Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
We have one in Cambridge, UK. It is pretty fun, my son loved it. Basically couples retro gaming with a suite of Raspberry Pis and other "learning" computers from the last few decades.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
It should be designed in such a way that kids can actually make the exhibits work, not just tell them how it works. All other considerations are secondary. However, dramatic comparisons like an IBM 350 disk unit displayed alongside a modern mSATA drive will also make an impression.
Just take a few big strokes from other computer museums and make most displays as interactive as possible. Obviously talk about video games too. Throw in some robot programming workshops with mini robots doing stuff in an arena for a few minutes. Offer free apps for kids to take away some concepts and continue at home.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
That sounds like a huge waste of money. And for a really stupid cause. So you want kids to be interested in computers? Why? So they'll do your job for minimum wage in 18 years?
Computers aren't this magic thing that you have to be raised with or you'll "just never get it." You can learn at any age.
I think they should put the money into the actual education system instead of trying to trick kids with a knockoff edu-tainment "museum."
To play devil's advocate here, the idea of children's computer museums and science museums is nice and all, but realistically there's a reason why these things close down, and it usually comes down to not making enough money to keep the lights on. Perhaps a nice interactive science website with VR would be a better way to spend the money, rather than restoring a building whose design results in high upkeep costs, plus the cost of staffing and renting exhibits and so on.
I mean, the city of Sarasota was spending something like $150k+ in maintenance every year just to keep the building from deteriorating further. At ten bucks a head, it takes 15,000 visitors every year (almost 10% of their total during the final years) just to pay for the absolute minimum level of upkeep. I'd imagine the real numbers to keep the building in good shape were at least double that. A good target for a business is closer to 5%. Basically, that building is a money pit.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Children have absolutely no interest in looking at old computers, make it something hands on where the children can touch, interact and experiment.
A bit hidden on the site is one room (I almost missed it) with a small but very good set of hands on activities to learn about computers. A simple thing like coding your age in binary and boards to explain an experiment with AND & OR principles. Some games were also available
It shows also the evolution of computers. From an analog computer build in meccanno, an IBM 360 and so fort. I was particle impressed by the automatic analog switching telephone unit still functioning with rotary telephones. You can literally see the switching arms turn in function of the number dialled on the rotary disk. A rare treasure to illustrate to youth how technology evolved towards computers.
Maybe some programmable robots that can move objects from one bin to another based on some high level commands. (perhaps small and under a little bubble)
robot 1 (worker bot): goto A, pickup, goto B, drop, repeat
robot 2 (maid bot): find ball, pickup, goto A, drop, repeat
robot 3 (messy bot): goto B, pickup, random walk, drop, repeat
so with 7 possible commands there is a fair amount of programming of behaviors. might be overkill to try and also allow branching and conditionals.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you want to get children interested in computers and computer science, especially as a prelude to increasing their education in the same... I can't think of a more back-asswards way to go about it than sentencing them to a computer history museum. As interesting as the topic is to the geek and nerd, it's dull and boring and almost completely irrelevant to the call-to-action you linked to.
Don't confuse what you want to see with what is actually needed. A computer education center, which is what you're looking for, will have perforce have a historical component - but it's overall focus with quite different.
All that being said, I'd run not walk from that building... it's forty odd years old, located in a stressful climate (humidity, rain, and near salt water) - and reading between the lines of the news articles, suffering from failed systems as well as probably at least a decade of deferred maintenance.
A common mistake people do when making stuff for children is assuming that kids are dumb so let's make it simple for them.
Kids are not dumb and a good children's museum teaches the adults too. The only real difference is the "Adult" museums are more or less teach like the Victorian times quite expecting you to stay attentive with learning to be done via audio and visual learning.
A "Children's" museum offers the tactile learning as well and fully engages all the senses for proper learning.
I would make physical and manipulable exhibits such as not gates and gates and or gates either out of blocks or plumbing with color water. Then getting so far to make a 4 bit adder.
After you get that far then you can switch to electricity. Perhaps with a large quartz transistor and circuits. Where they can turn a dials and press buttons pull leavers to get the point.
The goal is to demistify computers to children and adults before you get to the other suggestions with robots writing code. But for the most part target towards teaching adults the concepts using as many stimula as possible.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If it's to be half decent as a museum - it needs an entire room devoted to Turing and Bletchley Park and if anybody can do it - a working replica of Christopher - the machine that broke ENIGMA.
That was the start, not only modern cryptography but of the entire computer age - every modern CPU is really just a Turing machine after all, and we are long past the nearly 50 years of secrecy and denial - it's time the man got due credit for his role in winning World War 2. Turing, more than any other single person, saved the free world from the NAZI war machine.
Churchil, Paton and Stalin got all the credit - but it was Turing's work that allowed them to choose their battles well and succeed. The D-Day invasion would not have been possible without Turing's work. Historians believe that Bletchley Park shortened the war by at least 2 years, saving millions of lives, and turned a likely defeat into an ultimate victory.
That's a story children need to hear, they need to hear how the GI's lives were saved by a nerd who loved maths and crossword puzzles, and because history isn't supposed to be a nice subject, that he was gay - and the horrible way the free world 'thanked' it's saviour.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It should look like this :
https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/
Replicas of ancient computers, like the solar system models, rope robots of the greek and romans, probably even ancient steam engines (even if that does not compute), maya calendar, babylonian number system.
Everything that is fascinating and/or math/science related. Variations of "abacus" . Inka number system and thread woven messages.
Various simple encryption methods, like the greek staff with wrapped paper around it, the grid based encoding schemes: chicken code and pig code.
Water clock of the romans ...
Regardless of "computing" everything that has to do with measuring and simple calculations with a trick, e.g. the measuring of the earth circumference by Eratosthenes. Or what a parsec is, measured via parallax.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As as child in the 1960s, I went to the Science Museum in London. There were lots of handles to crank and buttons to push, and the science tended flow out of that. Taking my own son in the early 1980s, it was somewhat the same and rather enjoyable, crank something and see what happens.
Also (one of) MONIAC, the Philips Hydraulic Computer was there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and currently there's a reconstructed Difference Engine (also in Mountain View, I think?). These objects make computing very 'visible' and kids (quite wisely) are not very abstract. Besides they can now get all the coding lessons etc. in school, so a musueum shouldn't be more of the same.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
The most important consideration, above all else is that it be a fun, engaging experience. Who cares whether they walk away knowing important names and dates? If they walk away thinking "computers are fun" that will do more for the future of computer science than any amount of knowledge you can pack into their little heads in that time. Here are some ideas:
Mechanical computers: use colorful balls on ramps to perform basic addition and subtraction.Let them tinker with the ramps.
Blinkenlights. A big panel from one of the old supercomputers where they can push and pull and switch all the different things to make output on a punch paper. And they get to keep the punch paper.
A basic movement programming environment implemented with physical puzzle blocks. When they assemble a workable program they get to see a robotic turtle move the way it was told. Add obstacles and dots they can pick up for bonus points.
Tin cans on a string, but with a simple, observable interface that lets them push 1 and 0 and see letters and numbers come up for the ASCII they entered.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
every modern CPU is really just a Turing machine after all
No it is not, and neither was the Enigma cracker.
No idea why /. is full with comments of people who don't grasp the differences between a turing machine and a turing complete machine/language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
BTW, if you need another term to throw around without grasping what it is/how it works: basically all modern CPUs are "Von Neumann Machines", enjoy!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah, that's going to impress a 10 year old. He sure will be listening attentive when you explain to him the intricate details of statistics and probability and how the hundreds and thousands Bombas made the task of breaking cryptographic code easier.
No later than here he'll pull out his cellphone and play Angry Birds while you drone on.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We're talking about a children's museum. The relatively subtle difference between a Turing Machine and a RAM based CPU is not actually at a level where I think they are suitable for a children's museum.
Christopher was not a Turing machine and nobody claimed it was - but then, it wasn't a computer either. It wasn't programmable, let alone reprogrammable. It was essentially a mathematical pattern matching machine that was used to brute force the code-breaking. There are elements of it's architecture which later computers replicated but the key design was very different and it was a single-purpose machine. Even Turing wouldn't have called it a version of his idealized mathematical concept known as the Turing Machine.
A CPU with memory and instructions however, are about as close as we could get to building something which is meant to contain an infinite length piece of paper.
Random Access Memory was, to my mind, really just a major optimization over his sequential access model.
http://www.groklaw.net/article... This article explains the point better than I can.
Education is a skill known as a lies-to-children. You start with simple, but flagrantly untrue, explanations - which makes more complicated lies understandable and you don't get to anything resembling 'true' explanations until grad school.
For children - a Turing machine is the concept that was realized in CPUs. That allows you to then go on and explain Turing-completeness and finally RAM designs with people who now understand the basic principles of computing.
Von Neumann's architecture differs from Turing machines in being about something fundamentally different. Turing was developing the early stages of computing theory (though he had set out to do something very different - attempt to create a new language for expressing mathematical proofs in) while Von Neumann's was an engineering design - the seperation of data and instruction while both are in the same basic format (and possibly even on the same medium) was a way to practically put Turing's pencil-holder into the machine itself, but it was an engineering concept.
Both are still fundamental to how computers work to this day - and for children's level education that's all you can or OUGHT TO try and teach. You can't possibly teach the next level to somebody who hasn't first heard this lie. That's not how education works or ever can work because it isn't how human brains learn things.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
... and a pile of resistors for the kids to use.
Oh, and electrons.
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
That's a prime example of lies to children.
No, that's a prime example of explaining a simplified subset of facts to children so that they aren't overwhelmed by a deluge of information they aren't prepared to handle. There is no lie involved and ranting that there is makes you sound like conspiracy theorist whackjob.
full of children learning how to make computers do fun stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Something like an Apple Store? Microsoft Store? Something else?
So you're really just asking what it should *look* like? As in, what should the aesthetic design be?
Sure. Make it look like an Apple Store.
It seems like the bigger question should be, what should be in it? What should the exhibits be, and how should it work? Whatever the aesthetics, what are kids going to learn from the experience?
And I don't know what the goal is or what resources are available, but just to throw an idea out there, the first thing that popped into my head was (perhaps obviously) to have interactive exhibits showing the progress computers have made. As much as possible, have old computers or replicas so that kids can see what the actual physical machine looked like. Maybe show them a Babbage Difference Engine, and see if you can break down how it works. Maybe things like the early IBM PCs, an Apple II, and the first Mac. Let them have access to some emulators that show what the different old operating systems were like-- DOS, early versions of MacOS and Windows. Provide some sort of interactive method for illustrating how long it would take for operation would happen on a computer from 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015. Maybe have an exhibit where they can play different video games from different eras.
Maybe it's just me, but that's what I think of if you say the words, "Children's Computer Museum"-- some collection of interactive exhibits arranged chronologically to show kids the development of computers, focusing on the development of personal computing (starting circa 1980), but with a couple of things early on to talk about how things developed from an abacus through mainframes, leading up to the PC.
YouTube: "How Computers Work: A Journey Into the Walk-Through Computer is an educational video produced by The Computer Museum and hosted by David Neil of PBS's Newton's Apple. Join David Neil and his four young companions on an entertaining and illuminating trek through The Computer Museum's one-of-a-kind, two-story working model of a desktop computer." Exhibit flyer (pdf). Press kit (pdf).
A hands-on demonstration of boolean logic: starting with two switches in series to show A AND B, then two switches in parallel to show A OR B. A more advanced portion of it might have a large plugboard (like from the old Ma Bell days), and a collection of gates and switches, with flashcards showing how to build up common circuits - a 1-bit adder, XOR, a 1-bit flip-flop, etc.
First off, while I'm sure it's important to get corporate sponsorships, the logos need to be only on the outside of the building and not inside. The purpose of the museum cannot be for companies to establish brand awareness and preferences - it must be to interest and excite kids about technology and where the future lies.
Don't focus on teaching kids how to use technology, focus on introducing the basic concepts which computing technology is based on. That means avoid rows of PCs letting kids design their own web pages or games in Scratch; create hands-on activities in which the kids can see how data is stored (flip flops), makes decisions (logic), input and outputs as well as communications with the culminating piece being how they work together to become a "computer" and how devices are built from them.
The visitors are the ones building technology's future; don't set expectations with a focus on sponsor's products and existing applications, show them the basics and let them imagine where they want the future to go.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Give children something to do.
Things to poke, prod and make stuff happen. Don't show them a CPU, let them build logic gates that light shit up, make noises etc.
Give them control of a complex lock system on a constrained (miniature) canal setup where a barge represents a data and the routes dictate processing.
Show them to history of 'speak and spell', calculators, robotic fucking barney, other toys to see how computers have enhanced play.
Build a proper difference engine and let them program it.
Shit, they're kids. They want to learn, they want to play, they want to see and do fun stuff. Is this really that hard?
Apple store? Really? What sort of cunt thinks that's a museum?
And with lots of pastels and cartoon images.
Surprisingly on point AC1P. Bright colors. Big, readable signage that looks fun. Easily cleanable floors. Large interactive exhibits featuring tech they don't see at home--in general, computer screens, mobile phones, tablets, etc. are pretty passe. So super new or super old.
For anything of historical significance (mainframe & punch cards et al.), make sure they can't reach it. Not necessarily behind glass, but if kids can touch it you're guaranteed to find gum in your tape reel and half a tootsie pop caught in your card reader by hour 3.
Nothing posted to
The world is in reality monochrome, and "1 bit" monochrome at that. Color is simply how the mind interprets the wavelength/frequency the photons travel at which the eye (rods) picks up (chroma), while the various shades the mind produces is caused is the amount of photons hitting the eye (rods and cones) at a given time (luminecence). The world is physicaly and completly colorless, and not even in greyscale (just some objects emit/reflect more photons than others). Yes, it is depressing, so try not to think too much about it, OK?
A better way to scare future programmers away is to show a bunch of nerdy looking fellas in white dress shirts and narrow ties (complete with pocket protectors!) coding ON PAPER, like was common in the 50s and 60s and handing the stack of paper to a well dressed woman wearing a peral necklace who then enters the code into a keypunch machine (a woman because common "wisdom" then dictated women couldn't do tasks that required THINKING and therefore they were commonly pigeonholed into near mindless jobs such as type copying letters and answering phones for the boss. Yes kids, BROgrammer culture was king decades ago!) , and then the several hours (or days) wait to get the results back, because it takes time to enter in code written on paper on the key punch, waiting for other peoples jobs in the batch to get done, the printout, and of course, the frequent hardware failures. And you got all your results printed on a sheet of paper! Exciting, huh?
If you're going to break down the concept of color by referring only to frequencies, then "monochrome" is meaningless anyway and you are just as wrong in your attempted pedantry. Color is defined by the frequencies we perceive with our eyes and our brain interprets. If those frequencies exist and are recognized, then color "exists". You might as well say that sound doesn't really exist because it's just a pressure wave and our mind interprets the impulses coming from our ears. You can argue it's true, but only by attempting to invalidate the basic meaning of the word you are trying to discredit.
Chickens don't really exist: your eyes just interpret a combination of molecules and electricity interacting in very complex ways.
I prefer to think of it in a different way. Human bodies are equipped with powerful radiation sensors, though they are only sensitive to a small section of the EM-Band they can, within this band, detect radiation with pin-point accuracy (including using triangulation to determine origin distance), and sort them by frequency and intensity.
The brain takes all this data to construct the 3D picture we see of the world. We don't see objects, we detect some of their radiation (most of which is reflected solar radiation). It's essentially a biological radar-mapping system.
Much like the computer attached to a radar dish makes it useful by drawing a map from the radio pings - so our brain draws a map of the world from the measurements of our radiation detectors. Among other things it combines frequency with intensity to assign the labels to various sources that we call 'colour' which can mix as a single-source contains more than one frequency - and which our brains then label with secondary or tertiary colours.
So the visual spectrum is a highly simplified view of the world and of course not all animals have the same ones. The capacity to filter frequencies 'colour vision' seems to be limited almost exclusively to birds and primates and were probably a co-evolved trait with plants altering the reflective frequency of fruits when they are mature and ready to be eaten for seed distribution to get the birds/monkeys not to eat the ones that weren't ready (upping the sugar-content at the same time so as to boost the tastyness of the ready fruit was a neat trick too). On the other hand - quite a lot of creatures can detect infrared and/or ultraviolet but our detectors stop short of either.
Hearing is the same... you don't actually hear people speak, or car engines driving by. A pair of (excellent in mammals - better than almost any other family) detectors measure air flow patterns looking for telltale vibrations within their sensitive frequency scope. And this goes through a filtering process not very different from the one done with light radiation to produce our brains' map of 'sound'.
When you consider how far removed our experience of these 'senses' are from how they actually work it's
1) no wonder illusion artists are so good at fooling them
2) a bloody miracle that we could further abstract these already massively abstracted concepts enough to create art... let alone communication
About 99.99% of 'seeing' happens with zero influence from the conscious mind. The point where we actually get to think about it, is only after the abstracted map is drawn. No wonder we can't see the massive blindspot we all have in center of each eye.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Museum are about the past and are passive learning, how about something like Do Space in Omaha, NE? http://www.dospace.org/
Think of it like a high tech library
Computers available for the use of all
3D printers/laser cutter available http://www.dospace.org/technol...
Tech activity kits for checkout: http://www.dospace.org/technol...
Regular/Special Events (Girls Who Code, Cyber Seniors, software classes, etc.
http://www.dospace.org/events/... , http://www.dospace.org/events/...
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.
So you turn it into a huge dissertation. One doesn't teach children - or anyone for that matter - by dumping a load of information on them.
It's like the time a fellow asked me about a tuned cavity used in a local radio repeating station. Understandable, because in a world of tiny equipment these fairly large tube thingies look a little out of place....
Noob:"What's that?"
Me: "That's a tuned Cavity for our repeater system"
Noob:"What's that do?"
Me: "It provides really sharp filtration on the RF signals, and only allows ones at our frequencies to pass"
Noob:"Okay - why not an electronic circuit?
Me: "You could, but you need a lot of blocking ability at the particular frequency.. We call that Q factor. Very difficult to get with regular components."
Note that I gave a very simplified version of "Q" I think that's what you call lying.
Third guy interrupts, and starts in with a 20 minute lecture on Chebyshev filters, Ring filters, and other filter design stuff that gets the fellow asking the question's eyes to glaze over. The guy that asked me the question tuned out after about 30 seconds.
Later I went up to the guy and apologized for him getting the history of filter design for a simple question. He noted that 90 percent of what they other fellow was preaching went way over his head and was no help. I asked him if he was good on what a cavity filter was. He said, sure, it was a very sharply tuned filter, and was used because it had very sharp filtration as compared to electronic components. Go figure, eh?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The SFBay Area has three to emulate/draw ideas from:
The Exploratorium: Practically grew up here as a kid. More of a STEM orientated, the key thing was it was all HANDS ON.
The Lawrence Hall of Science @ Berkeley. Another childhood hangout.
The Tech Museum in San Jose. Just took my 13 year old here, he is hard to please. Just turned him loose and he had a great time. 3d Printing, robotics, network simulations, build-a-plane flight mechanics. I enjoyed it too!
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
That's a prime example of lies to children.
No, that's a prime example of explaining a simplified subset of facts to children so that they aren't overwhelmed by a deluge of information they aren't prepared to handle. There is no lie involved and ranting that there is makes you sound like conspiracy theorist whackjob.
The ability to break down knowledge into bite size chunks is not all that common. All too often the "explainer" gets sidetracked into minutia, or gets impressed with hearing themselves talk. Meanwhile the poor kids, or the person asking, gets overwhelmed, as they try to process it all. And usually they fail. Which might explain the failure of science to get through to a lot of people.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Learn about the Ontario Science Centre during the mid-1970s. That place was super cool. Tons of interactive tech, huge lasers, giant Tesla coils and Van de Graaf generators, and of course, the Philips Coffee Machine (I'm still searching for the schematic, btw). "Coffee! Coffee. Coffee?" Oh, and none of this global warming boring-as-all-hell environmentalist crap.
Schanley, the city’s asset manager, regularly conducts walkthroughs of the former GWIZ building.
Am I the only one who read this as Schannel? I thought maybe this guy was a huge fan of Microsoft crypto...
And a point occupies no space, and a plane extends to infinity in all directions.
We get it. But it doesn't matter in this discussion.
make sure they can't reach it.
Better yet, make a stripped down demo that you can touch to demonstrate how the old tech worked.
Most of the computers of historical significance are Harvard architecture, not Von-Neuman. Punchcard based systems are basically all Harvard based, because it is pretty hard to fill a hole in a punched card at runtime.
Static museums work for the visual arts, they are kind of a failure for anything else.
Have a display where kids can play videogames as they have been over the years, have another one in which they can update their bank account, another one in which they can use databases to track down a suspected criminals, another one in which they can create their own bit coin operated recreational herbs commercial web site.
A bank of 8 toggle switches with a light above each to show when they are turned on. Next to that, a 3-digit 8 segment display to show the 8-bit number corresponding to which switches are flipped. Maybe another one to show the ASCII letter corresponding to the number, when there is one.
You don't actually have to understand it to get something out of it. But you could also label each "bit" and its value as well as put up an ASCII chart for the older kids.
Getting kids to museums is hard enough but I feel like making them look at old technology (when the smartphone they're inevitably carrying in their pocket probably has more computing power than all of them combined) is a pretty special challenge.
On the other hand if you could tie it into video games at least they'd be able to do something interesting and entertaining while they're looking at all these old crusty machines. The evolution of video games, from Pong/Space Invaders to World of Warcraft/Call of Duty might be an interesting enough tale to tell visually and interactively to grab someone's attention.
Why not Pascal? Or aren't his mechanical Pascalines enough like a computer for you?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
Now I know why not Blaise Pascal. You are attempting to build a worldview based on an extremely narrow interpretation of fact- and 18 years from now you're going to be a grandfather because of it. Religion too, has truth, but you're going to learn that far too late for your little girl.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
No modern child is interested in that.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Of course I think the answer you're going to get is going to involve game consoles more than old computers. Remember, computers didn't used to be game machines or home machines, they were business machines, doing boring, adult, business-y things. Sure, there were games written for text-only computers, but that's going to be boring, boring, boring to the average modern kid, who is used to HD graphics and 6-channel surround sound.
Something else to consider in this particular case is the mention of this being on 'prime Bayfront property'. Most county governments want more revenue, and zoning that property for business use brings in more money to the county. Something as specialized as a 'childrens computer museum' is going to be more of a money pit than anything profitable.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Both are still fundamental to how computers work to this day
Turing machines are absolutely not fundamental to computers. I doubt there ever existed a hardware Turing machine. They are mental construct, that is all.
Von Neumann's was an engineering design - the seperation of data and instruction
That is not the fundamental of Von Neumann computers, the fundamental is the fetch, decode, execute cycle in an random access memory. Most Von Neumann machines don't even distinguish between code and data.
Christopher [...] wasn't a computer either. ... after all: it computes.
Of course it was. It is a computer just like your GPS. Someone programmed it for you. There is no difference if all the "code" comes from ROM/firmware or it is freely programable.
And as the Code in the "Christopher" was already perfect, there was no need to reprogram it. That does not make it a "no computer"
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Harvard architecture is: separation of data and instruction cache. And is still the same as Von Neumann, no idea what you wanted to say. No change in the "fetch, decode, execute" cycle of an CPU.
Harvard architecture exists since the late 1980s / early 1990s, everything that is of historical interest is before that time, so you got id double wrong.
because it is pretty hard to fill a hole in a punched card at runtime.
And nevertheless every computer just did that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
They aren't computers at all. They are mechanical calculators - we've had those for the better part of 5000 years. They steadily progressed and no doubt they deserve to be shown in such a museum - but they rather peaked with the Hollerith Tabulator.
Going from counting aids to reprogrammable computers was a quantum leap, and it took a complete rethink of the fundamental principles of mathematics. Three people did that rethink: Alonzo Church, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - but Alan Turing was the only one envision a device that utilized their ideas about effective methods. He was the one who saw beyond rethinking the abstractions of mathematics and saw an opportunity for an entirely new way of performing mathematical functions - and the birth of the reprogrammable computer.
Also - Pascal never saved the world from an evil dictator bent on global rule.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I dissagree - fundamentally what makes a computer a computer is the ability to change the programming. Christopher COULDN'T be reprogrammed, it's instructions were part of the physical layout - not changeable. This was fine since it only had one task. But there was no way to reuse it for any other task.
The GPS can be reprogrammed, and they actually are with regular firmware updates. It's not about how instructions are stored, it's about whether they exist distinctly from the circuitry that operates on them. That may be in *other* circuitry, but only if it's possible to replace said other circuitry and (at least in theory) have the device perform a new set of instructions.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Well yeah, but please note that I wasn't using 'lying' in a negative connotation, I was explaining that it's a required part of learning to learn simpler, but untrue, versions of reality first.
I still don't think the difference between Turing-Machines, Turing Complete Machines and modern day CPU's are appropriate material for a CHILDREN'S museum. Hell most adults don't know it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Charles Babbage then? His looms were reprogrammable, even if he used punch cards for memory. Those three were hardly the first.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Try reading what I wrote moron. I didn't say it was necessary to get all kids interested, nor did I say anything about mainstream appeal.
And yes, this is Slashdot, where reading comprehension is a must. Go away until you've acquired some.
It should include things like this: Interactive Art using FlipBits. Full Disclosure: Yes, it may be a shameless plug. But you asked for my opinion.
I dissagree - fundamentally what makes a computer a computer is the ability to change the programming.
Then you disagree with 99% probably 100% of all teachers teaching computer science in university.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Technically, a Universal Turing Machine can emulate any other Turing machine or any other process we normally refer to as computation. Not all Turing machines are UTMs. Turing machines as a class, or a UTM in specific, can emulate any computation*. Proofs do not necessarily involve UTMs, but rather construct Turing machines that do something.
*The Church-Turing thesis is that any computation can be emulated on a Turing machine. Without an ironclad definition of "computation" it can't be proven, but so far nobody's come up with a reasonable definition of computation that can't be emulated on a Turing machine.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The prism explanation does extend itself to explain rainbows, with a little work. Observe that the white light coming in is turned into colors at different angles. Therefore, if you were some distance from a prism of a certain orientation relative to incoming light, you'll see it as red. The next prism, at a slightly different angle, will show as orange. Work with that, and you can come up with an explanation for a rainbow.
Science isn't there to tell you lies. It's there to tell you partial truths, and to show you you can keep going deeper into more and more complete truths. I'm not going to get into religion here, except to mention that it's not necessarily lying. Many religious statements can neither be objectively verified or objectively refuted, and therefore should not be taught in public schools.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Turing machines are a mathematical concept, extremely useful in proving things about computers. Stick a Turing machine display somewhere for the kids that will be interested in that. Call it a really simple description of a computer. Don't mention Turing completeness. Heck, don't mention universal Turing machines, since they're more complexity than you want to throw at a kid.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Are you an idiot?
Von neuman architecture has a combined program and data memory space. The Harvard architecture does not, it has separate data and program memory pools. Ever heard of "smashing the stack?" That is only something you can do on von Neumann machines, as it exploits the fact that such machines have combined program and data memory space, by hiding program code inside a trojanized data element, then jumping the execution pointer to its location with a stack overflow. Harvard machines are physically incapable of that happening.
And, the article you pointed to says nothing about filling in punched cards. Harvard machines could never do that, instead, they could shuffle one card in the execution pipeline out for another, that had differently punched holes, which is totally not the same thing.
So the one doubly wrong was yourself.
Seems I forgot to answer.
You are wrong.
Harvard architectures only have separate cashes for code and data. They all reside in the same memory, this: Harvard machines are physically incapable of that happening Is completely wrong.
Ah, seems I answered to your previous post ... Harvard machines could never do that, instead, they could shuffle one card in the execution pipeline out for another, that had differently punched holes, which is totally not the same thing. ... to lazy to look it up. And yes, you can write to punch cards. No idea what punch card based computers you used.
There never was a Harvard machine at the time we used punch cards. Harvard Architectures we have roughly since 1992 or so
So meanwhile your quadruple wrong :D
Everything you claim about Von Neumann architectures is wrong, Everything about Harvard Architecture is, and everything about the punch cards is ... perhaps you should read a book about it.
Or Wikipedia ... Von Neumann and Harvard Architectures are nicely explained there ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.