Ask Slashdot: What Should a Children's Computer Museum Look Like? (yourobserver.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If you're a wealthy techie looking for a way to establish your legacy, the City of Sarasota has a 117,000-square-foot children's science museum that's vacant and could use a little TLC. Housed on prime Bayfront property, the building that once housed the Gulf Coast Wonder and Imagination Zone might make a fine children's computer museum.

So in case any of those CEOs who stress the importance of getting children interested in CS are reading and want to put their money where their mouth is, any suggestions about what a kids' version of the Computer History Museum should look like? Something like an Apple Store? Microsoft Store? Something else?
There's often criticism about the ways computer science gets taught in schools -- so leave your suggestions in the comments. What would a good children's computer museum look like?

Comments

Re:Say what now?

[silentcoder]

As an interesting and unrelated example of my point. Why do rainbows look like rainbows? You probably learned in school that water droplets act like prisms and breaks up white light into it's constituent colours - producing the rainbow.
You probably did an experiment where you held a prison to the sun and saw a rainbow.

That's a prime example of lies to children.
Because that thing you drew on the paper wasn't a bow. The lie explains the colours but it ignores how millions of raindrops can work together like one giant prism, it ignores the reason why the rainbow is bow-shaped. It explains the colours and pretends it has explained the rainbow.

The actual geometry of calculating how rainbows form is actually beautifully elegant... and really quite complex - you simply cannot possibly teach that in a middle school science class, hell you can't teach it at high-school level. But if you learn the lie, you are able to learn a lot more slightly less untrue lies - like wave interference patterns and how binoculars work with prisms rather than lenses... all of which never mentions that light can behave like a particle (you may encounter a very simplified version of that in your final highschool years, I did, so simplified it never used the word 'photon').

Pretty much the only way you'll actually ever learn and calculate the full set of formulae that make up our contemporary understanding of the rainbow... is if you study an advanced degree in optics and it happens to be used as an example in the textbooks you use. Though anybody with at least highschool maths can look it up online and probably understand the answers.

We teach lies to children - because you start simple to get to complex things. My 2-year old knows the sky is blue, but she's a while away yet from understanding what 'blue' means, let alone WHY the sky is blue and it's almost certainly true that my first explanations of that will be far simpler than reality. That's just how teaching works.

Lying to children is, in fact, one of the most noble things we can do for them. Provided the lies are steps on the path to truth, not steps to nowhere. The difference between science and religion at school level isn't that one tells you truths - they both lie, but science tells lies to help you on a path towards truth while religion tells lies to prepare you for bigger lies.