Ask Slashdot: How Do I Engage 5th-8th Graders In Computing?

An anonymous reader writes: I volunteer at a inner-city community after school program focused K-8th grade. Right now, due to the volunteer demographic, we spend most of our activity time in arts and crafts and homework. The 5th-8th students are getting restless with those activities. I've been asked to spice it up with some electrical wizardry. What I'd like to do is introduce the students to basic jobs skills through computers. My thoughts are that I could conduct some simple hands-on experiments with circuits, and maybe some bread boards. Ultimately, we're going to take apart a computer and put it back together. How successful this project is will dictate whether or not we will go into programming. However, whatever we do, I want the kids to obtain marketable skills. Anyone know of a curriculum I can follow? What experiences have you had with various educational computing projects?

Comments

what size group?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a band teacher, and I've had experience teaching an electronic music class- not 100% what you're doing, but some principles will apply. If you've got a small group, you'll want each of them to have their own equipment to work with. With a bigger group, you'll probably just have to demonstrate to them.

You'll be shocked at how incapable many of them will be. It will take 5 minutes to get them to all have their breadboard sitting right side up. If you're using a computer program, it'll be ten minutes to get the computers turned on and get the right program open. I'd advise to start with something so easy, you can't even imagine how they could possibly mess it up. After the first project you should have a better idea of what else you might attempt.

Re:what size group?

[i.r.id10t]

Indeed. I taught a "this is what programming looks like, this is what these simple loops and logic statements do, this is a large library of functions that let you do relatively complex things very easily", etc. course for a 2 week summer camp last year with kids that were 10-14. Just getting their attention to start takes a few minutes, then showing something, explaining it real quick, then asking for ideas on what else it could do worked, but for every even slightly related question there were 3-4 that had absolutely nothing to do with anything going on at all.

At then end, I did manage to get about half of them actually writing simple PHP to do stuff (they already had a HTML class), the other half ended up playing Tanki Online.

Visualization

[blueshift_1]

You definitely want to jump into visually doing stuff as quick as possible. That age group wants to see things happen. "hello world" is nice, but not super exciting. Naturally, minecraft has been mentioned. So maybe doing command blocks or things like that (Maybe even some java to make a plugin or mod - but that is probably a bit advanced for an into).

I've use EJS (Easy Java Simulations) before to make quick visualizations. It's a bit more science/physics based but might be pretty neat. Like showing a rocket go the moon (and physically accurate!) http://fem.um.es/Ejs/

Another tool is vPython. It's nice because it is in python and can be neat - again, I mostly used it for physics stuff, like simulating planetary orbits, but being python, you can show these things in just a handful lines of code. It'd be a great way to crossfunctionally do science and computing. http://vpython.org/

Re:Visualization

[LessThanObvious]

There's a book called Python for Kids that I got for my bartender's son. The exercises outlined, like taking a PC apart and putting it together, understanding the parts, what an OS is and what and application is sounds like a good start. Basic web design never hurts. HTML is easy to teach to young people and putting something of their own creation on the web, seems to click with kids. Spending a small amount of time on word processing and Excel isn't bad and for the most part that is what employers mean by basic computer skills. If you can get a hold of a college level "Introduction to PC computing" sort of text book, some good accessible foundation learning can be drawn from that.

Scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a computer club at our local elementary school. MIT's Scratch has been an amazing resource for teaching the kids to program. It's fun, it's graphical, and it provides a platform for teaching most major CS concepts. We did tear a computer down, but we only spent one meeting on that. I think much more than that is overkill. The kids really enjoy the programming in scratch.

Scratch from MIT, JavaScript, Python, HTML

[omibus]

Don't worry about job skill, you will bore the crap out of them with that.

Focus on exploration, discovery, and fun.

I'd suggest you look at Scratch from MIT. NoStarch Press has a nice comic book style book on Scratch that worked for my kids.

There are also good resources on JavaScript and Python for kids. Khan Academy has JavaScript tutorial that are pretty good as well.