a robotics fair or programming fair. It seems to me that most people in high school do not want to take the time to learn anything about a *new field*. I guess the best way to put it is to say that most of them are lazy. These things may spark their interest but if its something that they have to take time to learn then they will not give it a second look. I was interested in computers at age 12 and pursued my dream of owning my own computer. I dont live in a family that buys there kids everything so recieving a $500+ computer was out of the question. I started reading computer magazines and gradually taught myself the I/O (ins and outs, pardon the pun ;). I then built my own computer for $800 saved up from a summer job, mind you it would have cost over $1500 froma retailer. I had my problems tho. I ruined a $200 mobo/cpu combo by electric shock from nt touching metal or wearing an anti-static wristband. I also had problems with my harddrive which taught me a huge deal about diagnosing and fixing them. That curiosity led me to want to learn everything i could about computers . Now, the people saying that kids are afraid of being labeled a geek are mistaken. In this day and age it is not looked down upon in the way i see it. People look in awe toward you because you know such a skill, not to mention the admiration from teachers and adults. From my experience i find that once people see the cool side of computers it does spark some interest. I've shown people case mods and they we're astounded. People have called me a geek but its not in the derogatory sense. People come to me for help with their PC's and often want to learn. It seems once they relize the advantages of knowing your way around the PC they take an effort to learn more. But most people are caught up in the world of being a teen, partying and hanging out. Im not a total shut-out geek, i have friends and i skateboard so i have a wide range of friends. This year for community service i have taken on the role of IT head, and fix my schools computers and their network. mind you its a small school of only 150 students but the experience is going to carry me a longway in customer relations and job experience. I dont think you can get many people interested in tech at such a late time, but it is worth a try. In fact, i know a student whom i sit next to in alegebra class who straight fails every subject. But, he will sit their and program games onto his ti-85 computer in under 15 mins. I've told him that he shoudl pursue programming as it would come so easily to him but he just doesnt want to put forth the effort. I hope that you come up with an idea to spark an interest with kids but until its somthing that they can pick up in 15 mins like a video game i dont see them taking an interest in any of it.
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
It hasn't been long since I finished school - namely a year - I think that still qualifies me to think like a pupil. Maybe it'd be best if I just wrote down what intrigued ME about science in school (actually enough to get me started studying material science :) ).
I have always loved comprehensible explanations of very complex topics - what quantum mechanics is all about, how quantum computers would realise XOR, OR (you know - like when I push this electron in HERE that other one gets pushed HERE... :) ) etc. what heisenberg's cat is all about, how tunneling works, how an electron microscope works. but also what fourier transforming is, how DivX and the like work and how graphic engines for FPS are written. how anisotropic filtering works, how antialiasing works and so on...
I loved it when the topics were so hard you had to really crack the nut but just understandable enough to really tackle them with limited knowledge (because I wouldn't sit at home and still think about that problem or really put some work into it AFTER school...).
I think the major trick is to slice up science in tiny bits that are 1) interesting and 2) not TOO hard but also not TOO easy. and i think lectures are the best way to get people interested since a fair is just another way of bunking school and only the geeks will get into competitions. when the lectures are good everybody will know instantly through rumor and more people will attend.
I don't think the geeks at school need support (I know this is a risky thing to state here ;) ) - they're the ones you don't have to think about since they'll get into informatics or mathematics or physics anyway - it's the "normal" people you should encourage to look at science.
The average /.er today discovered that hs kids are obsessed with sex. Meanwhile the rest of the world has known this since they themselves were in hs, but being that most of /. was too busy cowering from big bullies in front of their computers, this could rank as genuine news.
/. crowd has become obsessed with their new enlightenment.
In other news, the
Okay people, we got the sex aspect of school down. What should be emphasized, IMHO, is that you can make money from it in the future, and yes, involve games (as an industry). Way-back-when, when I was in HS all of my extracurricular activities were mostly based on what I wanted to do with my future (excluding the gaming circle). Highlight the potential profitability of programming (games?),and then being that the average hser has no control over their enviroment emphasize the fact that you can actually CREATE things. Try to make this whole venture into a simple package, with lots of flash (and optional content for the interested), and I think you have a way to cut through the hs ennui and anti-geek sentiments.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
If you want to have any type of programming aspect, you might want to consider doing something in terms of game design. I didn't know many in high school who didn't appreciate games, and "Learn how to make them!" certainly might get some attention.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
On the theme of outreach the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE.org) has some good materials if you are 40. In my department we have been considering doing a few things (the "younger" professorial types anyways). We have tried to get a LAN party off the ground utilizing University resources to push our new gaming option. Some of us have suggested getting a Beowulf cluster off the ground with hand picked students from High Schools doing the networking and programming. A couple of us professorial types were shut down in our efforts to have a hack a box competition for all of those reasons you can imagine. In a few cases it isn't the ideas but the refrain "If you want to do that get a grant" that stops moving forward.
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I'm just out of high school, so let me try and answer. If you're trying to just to appeal to the geeks, and this I doubt, then almost anything will work. Think of what gets you excited. We would have jumped, for example, to get someone from Apache to come talk. But there were maybe 5 of us. I assume you want to appeal to everyone. With that in mind, it has to be cool! The kids aren't afraid of learning a little science, but let's face it - lectures are boring. Anything that you'd stop and be amazed or interested by is probably a good bet. Explosions, rocketeering and such things can be interesting. Slip the physics or the chemistry or whatever on the side, but if it's visually impressing (in the way Mg + O -> MgO or giant explosions) you'll catch their attention, and that's enough.
I'd recommend supporting JETS.
Its a memorable experience for high school students.
Its basically a test-based competition with a group of students work together to solve different problems/questions.
Introduces students to engineering in a very fun way. Plus anything that results in a day off from school is awesome.
Just put up a chart showing the average salary of IT Workers and Engineers, and how it has trended over the past 7 or so years.
I guarantee, they'll be stampeding. Out the door.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I know tons of youth who have or would like a web log, or page. Of them, maybe one has something vaguely not-horrible in the area of design and implementation.
about three comments that made it above a rating of "2". And one was rated "funny"...
Does this mean we have no good ideas on what high school kids are interested in or is it that high school kids are not interested in anything that would be suitable for a school environment?
Just teaching them some critical thinking skills and scientific method to make them less credulous and more logical would be useful in their collective futures.
I recently read Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins and realized that *I* was a bit rusty in my critical thinking and statistical ability.
Humans love coincidence and try to recognize patterns in chaos. I think a "fun" logic course could have a lot of cool examples and make them a little less herd-like.
I'd say a major thing to do, (if you're looking to get the more general intrest of those computer-friendly and not) hold any events during the school day, this will stop class, (=good to get people happier while you do whatever you do)
See http://www.usfirst.org/ for FIRST Robotics, a nationwide (possibly larger) scale robotics competition with a new theme each year. Students and mentors build full size (130-ish pound) robots to complete a specific task (more accurately, play a specific game). My school is team 422, the Mech Techs, and we are already excited about the robotics season coming up in January. We are also trying to secure funding (entry fees run high) but it is absolutely worth it.
Well, I am the founder of the Programming Club at our school (Although it isn't exactly big...), and when I was setting it up, there was constant inquiries about if we would be able to play video games. Now that the club is off the ground, there is interest in joining a programming competition in our area. Maybe you're Department should host a video game day (Although you should watch out, some parents might not like it if you host a day where violent games are played.), or even a time when you help students create video games. Just some rushed suggestions.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I know as a high school, that i love games. So maybe a game development thing, Have people make a simple game like pong or something. Programing is another interesting topic, I'd like to learn to how to program but im kinda lazy so I, and I like to learn from watching. So some sort of programing thing would be good. I love to develope websites, Html is easy to learn and php is realy cool if you know it, so highschoolers could show off their sites and such. Graphics are fun too, I make sigs for forums all the time but i dont know how to make good backgrounds so little get togethers were you can pick up new tips and ideas would be awesome.
I've always thought it would be neat to have something like a programming "war" - design some game that they have to write the code to play, and then have them run against each other. This is made even easier (and useful?) now with object-oriented being the stressed paradigm - just have each person make a "GameStrategy" object tied to a common interface, and run them with a "GameField" or something. Almost like chess or checkers, only have a bunch more different and interesting games. And have it once every month or week or whatever the interest! Any ideas on what sorts of games one could use, though?
Same sort of thing happened for me... My High-School (Pioneer HS, Ann Arbor, MI) had an enrollment af 2700-2800 and is the largest highschool in the state of Michigan. Due to that the school offered a great number of classes designed to prep for the much contested AP exams of which there were two exams in Computer Science... (one harder than the other). As soon as I was able I took the class (back in sophomore year) and had a great time like the dork that I am... then I had to wait until sophomore year in College to take my next programming class, because there were an unfortunate number of prerequisites that they wanted me to get out of the way... Anyways, my point was that I watched over the three years as the class size shrunk from 30 or so down to 9 with the programming 1 and 2 classes that were offered (easier semi-prereqs) dissappearing... and with the change of the college board to Java, the class dissappeared entirely...
I think its a great shame because the programming class back then, and the things I learned to do from it was/were the reason I decided to become a CSE major...
I echo the appoval for a CS competition/CS tutorial, though having a battle bots type demonstration would dazzle a good portion of the students, in my opinion...
Gravity Sucks
A Van Eck Phreaking competition?
Grandmaster of the Revolutionary Order of the Forty-Two Fish
Although I'm not a highschool student (Freshman college) my school district is involved in FIRST Robotics. http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/ FIRST Robitics is a multinational program where highschool students desing, build and program a robot in six weeks. Although the program is expensive, ~$30 000, it was what inspired me to got to college.
(1) Pick a piece of semi-popular software (popular would be too easy).
(2) Contest is to see who can locate and download a cracked copy the fastest.
(3) Profit?
The point is that finding information is just as important as creating it these days. Plus, downloading warzed stuff seems to be something many high-schoolers are interested in.
I'm not sure if I'm actually serious here or not.
That is all.
I think a robotics competition is a great idea. At my school the robotics team regularly showcases what they build, and the student body generally seems to get excited about it.
I would rather enter a programming contest than a robotics contest. I'm not big on making robots but I'd love writing the software for one. Also a physics contest would be fun. Physics is fun because it is a good example of how difficult the standard system is to use.
If your organization has people willing to donate time, I'm sure the local schools would be glad to have some assistance administering or upgrading their networks, implementing better software for the students to use, etc.
If you are looking to engage students more directly, perhaps you can create some sort of program where the students work together with your staff to improve the school's systems. Perhaps a teacher could use a database set up to track student projects, or a web based bulletin board to distribute class notes and confirm assignment dates etc.
There are many potential projects that exist in any school. Why not try to create something that improves all of the student's experience with technology while teaching/inspiring those who are interested enough to contribute directly?
-Lod
http://www.usfirst.org/
F.I.R.S.T. Robotics competetion is a great way for local businesses to get involved with high school students by allowing them to learn about science, technology, teamwork, and sportasmanship. I participated in this program in high school and can say it changed my life - and none of it would have happened without our corporate sponsorship from a local small business in Philadelphia. The competiton itself is national with regional meets scattered around the US. I suggest finding a school in your area thats participating and help them out. Programmig is becoming a larger part of the competition and high school kids could always use help with that.
see the title of the story that follows this one. no, just the second half, fool.
I taught a high school computer programming class in '95 and had reasonable success with completely non-math and non-computer people. The classroom next to mine was teaching mechanical engineering. The trick was simply to come up with applied uses of these sciences.
Example 1: Intro to Computer Programming for High School Juniors
I covered the absolute basics as quickly as possible, then assigned the students with creating a Christmas demo. I gave them a very easy to use graphics library (setColor, drawLine, drawCircle, etc.) Some students drew static images, some made animations. As the students worked, they discovered the need for loops, or arrays, floating-point, optimization, etc. Every week or so, I would show them one of these, and they could then apply them.
Then everyone demonstrated their projects to the class. Much laughter and learning ensued.
Example 2: Intro to Engineering (for G&T Seniors)
Another teacher taught this class. Assignments included interfacing a computer to various bits of hardware such as toggling a bit on a parallel port to turn on a light, etc. One project was to build a perpetual motion car and see which one went the farthest. The students were given basic building materials, and they built rubber-band powered cars, etc. As they went, they were forced to learn the basics of engineering and to consult the text for designs and ideas. Many projects didn't get off the ground, but even those groups learned.
Indeed, I, being a high school student, would love a convention/fair. Or maybe a sponsered LAN party in town. I could see a lot of students digging the idea of a huge game fest (in this one might throw in some rooting competition) For me, at a small school, it's perfectly cool to know a lot about computers. Besides, computers are where this world is going. I would be all over a fair, I liked the idea of a few programming plugs, with a CD. Or some networking tools/skills. I think the tech community needs to reach out more to High Schoolers. It seems to be mainly out there for College students and older.
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As a public school teacher, I have noticed that high school students have a particular affinity for technological gadgets. Not just any gadget, but gadgets that are useful to a high-school-aged person. "Useful" often is socially favorable, entertaining, and/or convenient (note that "useful" to an adult isn't at all different from these categories, just slightly different criteria) Hence the popularity of iPods, handheld gaming, ubiquitous cell phones, and the occasional PDA.
What does this mean for someone interested in a high school computing/technology fair? Let students brainstorm and design personal technology! They think more outside the box than any adult is capable. Let them consider real world problems, and you will be amazed at the solutions they invent. For example, several major cities are currently considering WiMax implementations. Many of them are stuck figuring out how to make it meet social infastructure ends and still not put them in gigantic debt. What benefits could be added to this technology to make it favorable for both society and the individual? How about GPS coordinated with yellow pages information so you can see a restaurant's menu on your pda when you walk past it. And what gadgets would be needed to implement these ideas? More powerful cellphones? A wristwatch that surfs the internet?
Let the students consider solutions to these problems, and then take their ideas very seriously. Tell them that you will file a patent in their name for whatever solutions they create (not that I'm crazy about the patent system, but to most students it sounds very mature and important to patent an idea). You could advertise the idea to some of those WiMax cities. You could submit ideas to technology companies. You could even have a second-tier fair with more highly motivated students to attempt an actual implementation of their idea (in Rhode Island perhaps?).
Whatever computing/techonoly problem you throw at the students, their solutions will be far more creative than my paltry examples. If you take them seriously, you will be amazed at what they create. High school students already amaze me on a daily basis.
The first thing you need to do is focus your target audience a bit more.
Want the real hardcore, shy away from the sun geeks?
Go for the programming contest, and they will come. The audience is going to be fairly small however.
Want a bit larger geek crowd?
Go with robotics, there are more science and tech topics involved so you will get a bigger crowd. If you feel like giving up several months of your life, mentor a local FIRST team. The kids will appreciate it. You can even get a taste for it first by helping out at a local competition.
Want to do something that will interest every teenager with a passing knowledge of computers?
Do something with HTML and some basic web design. Emphasize ways to pretty up their Xangas and LiveJournals.
Looking for more science than tech?
Sponsor a science fair. Offer prizes, maybe pose a problem and have the entries focus on a solution.
Kids (Well People) are naturally very competitive. They will compete with each others. Hence they group people so they don't feel bad when other people are better then them in one area. So for all the people who are call Nerds and Geeks are often classified that way because they were good at school work and/or other mental activities. Jocks are the ones who are better a physical activities, Preps are the ones who are usually better at social activities. The reasons why socially geeks are at the bottom of the food chain in school is the fact although they are better mentally. They tend to behind the preps in social skills and raw mussel from the jocks. While the Preps with their social skills tend to sooth the jocks. And the intimidating nature of the jocks keep the preps in line. So the Geeks tend to feel at the bottom of the food chain. While I am talking about stereotypes and there are very few true jocks, geeks, and preps. But to explain there loss in any area without making themselves look bad they will classify people in one group or the other. If you are going to make a mental based school activity the trick is not to make it a competition so all the Geeks will sign up and not any of the other groups because they will see it as something they don't have a chance of winning. Which is the same reason why there are not many geeks in the Football team and Jocks in the Debate Team. The trick is to structure it so the people can work with groups of friends (so they don't feel uncomfortable) to produce robots/programs to do what they want them to do, If someone wants to make a chat program let them make a chat program, if they want to make a sport game let them make a sport game. Now the hard part with this activity to make sure it is not a competition you will need to put a lot of time in some groups to help them catch up with the other people in the group so when they are done they will have projects of equivalent quality. Dont expect a big turn out the first year but in time it will grow.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Titties and ass, at least as far as heterosexual males (pehraps the questioning too) are concerned. A wise man called this phenomenon "hormones."
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Mostly beer. ANd since beer is legal here at 16, most highschool students get hammered in the weekends. I know I did.
Slashdot 1|0 Productivity
Well First things first, I'm a high school student, a junior. This allows me to be pretty much disregard most peer pressure. I'm in the marching band, which, while still having a class hierarchy, allows for a greater interaction from freshman to senior. Its not uncommon AT ALL for a freshman to joke around with a senior. I am also a computer geek, mostly a gamer. Most people wouldn't think ( even when I'm wearing my Junpei ninj4 hoodie from megatokyo) that i am indeed a computer geek, being 6'2 and 180 lbs attributes to that ( tall handsome computer geeks with girlfriends, no way!) I'm not a computer nerd per say because i don't know how to code or program, or the standard configuration for hardware in your case, well mostly i don't know. I never feel ashamed o admit my computer geekyness, cause i know a lot of the higher up people in our damned school hierarchy. Having said all of this, this is what would appeal to me. -Programing class Even though we have a class at school ( 2 year class) that teaches basic C++ programming ( ill be taking it next year btw) its not enough for those of us who want to become proficient at programming skills. Possible Solutions: Have seminars promoting programming, don't be nervous when you do this. Be bold and ostentatious and you'll get more interest. Offer a programming class on a weekly basis or even after school. Your company pays for half we pay for half. I would definitely invest in that. Gaming competitions. Oh how many daydreams have i had in my PE classes the last two years of having a massive Lan Party in the School Gym. Oh joyous thoughts. Club. Everyone loves clubs, at my school we even have a day where, at lunch, we have all our clubs out there recruiting. Have your company send out student leaders to start a C++ club. It wouldn't be that hard with a minimum of corporate sponsorship. Robotics competition. Yeah how bout no scotty. I mean i guess it would be cool IF we had enough money to have really cool robots, and California is ALL messed up in the way of school funding. After the programming classes have been in place for a few years or so, have a programming competition, such as the one Google has every year. Well these were just some ideas that came up off the top of my head. And if you really want to train the next generation of programmers, start at the high schools, but a year or so after the high school programs are in place, set them up even more effectively in the middle schools, and the high school students while probably being more proficient in programming then a 7th grader, will feel pressured once Mr. 7th grader comes to high school. The high schooler will then increase is programming levels if he cares about getting beat by a freshman. Increase programming skill levels on command, how bout that? But then again what do I know, I'm just your simple average Gamer.
"Could you put that in a memo entitled, SHIT I ALREADY KNOW!" - Sarge
I have see that most joba out there in my area for IT are usually administrative or developer positions. I see a huge lack of entry level positions. This is due to outsourcing or lack of need.
I'm too old to be in touch with kids, but if you were to talk cars, and the logic that might work. Imports, and turbos, and A/F ratios get my brother worked up.
It would be pretty cool to create some form of OBD2 reader. (Or some other car computer hack.) I think a lot of car dorks would flip if they could create their own. Split it into tasks, have some kids working on the application to read the data, have another set working on the interface to plug into the car.
Robots are "cool" but I don't see any practicle purpose for it... Unless they wield chain saws.
(Then again, how many times do you need to read/clear codes from your emissions in your 95+ car?)
I like another readers suggestiong about a basic HTML course. Maybe some nifty dynamic HTML eye candy.
Mathematics and Sex. Or maybe one of those, I think.
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As a university junior, I remember high school (most of it, anyway) very well. My school had a job-shadowing program. First, they would get students to pick a broad field (e.g. petroleum industry, government, journalism). Then, they would link up interested students with companies or professionals in those areas. The lucky student would skip school for a day and spend it with his shiny new mentor.
Frankly, most of the options open to us were lame. I ended up sorting papers in a county clerk's office for seven hours. If you were willing to do such a thing and could actually show the participants something nifty, it might help a few decide on IT. It's important, though, that the program last more than a day. One day is not enough for anything interesting to take place. This might also be an excellent opportunity to latch onto some young talent; grab yourself some summer interns.
By the time I got to university, I didn't have a clue as to how a full-fledged IT shop was run. Last year, I landed the job of systems administrator for the Math & Computer Science department. Learning everything from scratch has been an adventure. Some hands-on experience would have been useful for helping me find something I love earlier.
First of all, who are you trying to help, the well-to-do kids or the poor kids.
If you are in an area where the schools are all full of wealthy kids (central Orange County?) I can't help you much, but if you really want to help out some kids who need it I might have a suggestion...
Gather the computers your company (and those of any others that might like to participate) would be getting rid of and host a class for kids that can't afford their own computer.
Sit with the kids and teach them to pull parts from various computers and put them together to form a computer that they "Hand built".
Finally host light instruction and q&a sessions on installing and using Linux, hooking up to the Internet, etc. (Could you get your company to host a dial up Internet service for temporary use by "Graduates?" of your training course?)
I don't recommend doing this for adults unless you are willing to spend a lot more time and deal with a lot more frustration.
I worked with the housing authority of Portland to provide such a service and it was really rewarding.
All that effort for a great post, and no mod points to you...
Drink, Sex, Drugs, Alcohol and maybe money. Not in any particular order mind.
I've (luckily) found that nerds are actually a rather popular breed these days, at least where I'm from.
High school kids like the "hacker" image, no matter how incorrect it may be. When other ("regular") kids see a kid good with computers, they instantly designate him as a "hacker" in their heads, and they think he is cool. It holds not a negative connotation to them, but an exciting one. These are the first kids that "regular" kids go to when they are having problems with their computer, or have a computer-related question.
Kids like to impress their friends. Try showing them impressing things that you can do with a computer, teach them how it works that way, and inspire them to come up with impressive things that they can also do. I'm thinking of programming, myself, but that may not be the best idea.
Perhaps the most important thing is to not overestimate or even underestimate the interest and knowledge of the students you get. Very few high school students I know have ever even compiled a program before, but if you assume that of those who have, they will become impatient and disinterested.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe a "get root" competition? At least that way they can learn how to secure things, and they find bugs in your school networks for you, for free!
Here are a few suggestions for you that seem decent in my eyes. (I'm 21, so 3 years out of HS)
1. Programming We had a c++ class when I was in high school. The first year class had everyone from a cheerleader, the quiet girl, a gangster, a football player, the extremely geeky calculator programmer, and a few gamers/average geeks. By the second year this had thinned down to only the average geeks, calculator man, and an unattractive geeky girl who was interested. If you decide to go with programming, I'd suggest something more non-traditional like actionscript in flash. Its fairly easy to learn, and you can entice the art students into the class with the design part of the program. Its also an instantly rewarding system where students can make projects that goes with their social intrests. Its always best to open someone's eyes with something easy and interesting before you slap cold hard c++ on their backs and whip them.
2. Computer Security We all know this is a glaring problem with most net users today, so why not teach it in school? You could easily garner attention for it by using buzz words like "viruses", "hacked", "spyware" and teaching kids what these things are and how to prevent them. If you are teaching something that is immediately applicable to them when they go home, it will help them stay focused. I think most kids would be rather clean the spyware off their system and speed up their net connection when they got home, than to do other homework.
3. Certifications If you can teach courses that promise a real world certification at the end of the year (or more realistically, by the end of their senior year) it should perk a few more ears. Showing students what kind of jobs they can get straight out of HS with some of these certs should give them a goal to aim for. I'm willing to bet some will be drawn to the classes just because of the money you can make with even one good cert under your belt. I'm not sure if you could manage Cisco level or anything (although if you could I'm wondering if cisco would provide funding...) but the comptia certs (A+, Network+, Security+) are all fairly easy to achieve with some serious study.
Those are the top three I'd look into, but if you feel like jumping on the trendy wagon you could try these....
4. VOIP Seeing how this is gaining in popularity over the past few years, and how there's now home use as well as big business uses popping up for it, it might be worthwhile to know. I've personally been learning the consumer side of it, wanting to implement it for my friends/family. Its something simple enough that you could teach it in a classroom for a semester and have kids learn something usefull and technological.
5. PC Modding This would probably apply to the more geeky kids who have computers at home and care about what they look like. But this could also be expanded to include original mod ideas such as setting up a PC to function in your car with a dashboard monitor, plugging into the sound system, etc. That would probably help broaden the scope of the class a little. Or even a "build a budget PC" type section/course that might require a small investment from the student/family for materials, but would allow them to carry home a new computer that they built with their own hands.
Ok, I'm all out of ideas. Good Luck finding something you can use amongst all the random posts here. Be sure to let the community know what you chose, some of us would love to know.
You might try partnering with a local college or university to put together a robot competition team. Check out some robot contests that have been very successful in attracting high school students such as the Trinity College Robot Firefighting contest.
Well, I am in high school, but I think /. answered your question: Mathematics and Sex :)
Just remove the Mathematics part
Why not sponser a First team (formerly US First)?
well most of the kids at my school like photoshop & flash stuff, but i would rather code in c or perl
I am a junior at the Chambersburg Area Senior High School in Chambersburg, PA, USA, and I'm an experienced C/C++/PHP/Python/ASM developer. I see programming competitions all over the web, but I've never seen good challenges. Especially when it comes to competitions geared more to highschoolers, a challenge is important. A good challenge will keep the interest of any developer with significant interest in completing it.
:)
I've been trying to pool ideas and sponsors for a Python development competition (information is available here if you're interested) but have been coming up short. I've participated in PHP coding competitions in the past, but the main gripes I have with them is that the challenges are either easy or extremely boring, either of which makes it extremely difficult to stay focused on.
One idea I've been throwing around is setting up a site for open bounties, where someone puts up the money for a challenge and whoever completes it gets the money. If this sort of a system caught on, it could be great for developers of all ages, as well as providing a lot of different challenges for people with different interests, something that's quite difficult to do in a traditional competition setting.
Hopefully this will give you some insight into what highschoolers want, even though I'm far from a typical highschooler when it comes to interests
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
I think this thread holds the record for comments initially undisplayed. These high school /.ers a force not to be reckoned with.
and he's going to a 4 year school to pursue a degree in engineering.
He did this in part because his older brother (me) is a rocket scientist and has that "older brother influence", and because of his robotics class in high school.
I took the same class when I was in highschool (about 10 years ago... same teacher too), and it only further cemented the fact that I wanted to get into engineering.
A robotics competition would be good, especially if you show them some videos of past competitions or the MIT ones. Or if you were to show them pictures/video of the mars rovers and tell them that they could make "one of those".
The key is to make the project challenging, yet simple enough that highschool students can do it. In other words, when you're going over AI techniques and you are talking about minimizing functions, A* algorithms and whatnot, remember that a lot of those involve concepts or techniques that could be above their heads.
Maybe "off the wall" projects might be like the following:
- Create a machine to make waffles automatically, without human intervention
- Create a system to predict a person's shoe size using seemingly unrelated measurements, such as head circumfrence, hand size, etc.
- Create a machine to automatically spread a pile of dirt evenly about a room (the opposite of what a Roomba does).
The ultimate point is to get them thinking outside the box. Employers can find lots of people who can tinker some and play with existing toys. Developing people who can take a rough concept and run with it to create a new way of looking at things is gold. That's the kind of talent that created this Internet thingy...HALO 2.... give away a console or two.. and some games. Have free Mountain Dew on hand and you will need Carmen Electra to show up for everyone to leave.
Wait. Let me get this straight:That just doesn't add up. I mean, when's the last time you saw a tv show about battling programmers?
High school students are beginning to feel they're being treated like kids. Sometime in the early 90s, some jackass came up with the idea of making everything they want teenages to do sound "cool." This simply no longer works for this generation. (As a side note, I can't wait to hear what they call my generation. "Made in the 80s," perhaps?) Just be honest with what you want to do, and people WILL begin to flock there...
I just created my schools first Computer Science Club at my school. Our first official meeting had 11 members and it's steadily increasing. We don't try to lie to anyone, or tell them that they're going to get to play games. We just tell them the truth, that they're going to learn about computer science theory and have fun at the same time. The most suprising of it all, however, is that our members are quite diverse. I won't go into our diversity, but believe me, CS isn't for the stereotypical pocket-protector, taped-glasses geek anymore!
I've been noticing a surge of interest in computers over the past few years. Some of the least likeliest people on earth you would ever consider to be into computers ARE. It's beginning to be cool to have a nerdy side, and this is clearly evidenced by all the pins girls are wearing these days that say things like, "Talk nerdy to me." It's quite a phenomenon, and definately PhD thesis material.
Long story short: Geek out, man... Geek out...
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
that "Mathematics and Sex" is next to "What Interests High-School Students" on the front page?
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
I have a daughter in high school and have percieved the following:
Music and it's cultural ideologies seem to have great affect on young people. Hiphop is huge nowadays, so you have kids in slanted baseball caps and drooping pants holding on to theit crotches as they walk from class to class. You also have metal heads with their own cliques, death rockers and freaks who listen to Marilyn Manson, and punks/skinheads wearing Exploited t-shirts and the list goes on. Music has a huge effect.
Counter-culture. Kids nowadays hate advertising. Marketers have a helluvatime trying to get their attention (and will often use music to appeal to their target market). I'd imagine high school students would find the whole psychology behind marketing and advertising fascinating. I wish there was a course like that when I was in high school!
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
are always interesting to high school kids. (And us old geezers, too!) Hot rodding is a fantastic way to learn about technology - mechanical, electrical, and computer. And the results work or they don't, there's no hiding.
Despite rumours to the contrary.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Have the teacher be naked.
like naked news.
Free music, free movies, and porn.
When I was in Highschool we joined a competition called Canada FIRST Robotics, Basically they give you the board and some motors and relays, and you have to build a robot which will compete in some kind of game. In the year we did it, The game was a Giant 48' x 24' Pacman game where 4 Robots had to run around and pickup yellow bean bags and launch them into a rotating goal hopper. It was probably the highlight of my highschool career. Google it for more info.
Many Scince and Technology Centers/Museums have rich well supported youth programs that already work with the audience you might be interested in. They have the experitise to directly target youth while also dealing with the complexities of working with youth.
In the same way you wouldn't trust someone to configure your servers as a pet project, don't assume you know how to work with youth as a pet project. Your expertise will be invaluable and very helpful to people with already running programs. You could rally around the work they already have going.
So check your local science museum.
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense. - Robert A. Heinlein
Something I've wanted to do for while, but have never found the opportunity to do, was a computer wargame.
It would be a competition between two teams of any size. You give each team an equal number of workstations, a server, a router, and everything they need to put the network together. Have them build a network, configuring it all themselves, installing operating systems from scratch, and securing it for what comes next. When both teams have finished building their networks, you connect the routers. Each team would be given an objective, which could be to copy a certain file from the other team's server, gain root access to the server, gain root access to a number of workstations, shutdown the server, or any other attack-defend situation you could come up with. There could be point values associated with the objectives, and penalties for being caught.
I could see something like this as not only being very fun, but also very valuable. It would teach them to think like an attacker to secure their own network, to keep up with patches and updates, choose strong passwords, read the news often enough to be aware of new exploits and what effect they have, know what parts of networks need to be strengthened, how to use pen-testing and defense tools, what to do when being attacked, where to look for traceable clues, and what to do in the aftermath of an attack.
Of course, the rules would have to be worked out, but I think that this could be something that high school kids could really enjoy.
Two co-workers and I asked ourselves the same question during a late-night troll-session about education two years ago...
That troll-session degenerated into a meaningful volunteer opportunity at a local after-school program for struggling high-school students.
One of our greatest successes has been the creation of a computer club. We basically scrounged some machines together and taught the kids graphics/game programming (this almost generated more interest than the organization could handle).
The easiest tool we found for this is Basic4GL, a freely available, GL compliant flavor of BASIC that runs on practically anything with Windows on it. Additionally, it has support for sound and comes with some pretty impressive (yet simple) examples and tutorials.
We took the following approach:
1) Started each lesson out with a demo of something cool & graphical, talked about concepts.
2) Showed the finished product of the lesson (e.g, draw a triangle, play a sound, create a simple asteroid game, etc).
3) Walked everyone step-by-step through the creation of the program for the lesson
4) Gave students time to work
5) Went around and made sure everyone was able to complete the assignment.
Some students struggled with concepts like loops. Others took off and ran with it, creating stuff that even impressed us. Ultimately, even the struggling 6th graders were programming and understanding what they were doing, even if they did not get too far.
[To quell the inevitable questions of "why not Linux" and "why not C, Java, etc." 1) BASIC is very easy to write "hello world" in. 2) Basic4GL required no environmental setup. 3) Basic4GL was very easy to give to students to run on their parents' otherwise pristine machines.]
Personally, as a highschooler, I would prefer to be offered free IT seminars and demonstrations. People really get interested when they have a means of seeing the potential in technology. If anything, a hot-rodding competition for computers would be my kind of thing. Sort of like an auto show for geeks. A lot of the computer geeks are mainly gamers, so to show them the potential gaming would be a hit. Overall, if their was a way for you to highlight computers via a free seminar, in all their glory and applications, it would be awesome. There have always been job expos, but what about tech job expos? With all that can be done with computers, why not show kids the future of computing, i.e. graphic design, gaming, communication, voice recognition, coding, and revolutionary new ideas in both hardware and software. You may not be able to do all of that all on your own, but I'm sure that there are people willing to help. And with computers, it doesn't have to cost a lot to make people's jaws drop.
First off there are always some students interested in doing stuff like this, and they will appreciate the opportunity to have something fun and/or challenging to do as opposed to the rest of high school. I went to a school with 500 kids, where the "it's not cool to be motivated or smart" syndrome was extremely high. Most kids did not go to college after high school. Even there, a dozen or so kids were interested enough to meet weekly for a tech club, and do tons of fundraising to pay for trips to state and national competitions.
My advice to you would be to see what existing clubs, the school already has such as MESA, TSA, Science Olimpiad, and help out. Being a (good) teacher is alot of work by itself, and I'm sure they would love to have someone help with extracurricular activities. In addition to easing the workload, it is always usefull to have experiance from industry to add to the teacher's perspective, and you may also be able to help the club branch out into some other areas that the teacher doesn't have much knowledge in.
In terms of drawing in students don't try to bait students in with thing that they are interested and then relating it to science and tech - the ones who don't care still won't care, and you will have watered things down for the ones who do. Just provide interesting hands-on projects that are defined enough to keep the student from feeling totaly lost, but open ended enough to encourage creativity and problem solving. It is hard to know where this balance lies, but again partner with a teacher and they can tell you how much the students know, and gauge how good a project will be.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I know that I do not speak for most high-school students then I say that my interests include politics, international commerce, and, of course, comptuers.
The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. The program is a life-changing, career-molding experience--and a lot of fun. In 2004 the competition will reach more than 20,000 students on over 900 teams in 27 competitions.
Yes, you will spend 6 weeks out of the year without sleep, spending all night in the shop getting the robot ready, but it's a blast!
For more information, see http://www.usfirst.org
As a general rule, laws regulating explosives and the like are in place to stop people coming to harm; however, this means that most kids who want to blow stuff up end up googling and finding things like the terrorist's handbook - as any chemist who's read it'll realise, the recipes within are pretty much suicidal and / or things that don't work in practice. As such I'd think it great fun to have a properly guided tutorial on blowing stuff up without putting yourself at risk, DIY potato cannons, simple rockets, examples of just how stupid the TH recipes are, etc; generally things that it's illegal to do without a permit, but great fun with :)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
This may seem a strange suggestion, but try to cater to those who aren't already interested in school/sci-tech. A big problem for me growing up was that none of the things targeted at getting kids into robotics or what have you were accessible as I knew nothing of electronics or programming at the time. All I would have needed was for somebody to explain the really basic things, and I would have become interested in school much earlier. I probably would have had my doctorate at least five years earlier, too, had I not squandered those years between 10 and 18 on girls and sports. So, in summary: do something accessible.
but in Canada, where I am in grade 10, being profficient with computers is not at all frowned upon. I personally am not extremely profficionet, but I have friends who run Linux, code, etc. Beyond this being smart is certainly not frowned upon, but rather, looked up to. I havemade many friends (ye they are legit friends I may add) by helping them out in class. The big thing that A LOT of people would really want is a game programming class, I think. I have many friends, techie and non-techie, who really, really want to have these skills. Also, while many people do drink, do drugs, etc. it is not a big incentive and a striahtforward we are going to teach you to do something useful approach would be better, in my opinion. Of course all this is irrelevant because I have no concept of what it is like at other schools. So my suggestion would be go to a school and find out what they wan, it is all about the demographics of the area, but if you do it right this program will probably have big success.
I am also a high school student and I completely agree with koreaman and Nailer... but don't use nailers idea due to legal reasons... The robot idea will fail and I wish they had some type of programming thing in my community... especially with cd's being passed out. However unlike koreaman I have already been labeled "geek" or "nerd". When in doubt host a lan party, get some local stores to chip in and you could even offer a local game shop to be there with a table of the games you were playing that day for the kids to buy if they wanted when they were done. ..or go with Nailer's idea and lead them there by leaving porn magazines on a trail to the programming event... if you leave trails of porn they will come.
>I graduated with a double degree in electrical engineering / I.T and I can't say I ever met a straight female student.
Dude, that's just what they tell EE students...
I'm a professional geek, and it's how I got in computers in the first place. "How do these video games work?" "Well, there's this thing inside called a computer..." And the rest was history.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I totally agree with you koreaman. In my high school, there is a lack of exposure to technical computer classes. All of the computer classes I have at my school only deal with office applications, such as word processing or spreadsheets.
I also can agree with the comments you made about a robotics competition being a bad idea. In my school, there is a robotics team; however, there is a lack of interest from most of the school, myself included. In contrast, I would be much more excited for a programming fair. It would set a precedent in an area such as mine. We hear about technology everyday, but are rarely exposed to things such as programming. I would still have to say that, for the average high school student, technology, robotics, programming, and the like are probably the furthest thougths from their minds. On the other hand, I would be very interested in something like this and I wish you the best of luck.
Also, location is key. It might be better off hosting an event like this in an area where such exposure is limited rather than commonplace.
Best to focus on music production, stuff that kids wanting to get into the industry will find really useful. Least expensive would be to focus on software, and stuff you can do on normal computers. Tutorials in Cubase SX, Soundforge, Reason, Recyle, ProTools, VSTs ...
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Two words: extra credit. In the not too distant past when I was in school, the way to get kids involved was to get their teachers to bribe them. Anything to get out of opening the textbooks is a sure winner.
As for robotics, it is all about marketing your event. Think BattleBots and not Lost in Space.
In the end, talk with teachers at the local schools to get some insite on what they think you can offer. Check with the science, math, computer and library type people.
I'm a high school student, and I've observed something interesting: there seem to be people who are interested in computers themselves, but not programming per se. For example, when I ask people why they are thinking about taking Comp Sci, they usually reply "I want to know more about computers." So, perhaps you might get the largest attendance if you started off on the basics of computers (i.e. what a CPU is), and then moved up from there, eventually getting to say BASIC or Java programming for the people who want to learn more.
My step-son says, "Um... robots would be cool."
1 7&tid=126/
After nudging him for more info, I got the following:
"learning to make or program games,robots and what to use in order to make them."
Let me translate for you...
Very few kids want to be educated. All of them want to learn. When it comes to technology, it has to be easy-entry, FUN, and scalable! Did I mention fun? With the advanced games available to kids and increasing computer/internet usage, many teens are savy to technology and quick to pick it up. Start easy enough to get everyone going, but make the difficulty level scalable for the more advanced kids and quick learners. My recommendation is that you integrate as much of the new and exciting technologies out there, using media spins (like RobotWars, etc.), to gain interest. Unfortunately, technology usually appeals to the boys, so you will have to go the extra mile to get the girls interested. Have a simple contest for the girls, integrate a chat room during the education process, etc.
Of course, I must mention the SlashDot article about the Japanese teenage-girl phenomenonal influence on technology from last week:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/09/16352
I hope that helps.
--I smoked my sig.
porn
If you want to help out at the high school level, volunteering your time as a tutor or setting up and supporting a peer-tutoring system at school is the way to go. It is nice to work with kids that already love science, math and technology, but those kids are ususally well on their way to higher education/success and don't need much encouragement. Giving a little help to those who struggle in these topics can go a long way. It is hard to get people with math/science backgrounds to come into schools and help out. I have been a high school teacher so I have seen these facts bear out.
Warning: nothing snide here.
HS students like to learn and think and grow, more than anything. The trouble is that the ecomony of memes promulgated by the media magnates has captured their brains with movies, video games, and entrancing images everywhere of satuff they need to buy.
Many of them feel like failures because they can't possibly measure up to the images presented to them at every turn. And adults manipulate them with fear and half-truths to ensure a market for their memes.
But look at those who have learned to think and act for themselves. They work hard in school. They do fall in love with each other and have sex. They do try substances and other kinds of thrill seeking. Eventually, most of them survive these perils just fine, and they simply want to get on with their lives and be respected, not treated like children by the adults around them.
Like children have for thousands of years, young people want to learn and explore the world around them without being exploited by the adults.
Live to learn and you'll learn to live.
I am currently a high school senior, and I agree that there is a big gap between the people who like to fiddle around with their computers, and those who get confused when they are installing a program in Windows. In my opinion, most people who are of the first group, dont really care if they are called geeks, actually we are quite proud of it (to some extent). But if you want to reel in the other group, you need: -flashy lights -hip music -"educators" that can relate to the kids -free stuff if you follow those basic guidelines, almost anything that you do will be a success. But you should stick to subject pertaining to pop-culture references, like the fighting robots, for example. Hope that helps
Mess with the Best, Die Like the Rest
Knock on your next door neighbors door. Tell them what you are planning on doing and that you need sugestions. Ask them if you can ask their teenage son/daughter and use their sugestions. Repeat with any and all neighbors you know of with highschool kids.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
We sponsor internships for students who show aptitude and proper attitude. We then let them help develop projects for our clients, and even let them develop some projects that they come up with.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those who forget the past are doomed
I think that you should cover all the cool things that are beyond the ability of a high schooler to really grok at a fundamental level.
why Administrative normal form is preferable to continuation passing style in modern compilers,
what the curry-howard isomorphism really means,
what exactly monads are (and what those monadic interpreters accomplish),
and also cool stuff like how to write a parser generator and an optimizing backend for a pure language which uses graph reduction as its evaluation mechanism.
Granted this is all a tad ambitious for most high schoolers, but I'm not normal. (now time to get back to that book on Typed Lambda Calculi and Small Step Operation Semantics)
This is the stuff that I would consider worth my time to learn about, but it definitely does not reflect what would be appropriate for more ordinary high schoolers, though it would be very cool for the appropriate people.
God knows I learned the most I ever have about computers by setting up doom and quake servers in the school computer lab. Hiding the files on the network so the teacher couldn't find them...
I am presently in my first year as a HS CS teacher. I had a similar experience to yours during my time in high school (and judging from the games you mention, we were around the same era.) I must say: times have changed.
Simply setting up a network for gaming or even finding ways to circumvent my authority are not very productive.
There are so many students with such great prior knowledge that letting them just do what they want (download mp3s, play games) is a terrible, terrible waste when they could be MAKING music or games!
Free stuff. if everyone who attends gets the option of walking away with a free cd, I dunno, maybe OpenCD 2? Granted, in high school I would have known about something like that because I'm a geek but it's still free and that would have meant something. Show something about making digital music. Most people love music, and being able to play with a music program like Reason or Fruity loops would have been interesting. I learned C++ in high school and even though most high school kids arn't programming proficient, anything that makes most semi-nerdy kids seem more "l33t" will probably go over well. Ivolve the process of making digital movies or something, just be creative; and have free stuff.
www.team639.org That's just to advertise us, but I would fully support your support of any FIRST Robotics team in the world. Canada, USA, Brazil, England... etc!
It is sad going to school in the city of Memphis. I live in a pretty rough part of town, and therefore, I am not in best means of reaching technology. I enjoy programming c++, (various sourceforge projects, 'amathis101') and I love scripting php. I wish we actually had a computer lab, but I am afraid we don't have the money, and even if we did, the collective IQ isn't that desirable.
...at least for me...
I resent this. I'm a teacher. School board members are not educators. They have more to do with local government, each other, and whatever other social networks exist in their school system than they have to do with kids. These inefficiencies you describe have really nothing to do with education since those people in some other setting would behave the same way.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
First thing, contrary to what many other have said, you will find students interested tech stuff. Make the topic something like a programming contest and you'll get attendence from the geek community. The more accessible you make it the more people will show up, so I'd stay away from things that require a lot of prior knowlege or a large time investment.
There have been a lot of good suggestions so far like teaching about car sound systems (there's a helluva lot of technical lessons it could introduce), or you could run a course to introduce kids to fixing computer problems. Process of elimination, common procedures, and running Firefox. Just keep it simple so that the audience is wide.
If you want to do something that would really help out, just ask the school. There's a ton of run of the mill stuff they always need help with. Chances are that their internal network admins are overwhelmed or they need substitute teachers.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
I am a new high school student(freshman). Since the time I entered 2nd grade, I noticed that schools do not put enough into computer education. By third grade, I was writing Visual Basic apps without the books by my side. Over the years, I taught myself Basic, Visual Basic, C, C++, Perl, PHP, HTML/CSS/Javascript, Bash(and other Linux shells), and many more languages. My schools(two different districts) have never taught me anything about computers, I think I can also add in, nothing about technology.
A programming and general technology fair would be a great idea. Get a few terminals with different compilers or programs asking for example code for different languages. Keep tutorials like "printf(string);" near each terminal and have some introduction to teach the slowest of students. Take things apart, if legal, such as the Playstation and show how it has parts just like desktop computers. Demonstrate that there exists more than just Microsoft. Open up an iPod and show the mini-HDD and how it works. Things need to be applied, and letting the more willing, experiment on higher levels, will definately be encouraging and let the students work at their own level.
High school students are interested in each other. You'll notice that having a nice phone and sending little text messages is cool. It's not the phone that's cool.
If there's some technology that allows them to monitor who's going out with whom every day you'll see kids snap it up.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
If Slashdot is teaching you more about writing then school, your school is SERIOUSLY FUCKED.
PS - no offense, your writing skills are fine.
A guy at my church has apprenticed me and another highschool friend of mine to learn how to program, administor webservers, and develop new products. We both love it. We go in once a week for a couple hours to do our stuff and the boss has given me Visual Basic software to learn on my own, but now he wants me to get to work on ColdFusion instead. The boss says he will even lend us his webservers to mess around with once he gets new blade servers up and running.
I hope this tells you something about what you might be able to do with highschool students and what they might be interested in.
Sex with good-looking cheerleaders was my interest when I played football in HighSchool.
I like robotics, programming (esp. games), i'm trying to learn Linux, but that's a special case, i think. A cool project we can take home also helps.
One, we have a First Robotics competition -- or something. One of the two competitions involves legos, the other an embedded form of C and a lot of construction. The former is the easier for the two, so the people working on it are mainly middle schoolers, while high schoolers work on the latter (my school is a combination school with students from 7-12)
Two, encourage your students to participate in Spaceset -- an engineering simulation involving the construction, location, and internals of a space station. The RFPs are detailed enough for high school students (and certain enthusiastic middle school students) to collectively (groups of ~12-25) come up with 50 pages worth of material.
Third, my principal is encouraging me and two of my friends to teach the computer sci class, as the teacher for it retires this year.
To interest high school students you want things that a) Look good on college transcripts, b) teach them something useful, i.e. electronics engineering orgood communication in an engineering environment and c) give them an opportunity to socialize, meet new people, and generally take a positive experience with them to college.
Link to spaceset: http://spaceset.org/
- Build towers or bridges out of balsawood that then compete in a wieghtbaring competition
- Bottle rockets with parachustes, the longest one to stay up wins
- Catapults, crossbows, slingshots,
...
- remote controlled cars
It doesn't take too much to involve technology into these:who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
What they want are Robot Wars!
The ultimate combination of video games with real world physics. Once you have the first two going at it, you are set from there.
(& it's free from sex, drugs & rock n' roll)
WOW? You also from India. Great where do you come from?
The truth is that even the president of india admits that we do have a rot culture.
BTW isn't Bihar a part of India.
Cowtamer's idea about a game design course is great Game Programming, OpenGL, Basic4GL, but it needs a reality check. Being in highschool I can tell you that very few people will want to start on anything that seems to "hard", or confusing when begining, and most that will are already into tech. The best approach would probably be through video games since they reach such a wide audience, but starting off in any sort of coding language would drive away many potential canidates. To really get people into this, you should start with a more click and drag interface, say a simple 2d engine that can be modified by dragging in walls, floors, and characters, and then dragging in pre-built behaviors for the characters. Eventually, you would move to scripting short behaviors for the characters as well as new items, etc. Using a slow progression like this you could introduce a language such as Basic, as cowtamer suggested, or C. If such an accesable system were used, even people who have no technilogical background could gain a grounding in computer science, and could truthfully tell their friends that it was fun and not too hard, thus compelling others to join.
We raise our slide-rules high.
I must say that getting involved in FIRST Robotics is a great way to volunteer your time. FIRST currently has over 900 teams in the US, and there are more every year. The controllers are programmed in C, so there is no lack of programming work, though a team can opt to not program them at all. The first 15 seconds of the two minute competition is completely. If you make it clear that it is not solely a geek thing, but involves tasks that most geeks wouldn't even think about (welding, assembling parts, designing chassis and drivetrain, etc.), you should have no problem getting people involved. Another good resource for FIRST is a forum at ChiefDelphi. If you decide to start a team, post there and see if there are any teams in your area willing to help you.
[A side note: the most important thing to remember is that for this to be successful, you must make the students feel comfortable. I know many students who were turned off to science, and it was always by a bad experience in high school. Students will be interested in science, but it must be understandable to them.
High technology is fun, but the average student doesn't know the first thing about programming or building a robot, and might not find something interesting if they don't understand it. So your project should be aimed at things that build interest, but are also easy for high school students to understand. Take care to emphasize that anyone can do it if they're willing to work at it a little. Students must not be allowed to feel dumb or stupid, or to think that the teacher feels they are.]
If you want something like a fair or competition, you might try a pumpkin' chunkin' competition. I don't mean large scale, though. You could have fun with a smaller competition such as the one at my university. The launchers must fit in a 4-foot cube and must be human powered. These limitations make it fairly safe, and the competition is an entertaining and respected event. In the process, students can learn some basic things about ballistics and engineering.
Alternately, you could form a project to build a larger single device, like a trebuchet or catapult. This can be a lot of fun to fire (for a rally before a big game, perhaps?) and provide a larger project where students can use a variety of skills including math, physics, and metal- or wood-working.
On the other hand, if you want smaller projects that might fit into a short class, here are a few suggestions:
- Anything with liquid nitrogen is cool by definition. :-) You can make liquid nitrogen ice cream, freeze a rubber ball and shatter it, let the nitrogen roll off the back of your hand... all the standard tricks. In addition you could get one of the small superconductor kits and levitate a small magnet; you can talk about new materials research.
- Bring in a strobe light and look at things under it like water from a faucet, a turning bicycle wheel, or other semi-periodic phenomena.
- Astronomy, with a good telescope, can be really fun. Start off with something easy like looking at the surface of the moon, and save calculating orbits for much later. ;-)
- Photography appeals to non-technical students but also introduces a lot of more technical subjects in a non-threatening way.
There are all kinds of great activities that will catch the interest of students. I don't think the kind of activity is as important as its level.
Ask yourself: will the average high school student see your activity advertised and think "I wish I could do that," or "I know I could do that!" ? Use that as your guide.
Good luck!
Find out if any of your local technical societies have any programs you can become involved with. For example, IEEE sponsors the national Engineers Week in February, and many Sections sponsor high school oriented competitions to go along with that. My local Section is involved with the Future City competition, where the kids have to design a city around a certain theme, build a physical model, write an abstract about it, and so on. That program is designed for middle school students, but you get the idea.
Dreamers, shapers, singers, makers... Elric, the Techno-Mage
Having left high school in the past few years, I'd say you have no chance whatsoever of gaining the interest of those who would not already be interrested in the idea of any geekfest. A programming competition, robitics fest, whatever. The geeks will show up, the others will not. Simple as that. If a kid has reached high school with no ambition towards technology (or intellectual advancment of any kind), they will not be swayed by any advertising you might try. If they have developed for 15 years or more with no interest in the way the world around them works, they are lost to intelligencia everywhere. Only those with a previous interest in learning and self-betterment will attend. For those, set up any geeky event, and they will be there in force, whether it's robitics, programming, or physical sciences, they'll be there.
I was never interested in science or math until college - I took 10 hits of acid and watched that movie Pi (not too great a movie, I know, but it served its purpose for me), and never looked back.
Robot competition == gay and (worse) boring.
I can directly attribute my interest in computers to video games. One path is:
- Video games
- Pirated video games
- Bypassed copy protection
- Reverse engineering
- Assembly language programming
- Buffer overflows
- Computer Security Expert (present day)
Another is:- Video games
- Multi-user video games
- Create my own maps/skins/bots for multi-user video games
- Create my own scripts for multi-user video games
- Become a Programmer
- Write my own video games
- Software Engineer (present day)
Finally, for you hardware types:- Video games
- Better video card
- Faster RAM
- Overclocked CPU
- Chip design
- Computer/electrical engineer
(We all know the real reason Intel creates faster computers: It's for better video games, stupid!)Now the Internet, while that STARTED with video games (the whole "play against your buddies" concept), it only really started to take off with pron...which, strangely enough, also ties back to video games, e.g. Leisure Suit Larry.
LIKE THE TIMECUBE, NO ONE CAN RESIST MY LOGIC AND PROPERLY AUTHORED HTML!!!
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Hey guys. I'm a college student and I have a younger brother who's currently in highschool -- and he's definitely one of the more social kids and you know what pretty much his entire grade does? They're starting to bring magic cards back and they hold lan parties and they game! It's badass that they've made "geek" the new cool. Anyways, back to the topic at hand. I tend to agree with the proactive stance on robotics -- I took a lab-last year where we had to solder together our own small computer systems (I think it was sponsored by...motorola I want to say...) and then build a robot out of legos, and etc. etc. there's a competition with rules and we need to program blah blah. APPLIED technology is where it's at. And I think a lot of highschoolers are a bit more capable than they appear to be or actually think they are as long as they can surpass any social boundaries that might exist. Teach them hardware hacking. Teach them how to build a bluetoth transmitter. Help them set up a radio-station. Create a group project to build some cool website or something. Anything with the end result of some cool physical/interactive object can spark a lot of creativity.
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
I would suggest doing a video game creation contest instead of a regular programming fair. It will make the kids who can program want to get involved, as well as drawing in kids who have talent in other areas, but might not otherwise be interested in programming.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
Check out the project page or read an article (pdf) about the first one.
Every high school in the state is invited to the competition. Percentage-wise we get a terrible response but do usually get a half dozen to a dozen teams. It basically boils down to there being a volunteer at the school willing to help the kids out.
The kids always seem to have a great time flinging eggs at our giant frying pan. And we hope they gain some interest in engineering through the process of building their catapult and documenting the work.
I'm in highschool and honestly I couldn't care less about robotics or programming fairs. We have a robotics team that I'm not interested in, and there are annual programming competitions (not at the highschool though) for those interested in it. The best thing that the school has ever done for me was providing a copy of Visual Studio .NET for my home computer through Microsoft's MSDN Academic Alliance (http://msdn.microsoft.com/academic/program/highsc hool/default.aspx).
Yes, its Microsoft, but seriously, how many highschool students want to open up vim & a shell and hack away? I've swictched mostly to this since , but I never would have been there if not for VS.NET as a stepping stone.
MSDN AA memberships are cheap for highschools ($300) and let every student install it locally, as well as every lab computer in the school. Hell of a price for that.
I'm going to suggest that you get involved with the computer club. Give them some sort of server access - a Unix box they can SSH into and do some web hosting on. Invite them to get involved in whatever FOSS projects you're working on, or to find one on sourceforge or whatever. Point them towards whatever tutorials are appropriate for their skill level & interests (HTML/CSS/Javascript can be fun for building simple games, Python or Java for programming, etc). Maybe get some local businesses to donate $ (or do it yourself) and show them how to build a computer from parts.
As for "worthwhile" private schools, that's going to be a very subjective measure. You might start by checking with the better regarded college prep schools in your area.
Luke, help me take this mask off
You should sponser a KIPR Botball Team. I am in college now, but in high school we competed in the KISS Institute for Practical Robitics regional and national competitions. The robots were made of legos and programmed in a variation of C. The bots had to be totally autonomous, but also had to carry out some very complex functions, usually involving ping-pong balls. Here is the link to KIPR Botball:
http://www.botball.org/
I teach in a high school and here are some ideas that my kids have talked about: (if you sponsor something, have great prizes like awesome video cards or ipod mods or other gearhead gadgets). Make the contest either national (run it with CompTIA or somebody) or in a metro area (like Louisville, KY).. statewide contests bomb. Your role is that you gather the prizes and be the judges. 1. Sponsor a computer repair bench competition in the gym of a school 2. Sponsor a modding contest for educational adaptations of a computer or PDA (like the Alphasmart DANA) 3. Sponsor a software contest for school needed handy utilities (like teacher sign-in box, or parent tardy sign-in kiosk, or security guard hallpass checking wireless PDA software that creates passes on the fly), or a host of a million ways that IT could actually improve a school but doesn't because the people who run IT are in central office instead of center hall. The most important thing is go into a school and chat with the IT teachers and kids and connect them to you as well as vice versa. Most IT classes (A+, Cisco, Network+, Linux+, Programming, etc) just don't see enough real world folk in schools. For more, contact Gary Hannah at the CompTIA Jobs+ (E2C) Program (www.comptia.org).
I myself am a highschool student (senior), and know that me and many other kids at my school enjoy hardware too. Programming is awesome too, but it doesn't appeal to the person who isn't math or logic oriented. Hardware is hands on and many kids will likely get a kick out of it. I, personally, wouldn't mind doing some 3D rendering or, as a few before me have suggested, game design (2D is quick and fun, whereas 3D gives you more of a feeling of accomplishment - you could possibly offer both).
Just thought I'd add my 2 cents.
I think you can get high school kids more interested in technology by making available resources and having programming competitions (e.g. USA Computing Olympiad). Also, during summers, one can offer them tech camps and such to draw their interest. In addition, conventions specifically geared toward high school students interested in technology would be great as well.
You might check around to see if your area has a botball competition. The website www.botball.com has a list of all the teams, so you can get an idea of whether or not it's in your area. Basically, you build robots using legos and other specified materials, though you have a limitation on them and the robots must push balls around a small court against another team. You also have to program your robots, generally in C, so that they know what to do and how to move. It's very time-intensive and unless the students have an idea of what they're doing, it's probably not worth it to start a team. On the other hand, it is a lot of fun, and certainly gives nerds an opportunity to hang out. Another possibility, that I also found enjoyable, was the American Computer Science League (ACSL) competition. It's a national competition, though schools from other countries do participate. It runs throughout the school year, with an All-Star competition Memorial Day weekend. Students take both written exams on computer topics, like bit strings and boolean algebra, and write programs. Both have time constraints and the written portions in particular require studying. It is good practice for those who intend to go into CS in college. You can look at the rules and see sample problems at www.acsl.org. This really is my first recommendation.
At my school I'm in a Cisco networking class training to be a Cisco Certified Networking Assistant (CCNA) at the end of two years. It's considered a college level course and can be taken anywhere due to the fact its online. Anyways, I like the class but I want more hands-on action. I want to see somebody actually managing a network. There's a lot more than just plugging in a bunch of ethernet cables and switches and routers. I learn by doing. Hands-on is better for me. Anyways, I may not be able to take the second course next year due to the fact it's not popular enough. There's only 9 kids in my class already and I'd say 5 at most by the end of the semester. So although it's not that popular, I still like it.
When I was in high school, you could get the more technologically-inclined students' attention by offering them an opportunity to sit in front of a computer (actually located in the same room), type commands, and maybe even code some simple programs in Fortran. We also got to map line drawings onto a grid (I did Snoopy), key in corresponding characters on punch cards, and have the computer print the result on continuous-form greenbar. The lucky ones got to run a "banner" program which would churn out a text message in large format, horizonally across several feet of greenbar. I'm sure that'd still be a big hit.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I am a highschool student who recently was part of WPI's (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) Savage Soccer program. It was very fun. Came in 3rd, behind 2 of the 5 Mass Academy teams, pretty good for a poor public highschool imo(south) http://users.wpi.edu/~savage/
Personally the only thing that keeps me interested on the school computers, is doing things I shouldn't.
Like looking at
*GASP*
the C: drive.
Yes, thats right. STUDENT Tech Support.
If the school has a computer club, pick one of the most trustworthy students and have them do some of the mundane teacher support tasks. (Such as telling the user that the CD-ROM drive is NOT a retractable cupholder.)
I have advanced beyond the mundane crap and on to becoming THE sysadmin. They gave me total supervisor access to the NetWare servers since the Tier1 doesn't have a cluestick on how to use ConsoleOne and NWAdmin.
Show them how to adjust brightness/contrast in photoshop so they can upload all of those cool pictures to Myspace.
I live in the very, very rual Alabama (no DSL!!). I to a local high school, and I am one of the very few geeks around. I, personally, enjoy computers. But I observate alot of social groups colliding. Like, there's the Skateboarding Punks (who, well, likes skateboarding), then there are the Gothics (who are people that like the color black), then the "Stupid-Other-Relgions-Your-Going-To-Hell" ground (I am apart of that group, the ones who are going to hell). So there are a wide variety of things going on. Since I have only 3 days left of this semester, I will monitor various people and ask question, I'm on the yearbook staff and I won't look as stupid as I usually would. I'll post my results in my blog!
Radio controlled cars or R/C cars have seen to become a new "fad" in my school and my engineering class has recently spent a lot of time working/modding them to make them faster, stronger, lighter, etc. We work mainly with the Traxxas T-Maxx and the Nitro Rustler 2.5 and let me tell you, its incredibly fun to make them do amazing tricks or watch them go over 50 mph.
Whatever you choose, you may want to include some sort of race.
The 4 basic things to attract a high school male are:
1. Girls. Good luck on that one, but if you can get some girls, the guys will come if you are lecturing on the most boring thing ever.
2. Moderate Danger: If it burns, flashes or makes loud noises, you've got my attention
3: Competition. Even in something nerdy, winning is still winning.
4: Practicality: Teaching them how to put linux on a paperclip won't work. Teaching them how to make a radio is more useful in high school life.
Don't be afraid to ask around your local high school, they probably have ideas that apply more to your area.
SAILING MISHAP
As a teacher as well, I have to confirm both accounts. Firstly, that teachers actually have very little power over tech policies, and are the largely at the mercy of school board members who may not all be as informed of the issues.
But I have to say that I encountered some of the same foolishness myself: wide vulnerabilities, resistance to free and OSS, lack of proper training for teachers, and so on.
A bizarre expenditure of money. Let's just say that our school libraries and materials budgets are not quite what they used to be.
I already said to you what I say to all racists I encounter. Fuck you, you racist piece of shit. It bears repeating.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Hey. Im a highschool student, and my inet friends and I are interested in programming, we would like a good programming contest/fair.
There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This ab
Simple BEAM robots might be better. First off, well, they're simple. A lot of the designs look like insects, so you might be able to get some of the art crowd involved too. They act like living things, seeking out light or whatever they need to keep going so you got the whole AI thing going on.
They're analog so there's no programming involved, which is good as most HS kids dont have coding skills and the less barriers to entry the better.
i was into building my own computers and hacking my HS's netware 3 network (which has no security) if only we had access to cisco lab equipment....
Of course there are people who aren't white. It's the act of preferring them over people who are white, simply because of their race, that makes the OP a racist piece of shit. If you agree, you're a racist piece of shit too. If you prefer white people over non-white people, you are also a racist piece of shit. Just because you discriminate against white people instead of non-white people doesn't make it any less racist nor any less despicable. Fuck all racist pieces of shit. Please note that I believe everyone has the right to be racist. However, I reserve the right to tell racists that they are pieces of shit and to fuck off.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Wow, one token boy and girl? How does that work? Was it a vertical or horizontal split?
First, this is a really cool idea. I guess educators are scared of integrating business applications into the public education system. Any chance teens/kids get to "see" what businesses are doing, engineers are building, what their careers demand, I think is a great learning opportunity and might inspire a new generation.
.... and taking a lot of my time."
As a upper year university student who used to be in a science program and instead chose a liberal arts degree, I have this advice:
Try and focus at least some of your program on advising students how "hard" post-secondary science educations are. They aren't easy, nor are most university diplomas. Your presentation might have a lot of "wow" appeal with robots, but I think there should be some responsibility - which educators (and some parents) might not know about - which are the demands studying and university take on you. The texts and teachers were heavy with the "wow's" of science in HS; when in university the only "wow" you get is "This is hard
There's nothing more rewarding then looking at a problem for a long time and you suddenly "get it". Trust me.
This is not meant to discourage. Rather, I hope you might get to kick a drive in others to persist in their studies at university. Things seem so "easy" when you're out on your own.
I had an awesome robotics club in eigth grade (I'm in tenth now) where we built them and competed in some local competetions. We also visited Carnegie Melon University for the Robotics Open (whatever it's called, the one with the Aibos playing soccer), which is internationally recognized for its robotics programs. I think mindstorms are great because they're accessible to pretty much anybody, but also quite powerful in terms of potential behavior.
Are you aiming to inspire the geekiest 1% of the students who are already destined to go on to become alpha geeks anyway, or are you trying to foster an interest in technology in a broader section of the students.
If it is the former, a robotics contest sounds great. Set some clear judging criteria, find some cool prizes and sit back and wait to judge. The main thing to think about when writing the rules is ways to keep costs down. Some of the commercially available robot bases and even good motors and batteries are very expensive which might make a team with a big budget unbeatable. Setting a very low maximum weight or specifying some of the main components can level the playing field.
If you are after the latter, some sort of web development clinics could work well. There is no other area of technology where somebody with a few hours instruction (and a little natural flair) can make a project that looks like the commercial offerings they are used to seeing. A student cannot build a professional looking GUI application, electronic device, robot, solar car or whatever else after 10 or 20 hours instruction, but they can probably cutomise a PHP-Nuke install, or build a personal website with some dynamic functionality such as RSS feeds and image uploads.
I used to be a highschool substitute teacher, so I would usually see the students at there worst (or best, depending on how you look at it).
From what the students told me, here are some ideas to get them interested in science/computing:
Network security: Present a challenge to the students to get past whatever "web-minder" or "net-nanny" type filtering scheme the district has installed so they can get to the more, er, colorful websites. (I was very surprised and delighted to see a group of inner-city students circumvent the filtering measures the school had so they could browse the pages of low-rider magazine online. When I caught them, they were a little scared, until I told them "I won't tell on you if you show me how you did it". They showed me, and man those kids were bright.)
Physics/bio-chemistry: While many people will look down on this, kids are going to smoke weed, and no amount of force-fed DARE propaganda can stop them. Now, you have to be very careful about how to present it, but interesting projects might include Bon..er, "water-pipe" construction, asking the kids "What chemical reaction is going on when the smoke is filtered through the water?", or "What is the best diameter for the main shaft of the pipe for maximum efficiency". I once found a student going over extensive notes, with diagrams and calculations for the design of his custom water-pipe.
Of course, neither of these could ever be seriously put into play in a public school, but for a great deal of motivation for some students is found in the desire to do something they shouldn't be doing. I for one learned quite a bit about computer software trying to get pirated games to run when I only had 640k of base memory to work with. The games themselves were incidental, it was the fact that I could take any number of cracked games and get the old DOS to run it which made the process interesting to me.
I think you'd get a lot of students interested if you can somehow create the illusion of misconduct in the exercises.
The Internet is generally stupid
I am fortunate in that my school has county vocational and technical schools that I attend [the technical school]. Called Bergen County Academies, we are recognized and specialize in certain technology areas such as science, medical, telecomm, visual arts, etc. I know for a fact many groups have tried to model this image and it is very open to ideas on classes offered and student ideas [as does not seem in your earlier situation]. What we are offered throughout various technology classes, electives, and projects are Science Fair type competitions for electronics and futuristic inventions that we develop throughout the year and display at places like Rutgers. Also are web design competitions [World of Webmasters, Tech xPlore] and other robotic and concepual projects [Panasonic Robitic Compeition, BattleBotsIQ, Chrysler Vehicle Design]. Not many other schools offer opportunities such as these but they may be ideas to consider teaching. I would particularly like to develop more of an advanced technical program related to Database Management, Network Security [I see why they may NOT offer this], and web-programming. For example, I also helped design the backend of our school's online magazine FreshAngles.com after the techs converted everything from UNIX to Windows and somehow fried our data in the process. It would be excellent to learn how to secure this in a real world situation as it is in and optimize it.
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
When I was in elementary school in 1994, my father, a college professor, ran a series of afternoon computer workshops aimed at middle and high-school students.
I tagged along, and the experience ended hooking me on computing along with some of the older students.
My dad worked up simple versions of Eliza, Hangman, and Conway's Game of Life in QBasic.
Though I doubt you could excite someone with QBasic today whether or not they know anything about computers, certain aspects of the way we went over the programs and later modified them would probably hold true for students today.
Basic or Visual Basic might still be the way to go for introducing programming. Maybe Gambas would be your bag. Results with these languages are immediate and basic programming concepts can be illustrated easily.
Since I was introduced to computers, the web and web programming have exploded. I'd be weary of teaching web-design or HTML, though. PHP or Perl web scripting would require knowledge of basic HTML, and I'm not convinced HTML is the way to introduce people to computing. Though "instantly gratifying", I tend to think that starting someone off with a formatting language wouldn't instill in them the awe of realizing what a computer can accomplish when instructed, and this realization is the one that hooked me.
i am currently a senior in highschool and let me assure you....we aren't worth your effort
I am totally not surprised...
Administrators are definitely not educators. They are interested in doing 2 things:
1. "earning" 6-figure salaries
2. dictating subordinates' opinions
Furthermore, they are interested in NOT doing one thing:
1. thinking
Remember, Administration 101 at your local college or university comes with a mandatory frontal lobotomy
Okay, I may be "retro" but I'm not a Troll.
I'll take a stab and ask whether one of your IT people is also an Amateur Radio operator.
Many teenagers involved in the Scouts and Guides will have heard of Jamboree On The Air (JOTA) or JOTI (I for Internet) so the recognition for Amateur Radio might be there.
Get some local Amateur Radio operators to bring in some modern equipment to demonstrate bouncing signals of the various satellites or the International Space Station.
Alternatively, contact the ARRL (Rhode Island) folk, who are local to you.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
Alot of kids at my high school were interesting in hack, the true kind not the "1m ub3r 31337 13 y3r 0lD d00d" kind.
Get them involved in security or cryptography, something puzzle related.
Yeah, that'll change those racists outlooks on life.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Very addictive programming game
I was hooked for all of high school and two years of college. It's open source under the Mozilla Public License. It is Windows-only though, until someone decides to port it. There's also a Linux game inspired by RobotBattle called RealTimeBattle.
I'm in highschool, so yes I have a decent opinion.
Robotics
Programming
Hacking
One, two, or all three of these would make many highschoolers happy
Robotics makes them think, work with their hands, program and many other aspects
http://usfirst.com
Programming is fun and can be made interesting to all people. Just give them basic knowledge, let them fly
Hacking - set up wargames on your network, teach them a little, make them learn a little
Trust me, they will feel pride with that
1. I am a FIRST Lego League coach for middle school. Its great stuff and kids love it. Tons of work. I have also assisted with the HS FIRST robotics competition. Also great stuff. In both cases it can be difficult to rope in the less geeky but its possible. Some find the geek inside and thrive. Its cool to watch.
Stuff I think about doing later:
2. Teach them how to program a microcontroller and use it to control motors, leds, etc. (STAMP or OOPIC are pretty easy). Build something fun.
3. Get a group of kids and head to the dump. At our dump there is always a pile of old PC's and monitors, every one I have ever left with has worked fine. Have each kid find an old junker or two to work on. Bring it back to class and help each work through getting it to come back to life, then hand out the fedora CD's (or whatever). Teach them how to set it up as a web server/web development platform/firewall/whatever.
4. Profit!
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- Nebraska Educational Technology Association Student Contests - I'm sure other similar association exist, but this is the one I'm familiar with
- Northwest Missouri State and University of South Dakota both held programming contests for high school students with a good turnout.
- Science Olympiad has some technology-themed events that high school students can enter, including two robotics competition. But from my experience, not many schools participate in those competitions.
And these are just some things that I alone have had experience with. I agree with those who say that you should contact local schools and see what they teach and how many students are intersted in them and base decisions off of that.My high school had a chess team. I would have loved to have a Go club.
well i was lazy and didnt bother to read the replies, but i'm a freshman in HS, i browse the network on my free time during """tech"""apps class, and i discover some machines having C and PERL scripts on them. i'm very interested in 802.1X hacking. but i dont have any technology inclined friends ( no friends ) that could give some input. i would really like to see a teacher showing us kids how to crack those fancy cisco routers they buy. i would love to help. i've even offered my free time to my school "techies". they dont seem to listen. i want to see FREE programming courses. (ive been to college and those classes are EX-PEN-SIVE!!!!!!! ) (along with the CISCO classes too)(bastard capitalists) along with some wardriving classes. and a blackhat convention in my auditorium... if you get us youngins before we're turned entirley into black hatted mofos, you might be able to turn us into grey hats. then let the skiddies 74lk l1k3 |2374|2|)5 ----------------------(talk)(like)(retards) Free Programming courses Wardriving courses CISCO IOS SHELLCODE and busses to HOPE will get the kids on track yo.
... mathematics and sex ?
My school's sports teams were quite mundane.
I would have killed for an ultimate ("frisbee", for the uninitiated) team.
Definitely, programming is interesting if it has immediate results, but most kids I know would get bored if they had to learn a ton of stuff before doing something 'cool' like making some kind of graphic appear on the screen. I think that something that lasted, maybe something that could be applied to an existing school computer and stayed there, would be extremely popular, as it would have a lasting effect on their school environment. Robotics is neat to most, but you'll only get the nerds (maybe that's who you're looking for) if you sponsor something like that. Also, 'hacking,' or mainly the cracking part of it, is extremely popular, however with any level of computer competency one is normally labelled a hacker where I go to school. This gets highly irritating.
Anyway, that's what I think is most interesting to high school kids!
FIRST was founded by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. Its aim is to get high school kids interested and motivated about science and technology. It's a great premise. Perhaps FIRST can help you, and vice versa. By hooking up with such a sophisticated organization, you gain an incredible support mechanism, and they gain another group of evangelists.
Give them a look-see. I woujld have given anything to be on a challenge team in high school! I bet it'll be a winner, all the way around.
I know that personally, I would be interested in working with the Wiki interface (http://www.wikipedia.org/, etc.) Not just learning how to interact with it or Wikicode, but how to create sites using it.
feeding the world its brain food
You are absolutely right. Back when I was in high school (89-93), the geeks in the Computer Club made a fortune with a matchmaking program they wrote. For a small amount of money ($3-5 IIRC), students would fill out a survey regarding what characteristics they were looking for in a date (bookish vs non-intellectual, blonde hair vs brunette, conservative vs. liberal, etc.). They also filled out a section that described themselves. The club members then entered the forms into a database and wrote an application to find three matches for each person. A few days later, every participating student received a printout with three potential matches.
It was hugely popular and made hundreds of dollars for the club's coffers.
I think something that would interest many people my age (I'm a sophomore) that deals with technology (somehow) would be the hands-on type things. It depends who you ask, but I have a junior frend who is really into rocketry and space stuff. There are others who like that as well. Some people are really into robotics-- the sheer notion of programming something that does things automatically. My classmate's little brother in middle school was in a robotics competition, and I heard that he and a some of his friends are obsessed about robots now (he won).
Sorry for posting as an "Anonymous Coward," but I don't see the need to register on Slashdot, as I just check it for the interesting news/discussion. Hope I helped out a little bit, and good luck to you.
I forgot to add that I am a high school freshman. http://www.asdk12.org/schools/Steller/pagesSteller
feeding the world its brain food
http://www.asdk12.org/schools/Steller/pages
If there are any problems in your company, that could be solved by paying a programmer, but you can't spend money on that, then write a list of things, that should be programmed, and allow high school student to write them for you in the form of competition. Students should have several months of time to finish their projects. Best students should be generously awarded. It would be great experience for a high school student to work on a real world project.
(Sorry for my English)
What I think would be good is to make use of one of the simulation environments around like eToys or Stagecast. Something where you focus on making stuff - not typing endless boilerplate.
Programming as a skill for its own sake isn't worth teaching in highschool. Its not even a marketable skill in the US anymore.
My recommendation is to setup an activity that relates to OTHER interests more obviously. The words 'robot' and 'program' only attract serious, self-described nerds.
You need to change your activity to also attract these two groups:
--> People who like technology but are afraid to admit it socially.
--> People who don't know about technology but might benefit from learning about it.
Neither robots nor programming will attract the second set of teens. Consider doing something about the tech aspects of MP3 sharing, iPods, video game consoles, or online phenomena like Friendster and AIM. Just stay away from things that the school administration hates or that promote too much recreational abuse of technology. Hope that helps.
First of all, thank you. I wish I would have had some of these opportunities when I was in high school. Now, being a junior in college, I hope to provide opportunities such as these. You already have a number of good ideas, namely: A competition (robotics, programming, etc.) A course (networking, graphics, etc.) Both of these will give you an opportunity to pick out the best and the brightest (don't just look at first place). However, I would expect that you are either going to have to filter down the applicants, or expect students who aren't serious. In high school, there is considerable variation. Expect some students to impress you, and some to annoy you. I would highly recommend that you talk to the high-school teachers in the classes you are interested in (Multimedia, Programming courses, etc.) Understand that these instructors are already overloaded with any number of things, but they know the best students in their class and can get you in touch with them to find out what they want really want.
I just recently graduated from the high school which supplied some of the core members of US FIRST Team #365, the Miracle Workerz. Believe you me, that WILL get kids involved. It's an opportunity like no other for education and fun, and believe me, those guys got GIRLS. It was a privilege for me to go to prom with one of them. It was also a privilege for our head cheerleader. Nothing gets a girl's attention like offering her a ride on your robot.
No, literally. Your robot.
Well Im a few years out of high school, but while I was there I did FIRST all four years, FIRST is the largest national robotics competition for high school students, and was some of the most fun I have had in my entire life. It does require a large commitment of time and resources, so it might not be for you. I went to several programming competitions run by varous state colleges and the like, and generally found them pretty boring.
The most important thing is building a relationship with teachers that are interested in whatever it is you decide to do. You might want to check around to find out if there is a school where what you have to offer will be most appreciated. For example, I went to a Magnet program for "Emerging COmputer Technology" that drew students actually interested in the feild (and willing to make sacrifices of convenience) from across the county. Lots of school systems have similiar programs, and such concentrations of interested students will make your life easier. Some schools now offer Cisco Network Academy courses and such, they might be a good place to start, invite them to tour your workplace and see a full scale deployment in action (this only works if you have a network worth showing off, but you get the idea). This will get you started towards building a relationship with the school.
If you decide to do some sort of competition, it will serve you well to make sure the students are self-selecting and want to be there for reasons beyond getting out of school for the day. Students will take any excuse for a feild trip, and once they arrive and are bored to tears they will not only learn anything but generally be disruptive. High school students will always, always act up when bored. Also, whatever task or challenge you set before them will take at least 3x longer then if you set a group of adults to do it, and that number goes up the larger the group.
If you are just interested in helping out however you can, almost all schools could benefit from professional IT help, and many programming classes are taught be reassigned math teachers who would probably welcome a guest instructor or such for the day.
Some links to get you started:
http://www.usfirst.org/
A very large and well respected robotics competition, all levels of contruction from screwed togethor wood bots to CNC precision engineered masterpieces sponsored by Fortune 500 companies. A 6 week intensive build period and my require considerable travel to competitions.
http://www.bestinc.org/
Another robotics competition, lacks the budget and professionalism of FIRST. Robots are generally poorly contructed and must be made entirely of components provided. Much lower entry cost then FIRST.
url:http://www.battlebotsiq.com/
A high-school off shoot of Battlebots, I have not competed in this and don't know much about it.
W00t! Newb alert!
Or lurker rather...
First...a thought:
It has been my experience during my high school career that the level of commitment and interest varies from place to place. The school I intended in the 9th grade, just shy of 3000 people, was a math/tech magnet school, thus we got more funding for projects. It was one of 6 schools in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, TX. Programs like this were organized and carried out well.
Though I never had first hand experience.
My present school, which I have attended since my sophomore year, is a large 4A. Around 1600 people. There is very little chance, if funding somehow magically appeared, that projects as ambitious as a robotics fair would thrive. So remember: audience should effect the decision.
To answer the original Q:
I can only answer as a 16 year old student. I love math/tech/robotics, and the like. I'm the proverbial geek as it were. A chance to participate in a FIRST like program would greatly interest me. But then again, so would programming/hacking competition, although my programming skills are next to nil.
If you want generic interests: Cars, Video Games, Music are pretty big... robotics, as it has already been proven on TV, can appeal to the masses.
But remember: joining a preexisting organization, such as FIRST, let alone making your own, will need immense dedication and patience invested into the students. But give them time, they'll come around.
(Geeze... turned into a rant... almost... sorry...it's late) -_-
Mathematics and Sex :-D
When I was in high school, my CS classes were all about the programming competitions. Some we faired well, others not so well. But what I really wanted was something advanced and wide open.
I class we got the usual data-structures and concepts, but coding anything useful was somewhat out of the question. So I would recomend you look for older, somewhat experienced coders and throw a handful full of real life code at them. Whether it be network programming (which I would have LOVED) or UI design, fundamental stuff like randomization testing, or some coding tools, like benchmarking or optimizers.
I would have killed to learn how to be a real programmer without having a job where I was forced to maintain university DHCP registration software that no-one liked. Or having to write countless perl scripts for the dumb-ass of a sysadmin. (Or splicing Cat5 cable)
At my school the following projects and activities garner the most interest:
1. Open Source. Legal free software, cheap computers to game/chat on: excellent. Teach students to build inexpensive boxes loaded up with stunning applications.
2. Student technicians. High schools have intense computer support needs and often lack adequate funding. Students love to be trained in how to troubleshoot, like the access and status they get as techs, and work for nothing. Recruit a few girls and distribute some keys to the techs and the program will take off.
3. Movie Making. Always fun.
4. Video game creation (with a point and click marvel like GameMaker) http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/
5. Robotics, but only if you have the resources to do some significant metal work (lego robotics much better for middle school).
Need I say More?
do something along the line's of Google's Billboard
post binary, hexadecimal, or other random mathematical/computer stuff around the halls. Something easy enough to solve, but cryptic enough to get attention.
It's an easy way to weed out the curious ones who will most likely be adept to learning tech from the jocks etc. who don't care in the least.
I am forced to point out the obvious.
LEGO is a mass noun, so a heap of it should and can only be referred to as "LEGO bricks" or the like.
Thank you for your sympathy. And our sincere apologies for the offtopic remark.
BEER, d'uh
How about building a locomotive which uses alternative sources of energy
or harnessing alternative sources of energy
remember all great inventions started simple.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this will get snarked in some manner, but as far as looking for appropriate activities, why not put forward a survey of students? Stick your heads into a few classes and explain what kinds of tech ideas you find cool (and, perhaps, relatively doable on whatever scale you want to describe), and see what kind of response you get. Let them give you some idea of what they want.
Now, to be sure, a contingent of students will blow off the whole thing. That happens. Not all of them will, though. You may end up with some "closet geeks" -- folks who think the graphics in their video games are pretty cool, but don't want to say too much about them, for fear of the "geek" stereotype -- in addition to the alpha geeks.
Come to think of it, that may be the absolute best thing you could do. Get people who are on the fence about science and tech to look at an aspect of either or each that's interesting to them, and to get them to use the language where they wouldn't do so before. Get the alpha geeks talking to the people on the fence. Give them something in common.
What would fit that bill might be something of a quandary in and of itself, so you may want to include in your survey some things in addition to general interests, such as, "What kinds of tech stuff have you done? Have you replaced parts in a computer? Built a robot? Coded programs?" That may seem overly focused, but having an activity that alpha geeks may regard as "been-there-done-that" and therefore an opportunity to demonstrate supremacy could put a hole in the bucket. That's not what you want for any activity, be it tech nor not. It makes gym class miserable for students who don't play sports, and it will ruin the inspiration aspect of what you want to do. Tread ye therefore with caution.
Depending on how deeply involved you want your overall program to be (and this is me just thinking as I post, so I apologize for the stream-of-consciousness aspect), you could do something like a program for on-the-fence people and something for the alpha geeks. Teach the on-the-fence people all kinds of cool things that got you to take on tech (I can't think of another way to put it), and challenge the alpha geeks. Encourage them to set off on their own -- have an art student? Teach them GIMP and let them develop their artwork through that, independently of what you may show them for the purposes of orienting them to GIMP.
Add another element to the overall program in that you give each contingent the opportunity to learn how to present what they've done to the others -- not necessarily just to say, "Hey, look what I did," but also to share with each other the programming, machinery, and creativity that you shared with them to get them to achieve their feats of developing technical prowess, on both sides. Get it to the point where it's self-propagating.
Now, how you could deal with each group in the beginning while trying to maintain the interest of the alpha geeks and to spark the involvement of the students on-the-fence, all the while bringing together all of them to get them talking and respecting each other would be a challenge to the whole thing. I can't think of necessarily the best way to go about it as I'm sitting here writing this, outside of having a few from each group sit in with the other, maybe by having signups for everyone for each project (probably need that anyway, considering parts, equipment, etc.), but I don't really have any specifics to offer you.
I would, however, emphasize that getting the students talking should be a paramount goal, because very often, they normally don't... or perhaps they don't do so in a way that advances either point of view constructively. When I was in high school (grad. 1999), geeks were a horrific minority, because the tech situation was, despite the superintendent's bragging to the contrary, somewhat pitiful. Seven students out of the whole senior class (itself small, to be fair) took programming, and that was taught by
"What's the use in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes?" --Fourth Doctor, "Robot"
Sounds interesting, but by publicly stating you're in a such class, you will eliminate the slightest chance of getting a girlfriend - except if's she's in that particular class.
I'm a high school senior in California. Here most of the students are into PDA's and their so-called "web developing" with their xanga online journals. I'm not sure about science though, we're a specialized arts high school so science is a bit off for us.
http://www.palmzone.net
I hate having to reply to an earlier, unrelated post to get noticed, but it seems like I'll have to here...
By far the best way to get students involved is to offer them some time in your shoes. As a freshman at a private school, the instructional technology coordinator somehow noticed that I was both interested in and somewhat competent with computers, and offered me a volunteer summer internship assisting the Computer Services department with various tasks. That first summer, I did a lot of manual labor and not so much technical stuff, but I started learning the ropes, and was hired as an hourly staffmember (part-time during the year, full-time during the summer).
My previous computer experience had really only involved administering a very basic home network. At school, I learned about NT domains, network hardware and infrastructure, deployment of software, servers, group policy, zones and subnets, and numerous minor details specific to my school's network. I also honed my hardware and software troubleshooting and optimization skills. But most importantly, I learned about dealing with ornery clients -- most often older faculty -- and minor network sabotage by students.
By the time I left for college this fall, after my fourth summer of work, I was far more competent in dealing with computers than I could ever have hoped to be had I not had the opportunity to work in CS.
It might be a little risky to just kind of open up tech internships to every student at your school/district -- you'd have too many people applying and among those applicants would be too many incompetent ones. So my suggestion would be to have a screening program that would involve fixing various problems; an interview process; and a provision that (like me) the student would have to work a period of time as a volunteer. You'd end up with a program that would only allow a select number of students to participate, but that would both help you and would help those students skilled enough to get the job.
I'm a student teacher just finishing a 13 week practicum in a rural high school in Southern Ontario. The computer labs are crippled on a regular basis because students steal the mouse balls. The budget is way too tight to keep fixing the machines, so it's normal for a lab to have less than half the machines running. Can someone come up with a $5 mouse with no balls?
Well I'm a highschool student. I'm interested in all kinds of technology, but many other students are not as thrilled as I am about some stuff. Computers in general and robotics fascinate me.
:P j/k
I would prefer something revolving around physics and/or chemistry however...
You old hags really don't remember a thing about highschool?
I've had the same results in my town. Most BOEs are interested in one thing only - increasing their budgets (and their compensation packages) at an exponential rate. Sure they talk about the importance of educating our children, but the fact is that I got a much better education in the 60s-70s than my children are getting today in the same state. For example, most elementary and high school students cannot do basic math without a calculator. What we need is a budget-friendly, USA-wide, minimum curriculum that does a very good job of covering the fundamentals (reading, writing, math, personal finance, science, history, health/phys-ed, music/art) that is not influenced by corporations (book publishers, calculator and computer/software manufacturers, etc.) or other special interest groups (BOEs, etc.). Education is important, but in a global economy where corporations prefer to hire cheaper foreign labor, education past high school, although important for our society, will probably not be a good return on investment for many Americans.
Then get them certified.
I used to teach Junior Achievement and found all ears perked up when talking about making MONEY!
Start off looking at job sites for various tech jobs and show them the salary they could make right out of high school with a certification. Better than Micky D's I bet . Then help them earn the certification. Considering the recent story about an upcoming shortage of Linux specialists I think that would be a great place to start.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Try contacting your local schools and ask them what they're looking for.
Definitely. I had a computer-tech teacher in highschool who had many contacts in the local industry (Seattle). When he saw that I was interested in websites and programming, he set me up with an internship with a local dot-com. This internship turned into a full-time job during summers, and I made great friends in the industry, so I could always get a job when I was back from college. I stopped working in the IT field to focus on physics, but the internship at a young age was great because it taught me how to work hard in a mature environment and showed me what life would be like in the IT sector.
Science fairs are cool, but I think more companies should look to hire joungsters as part-time interns. It was a great experience for me, and I knew many other kids who it would have worked for too.
My school is involved in a program called IT Leadership Academy http://www.itacademy.org/ It takes students from different parts of the state and puts them together to work on the project for that year. The site above has a lot about what we do. IBM works with us and allows us to have monthly meetings in there buildings. They often have a hang full of their top people there to help us along. Its a great program and should help you with yours.
If you lookaround the town where I live you will see youths driving cheap performance cars with many Blue LEDS all over the place, and speakers.
Center your classes around blue leds and speakers and you're set.
When I was 14-18 I was writing C/Pascal code. I think I was the only student in my school who had a slight interest in programming.
Why UNIX?
Though I love bleeding-edge technology, the things that have intrigued me over the years is not so much the new cool stuff that's coming out daily, but those "foundational" products upon which the new, cool stuff was built. For example...
Talk about Internet Radio and then show them a short-wave radio and explain the differences and uses of both.
Talk about convergent PDA/phones and then show an Apple "Newton" or or a "bag phone" and explain how these old devices helped propel the technology we enjoy in today's new devices.
Talk about the Internet and its high-speed capabilities like VoIP, streaming video, virtual worlds, etc. and them show them how a 300 baud modem connection was the life-blood of BBS users.
Talk about the latest in video recording and editing with a current video camera, and then show them some 8mm film reels without sound.
My point is to provide them with some historical foundation contrasted with new technology. It's one thing to provide them with the latest and greatest technology, but getting them to also understand and appreciate the devices that sparked the innovation will challenge them and hopefully interest them.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Have them design and build a computer-controlled trebuchet.
Self awareness - try it!
Try asking them. Offer up your resources and let the students come up with a class plan. You all may learn something.
I graduated from highschool back in 2002 after receiving my CCNA, and am currently interning with a local ISP. I know that some of the engineers at my company as well as some of the local cisco representatives would go in and setup a project as if they were a company wanting the students to develop a network for them. They had to develop price sheets and setup the network in the classroom. The part that kept the kids entertained was in the end using the network for a pc and xbox gaming party.
As a tech. teacher, I know...GAMING...teach them about server admin, c++ and how to use blender. The process of game design can encompass writing, physics, communication, math, science, art, and team work skills. Also teach them about PROFESSIONALISM
Blow stuff up people will be interested. George Goble, a senior systems engineer at Purdue University, has successfully reduced the ignition-to-cooking time to a mere three seconds.
b er _95/2.5HowTo.html
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/Ambrosia_Times/Septem
nothing at all..
A while ago, there was a Slashdot post about the game RoboCode. It allows people to program tanks in Java and then battle them against others' creations. Being a high school student myself, I can vouch for the interest and amusement of this game. Much of what I know of programming concepts comes from playing it. Best of all, it's very easy to set up and create a simple "bot." A lot of people have been suggesting a robotics competition - RoboCode is probably a more effective and definitely easier way to go. (Yes, there are also fiery explosions. But no boobs.) See robowiki.net for more information.
How odd. I wasn't trying to change anyone's outlook. Why did you think that 1.) I was trying to do so, and 2.) that criticising me would make me change my world outlook any more than me criticising a racist piece of shit changes their outlook?
For the record, I wasn't trying to change anyone's outlook. I was merely expressing my opinion concerning their world outlook. If you posit that I wasn't trying to change anyone's outlook, your comment is nonsensical. If you posit that I was, then you were doing exactly the same thing, and to exactly the same effect. Either way, you are wrong.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Kids aren't stupider than he thinks - but maybe some of their teachers are. Possibilities:
1) Your CS teacher(s) aren't very good. They may not be very good at CS, OR they may not be very good teachers, but either way, they're not getting their point across.
2) The teachers that are supposed to have taught them prerequisite skills earlier in the chain are quite poor at THEIR jobs.
3) Either set of teachers are using curriculum that sucks. For instance, I think it's very hard to learn programming (or learn "advanced" math, or be able to read a contract) if you grow up with a "whole language" curriculum. All of those things require that certain groups of words DO have a precise meaning - exactly one meaning. And "whole language" teaches precisely that this is not true - that there is NEVER a precise interpretation to language. You cannot successfully program with that mindset.
Very little "technical literacy" is required to learn programming. (Much is very helpful for commercial success, but that goal is a world of difference) If you've already got them sitting in front of the computer and using the keyboard at a halfway reasonable rate, what you're missing is how they deal with language, not exposure to technology.
My HS had a CS teacher who was borderline incompetent at the CS she was teaching (CS AP - in Pascal at that time) but nonetheless most people got decent grades on the AP test, because she _was_ a halfway decent teacher, the kids helped each other, most of the kids were very literate (as in reading, not in tech) and this was only at the beginning of the "whole language" revolution.
On the other hand, my school was very exceptional in the following regard: It expected a lot and GOT a lot, at least from it's honors students. (By honors students, I mean at least 20% of the student body - and I only mean that I can't speak about the rest of the classes, not that they were bad.) This was all about a general _motivation_ which I think came from honestly rewarding the students for being successful. Clearly there were some other things going for this school - like a moderately affluent neighborhood. But I think that the singular significant difference was just and only that it successfully made a lot of students WANT to do well, and TRY to do well - and kept this up over a lot of the career of those students.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
When I was 8 or 9 years old, I came home to find my father typing away on our computer (a device I thought was for playing games). I said "what's that?". He said "I think I can use this to make games." - 'this' being a version of Basic. I was thrilled to learn normal people could make games - whatever that stuff was, I was going to learn it. My first all-machine-code game was done at 13 (basic was too slow). It's easier today if you select the right tools (I'd agree with the pygame suggestion). Get Blender and see if any of them can make models. Get GIMP for your artists. It's not all about writing code these days. Just say the magic words "make games".
budget-friendly? You're kidding me, right? This IS the federal govt. we're talking about?
Anyhow, It always amazes me that there is such a knee-jerk reaction to throw money at education. The best class I ever had in high school was my physics class. It always amazed me how much I learned from building model bridges, catapault(sp?), etc. from toothpicks. We used old polaroid style camera batteries in our electronics labs, used car parts, etc. We compared the accuracy of a stock calorimiter vs. a home made one. I even remember a speak and spell's keyboard and display being used for something.
Part of the fun was just seeing how we could scrap together common items. Would junk yard wars be fun if they weren't using junk? Anyhow, lack of education is a societal problem, not a funding problem.
I was watching CSI the other night and caught a number of simple scientific inaccuracies that really bothered me. Such as the lead scientist guy saying "terminal velocity is 9.8 meters per second squared" and having the misconception that you are safe in a car during a thunderstorm because it sits on rubber tires go uncorrected. I've seen what happens when lightning hits a vehicle "protected" by its rubber tires, every thing was fine EXCEPT the rubber tires. Do you actually think that after going through a mile of free air that a half inch of rubber is going to stop a lightning strike?
.45 calibre round. A car that has been in a crash should not cause one to grab the occupants quickly because "O my God! It's gonna blow!" but have them call 911 so the crash victims can be safely extracted by those trained to do so.
Every year the local university has a festival where each department gets to show its stuff to the community and the students' families. The physics department puts on a wonderful show of applied physics which is always packed as they keep things light hearted and very educational. The biology department had experiments with banana DNA. The chemistry department showed how many calories were in a gummie bear by burning it. Many of the departments and clubs (such as solar car and robot projects) have very good displays and would likely give good ideas on reaching the general populace and especially high school students (which are targeted as potential students for the university).
May I suggest doing a regular how things work presentation. Perhaps bring in clips from popular TV shows and show how they got it wrong. Like the CSI episode I mentioned or why the antagonist that cut the air hoses on the racing tractor-trailer will not have it go speeding out of control but will in fact bring it to a sudden, spectactular, and usually quite safe stop.
Such misconceptions in television and movies not only insult the intelligence of those watching but perpetuate myths that may cost people lives. That sheet metal lawn tractor shed will not stop a
What's the point of my rant? I'm not sure. Maybe it's that Mythbusters is must see TV.
Money. Seriously whatever you plan on doing, offer five bucks to each student who shows up. Or maybe a free MP3 player at the end of the year if they went to all the sessions. I remember we had a smoke-enders program at my school to get kids to stop smoking, and the only reason it was so successful is that they offered a free CD player at the end (assuming you stopped smoking).
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I wouldn't pick C as a learning language. I think rapid development (so you get good feedback) consistent results, and clear consistent syntax are key to a good learning language.
While I've heard good things about ruby, perl, python and php on those counts, for my money nothing beats Macromedia's Cold Fusion as a "my very first programming language" And the development edition is free, which works exactly like the commercial version except only one external IP can connect to it. This may be enough of a consideration to choose something else - but the ONLY reason I can think of to choose C as a starting language is because somebody ELSE choose C - your principal is making you do it, because the AP test is in it...
I'll also happily admit that Cold Fusion is barely a programming language - I'd make a scale with CF/php, perl, C/Java - where the left gives you very immediate feedback, and the right requires you to define lots of structures to get to "Hello World". In CF, you just put "Hello World" on the page, and it appears in your browser.
But I philosophically _don't_ think an "intro to programming" class SHOULD to be drilling the low level details data structures into kids - the kids who want to learn that are a MUCH smaller group than the ones who might be inclined to use it as a tool. If you have enough of them, have another CSAP class. If you don't, let them find it in college, or on the net.
What it should be doing is opening up for them the basic way in which you go about making the computer be a tool for what you want. Before the web was prevalent, I think that would've been a shell scripting class, but now I think it should be a scripted HTML class - like CF or PHP.
ALSO I certainly did _not_ mean to imply that anyone who wasn't taught whole language can automatically program without instruction - especially C.
A good class should have outcome measures that provide rapid feedback of success or failure in a skill, an interaction of students working together who have the prerequisite skills, a good teacher who is good at the material, a good reference (book/web), and an environment that facilitates learning (few interruptions, machines that work... etc), supportive parents, access to teachers/tutors outside of class, students who are motivated to do well...
Very few places have all of that. The more you have, the easier it is. I was not implying that it's especially easy, only that I strongly doubt that the students are the _limiting_ factor.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I was involved in a robot competition (not fighting robots, they had to pick up golf balls or something) and we couldn't find motor-control relays that were rated for the amount of current we were pumping to the motors.
Result: while the robot was upside down on my friend's bed for testing, it caught fire.
Lesson: don't cheap out on parts.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
I posted in a different subthread with some similar points, but I wanted to reply to you to.
I think you are completely right about what the motivation is - but I want to expand on two comments.
Cold Fusion is rather awesome server side stuff from the POV of learning - it has an excellent clear markup syntax. And while the full edition isn't free, the "developer" edition is limited to connections from one external IP, but otherwise identical.
From something a parent post said, I want to point out the Flash design work has been around a long time, but real OOP programming in Actionscript hasn't - but it's around now, starting in 2004. While I choose CF for "my first language" experiences, Flash 2004 actually fufills all the promises Java applets could never keep after Microsoft got involved.
I don't work for Macromedia, but I do most of my work developing on their platforms.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I'm completing a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ( U. of Toronto) and work as a researcher with the Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology-a non-profit institute within the university. What you are talking about is rather in our area, so if you'd like to contact me, I'd be glad to help out. (dphilip@oise.utoronto.ca)
Basically, there are two approaches that would be useful. One is to simply ask the students. However students may not know the full spectrum of possibilities, so that approach might not produce the desired results.
A second (better) approach is to identify a set of real-world science problems, present those to the students, and find out which ones might interest them. Then try to provide the resources to assist them in understanding the problem(s) and to work with their ideas towards possible solutions. But remember: no make-believe problems. These have to be real problems of some significance.
flour.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Here, let me split it up visually for you.
One token boy and girl
One token (boy and girl)
One token boy and one token girl.
Merry Christmas.
We have two programs, one with a local library which centers around the Lego Mindstorm robotics kits as a vehicle to teach engineering, programming, and modeling. This has been on-going for about two years, and has been very successful.
The second is with an underprivileged middle school (a charter school.) The school has extra-curricular clubs, and after we hosted an Engineering Day at our facility they expressed an interest in a science/engineering club. Here we begin with simple ideas of building towers or bridges with different materials (toothpicks and marshmallows vs. linguini and gumdrops vs. index cards and paper clips vs. Lego blocks, for example.) We'll move on to Lego Mindstorms in the coming weeks. Another possible idea we're considering is exploring flight with paper airplanes. At the library we once did a program with model rockets. This charter school program is much younger and quite different from the library program.
Both of these programs have been recognized by our company's charitable foundation, and have been awarded with donations. And the kids really do just eat it up. (Not to mention the marshmallows and gumdrops.) Thusfar we have mostly targeted students from ages 7 through 13.
Simple suggestions: Local libraries can be a great community resource, and should be put to use if they are willing collaborators. This plays into the my second suggestion: Don't pattern it after school work. Make it fun! Tap into your most subversive notions to make the kids see that this is not just geek stuff. Check out Chris Rogers' site at Tufts.
And finally, stale marshmallows are the best. They are more structurally rigid and less likely to be eaten.
Oh, certainly, but it is still a better waste than what they'd be doing if they were away from a computer altogether.
I've been involved in FIRST since the fall of 1998, and am active on the ChiefDelphi Forums for years. I've been to competitions all over the country. These are my qualifications to speak on this subject.
I agree with you that most FIRST teams are used as marketing devices, but they are used as marketing devices for the enginnering profession. I know many people that have gone on to work for the company that sponsered their team, and know off countless others. NASA is now the largest sponser of teams, with partial funding for over 200 teams. For many of those teams, the NASA funding allows them to afford to compete but they have no NASA enginners or employees involved at all.
The purpouse of FIRST is not to teach kids engineering. It is to Inspire and get kids excited about engineering so as to goto college to learn engineering. It is to provide an alternative role model and idol to Ron Artest.
Here is a little bit from Dean Kamen, the founder of FIRST. In 2000, a VIP inquired him about "students not building the robots, like the Delphi teams". Dean replied, "But, if I walked into the pits of any of those Delphi teams, and asked any of the students about the robot, they could explain every inch of it. Learning is important, not whether they built it or not".
What a thoughtful, open-minded reply. Clearly, you're not the narrow-minded one.
Well... I'm a homeschooler / cc student, but am in your target age bracket. Most of my friends are heavy-duty nerds, so I'm nto sure how much I can help you with appealing to the general population of HS-ers, but here's my $0.02: Games are good. The fascination with making things move across the screen is not be undestimated. When a guy showed up at the gamestore for a D&D session with a scientific calculator and a tiny moving caracter program on it, any and all of the uninitiated were swift to come over and oooh and aaah. HTML is very cool, too. Although it's fairly outdated by web design apps, people like making web pages. HTML was my first introduction to any kind of computer language, if you would call it that. Also, anyone with a livejournal can benifit from knowing even a few tags... even simple things like italic brackets. Robots will only draw the serious techies. It's such a stereotypal nerd-fair event. In closing, I'd suggest a programming event. Try very, very hard to keep the focus away from the "geek factor" of the event. The more you have, the less people will come.
Magnesium, its bright enought to keep thier attention and its cool.
Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it? -- A. Hope
The nurse in, what was the name of the movie? I forget, asked Demi Moore why she joined the, what was it, marines, delta force? and Demi says Why do most people join the marines? and the nurse says, to blow up stuff. She says yeah, that's right, to blow up stuff.
So, blow up stuff, launch pumpkins on trebuchets, that sort of thing, destruction is fascinating at that age.
http://www.rctoys.com/
I was in it for 4 years. It was very beneficial in teamwork, coding, development, engineering, and creative thinking. MOD PARENT UP!!!
nothing.can.stop.me.now
I am the leader of a FIRST Robotics team. FIRST = For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology http://www.usfirst.org/ The students that participate in this program are aquiring skills that they would not normally have a chance to aquire in a traditional HS classroom or club. www.westisliprobotics.com
Yes. Clearly calling someone a racist, while asserting that they still have the right to be such, makes me intolerant. I *am* narrow-minded. I refuse to even consider the possibility that someone should be hated or loved simply because of the color of their skin. You got me. Guilty as charged. Now, shut the fuck up, you racist piece of shit.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I'm sorry, did you have to go look it up? I'll try to remember to keep my responses to one syllable, so that you don't need to inconvenience yourself further. Oops, now you're going to have to hit the dictionary again. Sorry.
http://xkcd.com/386/
English != math. You should have written it, "One token boy and one token girl" to begin with. Either that or "Two token black students, one boy and one girl." "One token boy and girl" != "one token boy and one token girl." Your proof has failed. Token is a singular noun. One item = one token. You could have made it 'a few token students' but you did not. That's like saying "I have one foreign car, a porsche and a lamborghini." It don't make no friggin' sense.
Have a good holiday, Christmas and New Year's.
Im in high school. Me personally, I like programming (mainly with C) and fidilling around with *nix the most. Im also intersted in Clustering and other forms of parallel processing. Most technically oreinted kids are intersted in games, pr0n, and thats about it.
I just find it extremely amusing when someone comes at someone else with unusually formal language on a website like Slashdot. This isn't a college thesis. The attempt is clearly based on ostentatious self build-up. Nobody is impressed. Sorry, but your penis will not grow based on the number of syllables you use. If you feel the need to further marginalize yourself by insulting those who point out your silliness, it will be even less likely you'll ever get to touch that magical boob. Good luck.
Better late post then never... here's a 2-hour onsite thing you can do in their gymnasium, to get them motivated about IT.
Bring in a bunch of laptops, PCs, Macs, etc. Bring also a network game, preferably a racing game of some sort (FPS might not go over well with the school admins). Write 1-page of instructions on how they can set up a LAN.
Randomly assign 2 people at each machine, they are not allowed to touch or visit another machine (any help to others is purely verbal). They have to stay by their own machine _or_ can go to the center 'parts pool' as needed. [This prevents the few ubergeeks from doing it all.]
Array a few hubs around the room.
Unplug everything, make a pile of the keyboards, mice, network cables, etc. Tell them they can only play when the entire network is done. Step back and see how they do.
Once they get the LAN up, let them play for the rest of the time!
To run with the next class, unplug and you're reset!
It'll teach networking, basic computer hookup and anti-technophobia, how to work in pairs, how to do things themself, how to follow instructions, and how to verbally negotiate things like LAN ids.
A.
Your claim to information regarding my sexual activity is amusing. Your pop psychology is even more amusing. I doubt that any mathemetician would consider the word 'posit' to be 'unusually formal'. I suppose I could have used the word 'assert', but then if that word is too big for you, you'd be writing the same complaint. It's funny; if I use informal language, I get lambasted for crudity. If I use my full vocabulary, I get accused of attempting to artificially inflate my penis. I hope you don't seriously think that I care what people on this site think. I decided long ago to post how and when I felt like posting. If you're threatened by my use of big words, that's your problem. As for 'ostentatious self-build-up', what exactly do you think you're doing when you bust on me for using big words? What's truly ironic is that you most likely believe that I am somehow self-aggrandizing (even though no one here knows who I am, or cares) and yet you feel the need to tear me down to build yourself up.
Boobs aren't magical. Sure, they're nice, but the importance you place on touching them tells me all I need to know about you. As for insulting others, you insulted me, dipshit. If insulting others is so wrong, why do you engage in it yourself? My goodness, you're just chock full of hypocrisy, aren't you? As for 'marginalizing' myself, you're correct that a person with both a large vocabulary and a total lack of caring what others think about them *is* a rarity here. Where you're wrong is in assuming that I give a shit if I'm 'marginalized'. Feel free to think whatever you like about me, assuming you ever learn to think.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Please, please, PLEASE don't look over FIRST. From first hand experience, I KNOW that FIRST is VERY valuable if you're looking to get students interested in science and technology. I myself wasn't extremely interested in the engineering field before I participated. I was leaning heavily towards pre-Pharm, but now I'm looking at an engineering (biomedical engineering, to be exact) major. The FIRST program doesn't only teach you, it inspires you. It gets you excited! I, for one, know that I probably won't be getting any sleep the first week of January because I'd be so excited about going to the local "remote" kickoff that Friday. It's also amazing what kind of a crowd FIRST draws in, in terms of participants and fans. The "nerds" aren't the only ones participating in FIRST - many, very different people do. Fans aren't just nerds, either. FIRST Robotics Competitions are highly active, so it's just as fun to watch as it is to compete. In short, if you're looking for a way to get high school students excited about science and technology.. FIRST is the way to go. Of course, any other robotics program would probably be just as good.. but with FIRST, I'm speaking from experience :)
(PS: I'm a high school student, so I know what I'm talking about ;)
I'm NOT saying you should teach VB - because VB has a poor structure WITHOUT the advantages of scripting languages.
I'm saying you should teach a scripting language first - one with sensible syntax, and preferably one that just doesn't do (at all) the things that are low level (as opposed to doing them wrong) because the speed and rapidity of feedback for scripting languages is much higher.
Then you should teach a proper OOP language - of which I don't think C++ is the ideal choice, either.
Perhaps by 8 you already were so interested that it was irrelevant - for you - which you learned first. But most people don't get past "Hello World" even people who would be talented programmers, because they never get rewarded for doing it - so for _most people_ it's better to teach them something that will actually produce some output before they don't care.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I think making a game or something would be cool and im in HS.
"Desire is the key that opens the champions door."
I hope you don't seriously think that I care what people on this site think.
The sheer size of your post alone makes this statement +5, Funny.
There's one flaw with your logic.. the fact that most US public school systems do not welcome high technology with open arms, they often try to push high technology away if it's a student program.. if it's something the superintendent cant understand.. the students better not understand it, because that's scary stuff to them.
Case in point with my school, we're not allowed to run linux on the network because microsoft has sat down with them saying how bad and scary linux is and how it's a hacker tool, etc.
That and the admin is anal, and if a real computer lab was started where you could screw around with operating system stuff, they'd try to get it shut down.. Hell, cisco networking at my school has been under fire from the network admin.. constantly, same with the computer repair class, he wants both of those ejected from the curriculum because they threaten his precious babies (the computers he wants no one, including teachers to even look at)
That situation is also in many schools in the US.
If someone high up cant understand computers or robots, they dont want to hear of it.