Slashdot Mirror
How Do I Talk To 4th Graders About IT?
Tsunayoshi writes "My son volunteered me to give a presentation on what I do for a living for career day at his elementary school. I need to come up with a roughly 20-minute presentation to be given to 4-5 different classrooms. I am a systems administrator, primarily Unix/Linux and enterprise NAS/SAN storage, working for an aerospace company. I was thinking something along the lines of explaining how some everyday things they experience (websites, telephone systems, etc.) all depend on servers, and those servers are maintained by systems administrators. I was also going to talk about what I do specifically, which is maintain the computer systems that allow the really smart rocket scientists to get things into space. Am I on the right track? Can anyone suggest some good (and cheap/easy to make) visual aids?"
Get a dead hard disk drive, take the cover off so the platters and read/write head are visible. Pass it around the class while you talk. Computers and IT will become immediately more real to them once they can touch it and see that a computer isn't just a fancy TV with keyboard and mouse.
If you want to add an analogy they can relate to, also bring a long a stack of encylopedias or an OED and do the "the words in X many of these books will fit on that disk" comparison.
I always get jealous of IT folks when I see that they get to work with racks of equipment. It seems to me like it is building with Lego blocks for a living.
In addition to software installation and security, our IT folks plan out the hardware with the power and cooling requirements. I would have been fascinated by this stuff as a kid (and I still am).
You're an aerospace sysadmin. So you're a roadie for rocket scientists.
Rocket Science = EXCITING!
So talk about how what you do holds up the exciting stuff.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Explain how online video games work from a networking and storage point of view.
You don't do video games? Doesn't matter.
You could very easily combine IT and aerospace.. bring in a laptop with a paper-airplane making program. Help the kids design and fold some paper airplanes.
You could also focus on the IT side; take a computer apart ahead of time, bring it in in pieces, and put it together and make it work. Nothing too complex, just need to put in a stick of memory, hard drive, video card, perhaps a wireless if it's available at the school.
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
Don't underestimate kids. They may be immature and annoying but they aren't stupid (naive and ignorant maybe but not stupid). Give them the tools and they will learn. I had my first computers (commodore 64 and a vic 20) at around 6 years old. I learned dos by 10 and had fixed dozens of electronic, computer, and mechanical devices around the house with no help from anyone (not even books). I'd be willing to bet that this anecdotal evidence is a mere drop in the pond compared to others on slashdot. I consider myself intelligent but I've seen tons of kids that blow me out of the water. The trick is just to find the right spark to get their curiosity going. (and each kid differs a lot in that realm)
There's a lot of angles you could approach your job from but if I can give you any advice, keep it entertaining.
I'd suggest a brief talk on satellites and then show them Google Earth. I give a presentation for my daughters 1st grade class on the solar system and ended on Google Earth. One flight to the Grand Canyon overlook and they were all clamouring to see various things (mainly local stuff like the school, where the teacher live, where they lived etc.) but I'm sure 4th graders would be far more imaginative.
When I was but a mite, the first science teacher I had lined us up holding hands, and then placed an electrode in the first and last child's palm.
Then he cranked a generator and laughed maniacally while we screamed and thrashed around, unable to let go.
A true visionary.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
(Bastard, you knew that half the people here wouldn't be able to help themselves.)
Clearly you don't fully understand this crowd. 85% of the people are geeky enough to want to figure it out (and likely in multiple font sizes so that they can pick an answer that relates to pi or e or the Planck constant or some obscure prime or, well, you get the idea). However, 65% of all Slashdot readers are rather lazy (as evidenced by their lack of reading any posted article, and in many cases, even bothering to read the summary). So, using those numbers, we can extrapolate that clearly 55% of the people would attempt to find the answer. In your haste to be the first (which places you in the 10% Frosty Piss crowd), you merely estimated and rounded and didn't show your work.
Font selection would best work as fixed-width. Per this article, http://www.lowing.org/fonts/ I'll agree to Courier 12 pitch for it's simplistic measurements. Printed, this font is 12 characters per inch.
12 char per inch
1 petabyte = 1.12589991 × 10^15 bytes
circumference of Earth @ equator: 24,901.55 miles
((1.12589991 x (10^15))char / (12char/in * 12in/ft * 5 280ft/mi)) / 24 901.55mi = 59,467.1314 times around the Earth at the equator
(All math performed using Google calculator, because Google knows everything.)
Layne
(1) When you talk about *what* a systems administrator does, it doesn't sound that hard: installing and configuring software, patching, installing and configuring hardware, researching and comparing potential upgrade options, troubleshooting problems, etc.
What 4th graders probably don't think about is that none of these things by themselves may seem particularly hard at the scale of an individual computer, but when you multiply each of these activities by a gazillion servers, routers, clients, etc., then it has the potential to become a real nightmare. So you have to use tricks & technologies in a company's computing environment that you'd never bother with at home.
E.g., "Ever seen your mom or dad install a Windows update? Remember how nuts that made them? Now imagine doing that across 20,000 desktops in 10 cities, and being given only 3 days to get them all done!"
(2) Probably a lot of your time is spent being a detective, trying to puzzle out why something that oughta be working ain't. Telling stories about some of your successful detective adventures might be entertaining.
All people (including kids) like to be told stories, so the more you can populate your presentation with interesting anecdotes, the better.
And, as one person already wrote, bringing some old or broken hard drive, circuit boards, etc. to pass around the classroom probably couldn't hurt either.
Also, many 4th graders I know think that the *monitor* is the computer. They point at it and say, "That's the computer, isn't it? Why are you fiddling with that other box?" I know that sounds crazy, but that's the way many 9 year olds think. So don't assume any understanding of computers just because they know how to play Spore.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."