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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."
I'm not sure anyone knows how evolution actually works. It's just a theory :-D
Seriously. I agree with your basic point. How many computers are around us these days. Do we need to know how they work in order to use them?
Scratch is nice but ha abstracted the workings of a computer away. We don't teach, and few us use, assembly language. And for good reason.
I thought the whole idea was to make these complexities disappear. I have a degree in Computer Science from a University. But I don't think "everyone" needs to know how computers work, esp at these young ages.
I'm not sure I agree with this movement to teach CS at the younger ages. Teaching math and problem solving yes. Using Scratch maybe. Everyday I write code and never worry how the computer works. Networks, VPNs, database tables and indices, and other topics that are abstracted from the computer. Sure, sometimes there's a performance issue that requires understanding O(n) with regards to loops RAM cache access patterns. But I have a degree and learned about computer architecture. These basics can be taught in a two year program. I learned that I was to create programs to solve problems so that the users could do a bigger task. I don't know much about doing theirs jobs.
I don't know much about the physics behind the design of a hammer, or what makes a good one better than a sucky one. But I can drive nails with them. Somebody else worked out the details