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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?
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
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.
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.
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 *
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.