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.
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
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
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