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Kids Think the Darndest Things About How Computers Work (acm.org)
"When visiting a series of eight primary school class rooms recently, CS professor Judy Robertson talked to children aged 5-12 about how computers work and discussed pictures they drew of what they thought is inside a computer," writes Slashdot reader theodp:
"In my view," Robertson writes, "computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation — the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all out computational thinking ourselves; that's why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it."
She notes, "What the pictures, and subsequent classroom discussions told me is that the children know names of components within a computer, and possibly some isolated facts about them. None of the pictures showed accurately how the components work together to perform computation, although the children were ready and willing to reason about this with their classmates. Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer. One boy, who had been learning about variables in Scratch the previous day wanted to know whether if he looked in his computer he would really see apps with boxes full of variables in them."
Time to get the Walk-Through Computer (1990 video) out of mothballs?
"Many of the children knew the names of the components within a computer: a chip, memory, a disc, and they were often insistent that there should be a fan in there. They knew that there would be wires inside, and that it would need a battery to make it work...."
But one student confessed that while they knew that a computer was full of both devices and code, "I am not sure what it looked like so I just scribbled."
"In my view," Robertson writes, "computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation — the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all out computational thinking ourselves; that's why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it."
She notes, "What the pictures, and subsequent classroom discussions told me is that the children know names of components within a computer, and possibly some isolated facts about them. None of the pictures showed accurately how the components work together to perform computation, although the children were ready and willing to reason about this with their classmates. Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer. One boy, who had been learning about variables in Scratch the previous day wanted to know whether if he looked in his computer he would really see apps with boxes full of variables in them."
Time to get the Walk-Through Computer (1990 video) out of mothballs?
"Many of the children knew the names of the components within a computer: a chip, memory, a disc, and they were often insistent that there should be a fan in there. They knew that there would be wires inside, and that it would need a battery to make it work...."
But one student confessed that while they knew that a computer was full of both devices and code, "I am not sure what it looked like so I just scribbled."
Truth be told, most people in the tech industry don't seem to know either. Or don't want to know. Most of our infrastructure is built on layers upon layers of buggy software, as if software was a platform.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I was going to write "Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others like them". But then I couldn't think of any other organisations really pushing understanding of computing technology. Perhaps Micro Bit and Beaglebone?
This is where and how I started my love affair with computing. :-D That didn't stop me reading the cover-to-cover many times over :-D
Back in '84 my school library got a few Usborne books in stock - a year before we had access to a computer
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs-of.html
When I was 7, I thought that by writing a game's name on a floppy disk, you copy that game from one disk to another. When I was 17, I wrote a full hardware emulator. Children this young are not supposed to know the intimate details of how a machine works, give them a break.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
y'know... there's a reason why a friend of mine, when his children asked "dad, dad can we get a computer", he went up into the attic, brought down a TRS80 and a stack of byte magazines, dropped them on the table and said, "here you go!"
they looked at him like he'd grown two heads or something. when they asked him about it, he said, "when you've gone through all of the programs in there, and typed them in and seen how they run, i'll get you a PC"
i have never heard of any other parent doing this. basic self-running computers just do not exist these days. not even arduinos: they require ANOTHER COMPUTER to program them.
BBC Basic, the Jupiter ACE (which ran FORTH), the ZX-Spectrum, these were computers that were *critical* to understanding.
Have them make a few circuits with bulbs and switches. The configuration of switches controls which bulbs light. The computer screen is just an extremely complicated set of very small lights. Then show the a relay, a switch that is controlled by electricity. The CPU is then a very tiny circuit of a very large number of electronically controlled switches that determine what gets shown on the screen.
Obviously this leaves out a lot, like memory and programs, but it's enough to get the general idea across. Should they show curiosity about those things, I'm sure the explanation could be extended further.
Were that I say, pancakes?
"just a theory"
You also don't know how science works. Theories are tested-to-exhaustion, nobody-could-disprove-this, oh-and-it-works. You may be mistaking it for either an hypothesis (a good idea if it works and tests out) or bullshit. Probably your're only familiar with bullshit, as it's the primary output of most of humanity and cows.