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?"

Comments

Relate Your Job to the Janitor's

[grondak]

Tell them you sweep the floors and clean up the mess that everyone else makes. Sometimes you get to do something cool, too, like painting a wall.

Tell them you also fix computers when your friends ask, and that you get to help out at 3AM when someone really needs the knick-knacks dusted.

You probably also do a lot of handholding, too. "Here, I will show you the way around this horrible mud puddle."

Try not to make it too condescending. It's a dirty job, and I'm just glad someone else than me is doing it now.