Software Engineering Demo for a K-5 Career Fair?

gmjohnston asks: "A local elementary school is having a Career Fair in a couple of weeks and I volunteered. The idea is for parents with various jobs and careers to show and tell the kids a little bit about what their's is, why they think it's interesting and rewarding, etc. It's to try to give kids a little early exposure to some of the diverse kinds of things one can do with one's life. I'm a software engineer, so I'd like to show something that has to do with programming or Computer Science, but which would be interesting to an elementary school student." What would be the best way to illustrate what a software engineer does to a group of primary school kids? "I'm trying to come up with something like what got me hooked way back when, which was when my Organic Chemistry professor in college showed me a listing of a Basic program (Basic Plus on a PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E if you must know) and I realized that, computers relied on a bunch of instructions that tell the machine what to do, and that if I could change the instructions then I could make the machine do what *I* want it to do! I'll have my laptop with me and I'll be at a table that the kids will be able to gather around and see the screen (or potentially do something themselves on the laptop, depending on what I come up with). Of course, showing them the kind of code I really work on (software development tools) would likely instantly bore them to death. So, the question is: What should I show? If other Slashdot readers have done this kind of thing, what did you do and how did it work out?"

Comments

Early Programming Memories

[bigtallmofo]

I can remember 22 years ago when I was 10 years old watching my math teacher at the time programming in BASIC on the one Commodore Vic-20 that we had in the classroom. For whatever reason, I was fascinated with the mystery of how this guy knew the right things to type in to make the computer do what he wanted.

I think the things that fascinated me most at the time were seeing how programming languages could be used to create games. I spent many hours on my Commodore 64 typing in BASIC and ML source code from magazines like Compute!'s Gazette.

Fight Invisibility

[Coppit]

Software is pretty invisible. The trick is to get across the idea of molding a program, without boring them with for loops and batch-oriented demos.

Check out toontalk for a graphical programming environment that looks like legoland.

Also see how the objects-first people are teaching programming nowadays. In the first week of class they have people drawing faces using OO programming, without loops or branches. For example, they have the students create a drawing program using event callbacks.