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Ask Slashdot: Hands-On Activity For IT Career Fair
First time accepted submitter MConnolly writes "I participate in an annual career fair for High School Sophomores. I have groups of 10 — 20 students for 40 minutes a piece. In previous years, we've brought a bunch of retired PCs and challenged the groups to disassemble (down to the motherboard) and reassemble them in working order. Many processors and motherboards died, but everyone had fun. Most students today only have laptops and tablets. As a result, this knowledge doesn't translate into the real world anymore (perhaps you disagree). I'm looking for suggestions for an activity that will give the students some hands-on, real world experience that will benefit them immediately."
Get an old wireless router, reset to factory defaults, have them connect to it via laptop and configure it for secure wireless, which they can then connect to with their laptop/tablet.
Walk an offshore admin who speaks maybe 500 words of english and has had only hours of training, through creating a Windows Server 2008 VM and configuring an ASP application under IIS. For extra credit, repeat using SUSE and JSP/Tomcat. Simulate an accurate communications channel by having the person playing the offshore admin stand outside by the freeway using an analog cell phone, doing the work on a 1990's era laptop balanced on an ironing board connected to the net by an old Telebit modem that drops often.
Arrange so the student can see the actions being taken, but has no control over the process. The student fails the test if he touches the keyboard.
If the student decides to forego a career in IT and takes up bartending instead, he's passed the test.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
... but here's an exercise that will translate into the real world... Separate them into two groups, the "M" group, and the "E" group.
The Ms ties the Es group's hands up behind their backs. Then the Ms set themselves on fire, and have to coerce the Es to put the fire out with their hands tied up. If the Ms survive, they get more Es and go again. If the don't, they're replaced with a new M, preferably one from outside who has no idea what just happened.
If you can get your employer to help pay for it, you could have the students work with Raspberry Pis or Arduino boards, and then they can take it home afterwards. Students love free stuff and being able to continue to tinker around with it after the workshop would enable this to be an invaluable learning experience.
... as you said students today have laptops and tablets which are completely self enclosed and not-user-serviceable at all, fostering the idea that a computer is kind of a 'magic box'.
Having a complete teardown/reassembly with some explanation will show the kids that computers are not these black boxes, you can point out what/where the RAM is, the CPU, storage, NICs, port controllers, network cards (if the PCs are older especially) etc. etc. etc.
Everybody can do virtualization stuff at home already, try to let them do something that they would not be able to do on their own. Configuring an AP sounds 'cool' but really it's just a matter of again staring at a screen and changing some checkboxes, doing something hands on with hardware is a lot more fun IMHO.
-- the cake is a lie