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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."
They also don‘t know how a car or a locomotive works and if they are from the South, how Evolution works.
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});
Probably don't know a whole lot about how many things really work.
Primary school == ages 5-11
They're children. Teaching them intense logic and assembly would turn all but a hand full off of CS.
When I was in primary school, I had heard of a computer, but I did not even know what it was.
When I was in middle school, we got a C64. I knew you could play games on it, and even make your own simple games. Other than that, I did not know what it was good for and certainly did not know what was inside, or care for that matter.
Yet, somehow, by some miracle, I, as an adult, with money to buy things, am able to purchase PC components to cobble together my own machine. Even a couple hackintosh machines.
I can even, on occasion... code.
Amazingly, my lack of understand the inter-workings of a complex system in my primary school days did not hinder my life. No no.. other things were responsible for that.
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
You're right - and it's not just kids.
A couple of years ago I was asked to teach a Masters level course in software development. During one discussion, we somehow got on to the subject of cars, and what made them go. Faced with baffled faces and a stunned silence, I drilled a bit deeper and found that none of them actually knew how an internal combustion engine worked - had no idea as to what made it go other than they had to put petrol in every so often. They had cars, drove them, but none of them knew anything about the mechanism under the hood.
This reminds me of a visit to France earlier this year. My wife and I were walking past a couple when my wife slowed down, turned to me, and said "I don't think the man knows what to do about their flat tyre - the girl has just said to him that he'll have to ask someone." They were well into their 20s, but neither had a clue. With the help of my wife as a translator, I changed the wheel for them. You should have seen their faces when I 'amazed them' with my knowledge, e.g., I knew that there'd be a special adapter required to take off one of the wheel-nuts; and that it was probably in the car's glove compartment (which it was).
I'm at a loss to explain this. Where has 'curiosity' gone; especially in males!? They all seem too much into self grooming products and how they look these days.
@peetm
Amazing, these books were my start into computing with my primary school's Amstrad CPC 464 and later my own ZX spectrum. Really well written and pitched to explain all the fundamental concepts to children in a friendly and accessible manner. I wish we had more books at this level today.
Perhaps it is past time to remove the industry-wide dumb down http://3seas.org/EAD-RFI-respo...
Not simply grown ups, but majority of grown ups.
No, wait, not simply majority of grown ups, but majority of grown ups WORKING IN IT!
So, exactly what is news here?
As a kid I had the book 'The Way Things Work' by David Macaulay, so I knew all about the tiny mammoths inside all our technology.
Clearly the kids who made these drawings never saw this old Sesame Street clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Then again, if the episodes I have seen recently are any indication, I doubt Sesame Street plays the kind of really good educational clips it used to anymore (I suspect it started going downhill when someone decided they could make a lot of money selling plush toys (especially that ugly red thing) and switched the focus away from the educational clips and towards more clips featuring the Muppet characters who could be marketed via toys and such.
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.
... then you need to get them close to the metal but make it less tedious. For instance, I would have them start with modified assembly language that was based on research, with libraries that gave kids a leg up to do cool things quickly (aka make little games, etc).
The problem with learning how computers work, it's often divorced from what kids want to use it for, aka learning for most kids will always be grunt work so you should tap into what they'd like to make the computer do and their natural curiousity and make it easier for them, kids will find a way to the goal if you setup a course specifically designed to tap into their own curioustiy and ambition - aka you have to make the grind worth the effort, otherwise kids won't be able to sustain the boring parts. You need to create a virtuous cycle of feedback that's usually difficult except for the truly gifted among us like the John carmacks of the world of Quake fame.
Where has curiosity gone in automobile repair technicians?
My car overheated out on the highway and had to be towed in. I OK'd the repair shop of the towing company to work on it.
They assured me the water pump was fine but the electronically controlled fan was not coming on. They replaced, at considerable cost, a special ECM operating the fan. That didn't fix the car, so they recommended replacing my "plugged radiator" at considerable expense, especially in labor considering the tight "packaging" in a front-drive car.
I had the car towed a second time to a dealer repair shop. They told me the problem was the water pump. When they replaced it, this revealed that the plastic impeller of the old water pump had fractured.
I guess I am lacking in curiosity too, because the hose going to the radiator didn't warm up, which could have pointed to a plugged radiator, but the cabin heater was blowing cold, so what is the likelihood of a plugged heater core and a plugged radiator suddenly happening out-on-the-road? Catastrophic failure of the water pump -- single-point failure responsible for both symptoms?
I learned something, but this cost me a pricey double repair bill on a 23-year-old car to which I have a sentimental attachment.
Besides the absurdity of including 5 year olds in a survey of computer hardware knowledge, how would you explain to them the basics, in a way that doesn't result in blank stares?
It's a good exercise both in communication skills (shifting your point of view) and creating a top-down view of a complex body of knowledge. Often those heavily involved with a field can't abstract.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
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?
Then Linus and crew is out of a job then.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I don't know, but their knowlege looks just fine to me. That one drawing emphasises two fans - I presume you can hear and/or see them easyest - and just has simple connections between components, not even plus and minus, but let's be honest: Do *you* know how the north and southbridge play together? Or which faulty resistor makes your memory defunct and which one the USB? The last plan of a computer I saw was the C64 layout that came with the manual - and that was pretty much abstracted away too, containing only information that some tinkerer would need.
That someone thinks a piece of cheese is inside a computer is obviously someone who won't be an engineer but probably a manager or a farmer or something. But children think like that - no big deal.
Example: As a 4 year old kid I watched the Stan & Laurel piece where they take a rife and shoot at a house and at the same time it explodes because of some dynamite or something. That was the joke but as a 4 year old I didn't get it, couldn't connect the dots between one shot showing a burning fuse, them shooting and the house exploding. I went for a few years thinking that rifles have the power to blow up houses with one shot. Big deal. Children reason as good as they can, and if they learn the details behind things they correct their opinions. That's how reasoning works.
Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Or how would you draw it? I have taken low level hardware courses. If asked to draw the inside of a computer I would draw a rectangular box with squiggles inside.
MY drawing skills are well below a grade 1 level, and I never took a course explaining how to draw any computer schematics.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Besides the absurdity of including 5 year olds in a survey of computer hardware knowledge, how would you explain to them the basics, in a way that doesn't result in blank stares?
It's a good exercise both in communication skills (shifting your point of view) and creating a top-down view of a complex body of knowledge. Often those heavily involved with a field can't abstract.
I suspect that teach is of the mindset that somehow every child is a genius, and that any child can be anything they want to be, if they only try hard enough. Probably spent too much time watching those annoying commercials where some little kid imparts great and profound knowledge to all the adults around them.
When in reality, there is a whole spectrum of abilities and interests. And what was once amusing, where children would be asked questions, and give amusing answers - think "Candid Camera" or that show with creepy old Bill Cosby - it is now something to wring our hands and kvetch because little kids don't understand the nitty gritty of computing?
Nothing wrong - in fact much good - with the concept of exposing the young to computing, but there is something wrong with the idea that a child in kindergarten should be able to understand basic logic circuitry and semiconductors. Or even be interested in them.
Something in here is redolent of the modern day concept of trying to get people interested in STEM careers, especially in the computing arena.
And there is a real bit of irony in that the people pushing for this influx of people into STEM tend to be academics with no interests in STEM at all. Rather than blame our mishandling of the little geniuses we somehow push away from STEM, perhaps these academics turn to an honest analysis of themselves and why they aren't coders or otherwise in STEM. Because there lies the real answer.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Any kids who spwns much time around me end up knowing how an engine works, because I show them any chance I get.
Showing them the internal workings of a CPU is a bit more difficult. My four-year-old will have some understanding within the next few years, somehow. She already understands wireless internet uses radio waves from the towers she sees, or our home router / AP. She understands that her iPad can't do video in the car because we're too far from the router and the radio waves can't reach. She can't SEE the radio waves, though, and that limits understanding.
Someone mentioned twenty-somethings who can't change a tire. My four-year-old changes the tires on her Lightening McQueen toy, using a little plastic lug wrench. I've made sure she's paying attention whenever I help someone change a tire.
Less the apt but unnecessary dig at creationists.
It's progress when people don't have to know what's inside the box. People used to have to know how their car worked so that they could work on it all the time. Cars used to have daily maintenance which had to be performed by a mechanic. Now they go thousands of miles before the first time an inspection even has to be performed. Computers, the same. No more checking for corrosion on wire-wrap terminals.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
No, we invented computers not to avoid the computational thinking, but to speed up computational repeat work, in particular the work of code breaking.
Using computers to avoid thinking is a new use case.
It's not so long ago that you had to be able to think and troubleshoot far more than the average person in order to use computers.
The problem is not that they can't tell you how huge, complex machines work together, the problem is the alarming lack of knowledge on how things work generally.
Indeed. The dumbing down of the public is scary. People know a lot of tidbits that are needed to pass tests, but understand very little, and are generally unable to figure out anything. Especially so with Google and Wikipedia at their fingertips. The word "why" might be dying, because people don't feel a need to understand anything. Even simple things become magic that's just accepted.
This is why we shouldn't be trying to teach everyone to code. We'll wind up with the homeopathy of programming.
One difference is that end users' expectations of software functionality have increased.
Internationalization How many languages can geoWrite display within one document? Can it display, for example, all the characters of a newspaper in Chinese, as well as right-to-left cursive text in Arabic or top-to-bottom text in Mongolian? In how many languages can its user interface be presented? Accessibility How easily can users who are blind or hard of sight navigate GEOS? Can it read a document out loud to the user while describing all controls? Pixel density and depth The Commodore 64 computer's display has only 320x200 pixels, and the selection of colors that may appear in a single 8x8-pixel area is strictly limited. This limits the usefulness of geoPaint or geoDraw for editing detailed photographs or illustrations with fidelity comparable to print. Common platform Back in the day, software had to be written in assembly language. In order to ship the same application for computers using 6502, 6809, Z80, 68000, and 8086 family CPUs, the program had to be rewritten by hand, and all bug fixes in one version had to be propagated to other versions by hand. Though the versions for one CPU family could share their "model" code, such as Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple II, or Macintosh, Atari ST, and Amiga, or ZX Spectrum and MSX, there was no efficient way for ports to different ISAs to share any code. In addition, versions for different computer platforms took up multiples of space on store shelves. A developer could produce highly optimized software for one platform, but then the application would have to be so compelling that users of one brand of computer would be willing to buy a second computer just to run one application. Nowadays, all major web application players (commonly called "browsers") have decent support for JavaScript and the HTML DOM.What I learned is that I should have stood up to my wife and executed on my plan to drive her 24-year-old Chrysler without working A/C up to my dad's place and exchange it for our 21-year-old Camry with powerful A/C so we weren't under pressure to repair the 23-year-old Ford to drive around the in-laws coming into town on a hot, summer holiday weekend. My wife admitted later that my plan could have saved us a bunch of money, either with a do-it-yourself water pump replacement or making a family decision without pressure on whether to junk the car.
What I learned is that I should have just paid the towing mileage to our house because the mileage charge on a long tow is small compared to even a minor repair charge, and the car could be started and moved into the garage without an operating cooling system. What I learned is that the online Ford Forum suggested that based on the symptoms, I had a water pump problem and that changing a water pump is doable on that car for a home mechanic.
Your suggestion that the dealer is the highest-cost option is well known, but the non-dealer tow operator has more than 10 people in its operation and is not any cheaper. They didn't appear to know what they were doing whereas the dealer did. We don't have a local car mechanic because I either do the work myself or take the car to a tire shop run by a friend-of-the-family up by Dad's place -- where I was headed.
As to the "blobs" inside the car, we are talking about a conventional liquid cooling system that has been on cars for decades, the only fancy thing being a relay box to switch the electric fan on, a part that costs about a hundred bucks from the auto parts store, only a repair place, all repair places I know about, will charge three times as much. The same goes for the water pump. As to why the huge markup on replacement parts, it probably has to do with the overhead employing more than 10 people, and much of that overhead is probably healthcare. Even a "lean" high co-pay health plan is pricy. So it is modern medicine that makes fixing cars and every other service so expensive.
As to junking a car that breaks down after 5 years, a replacement for the Ford runs about 25K these days. Yes, you cannot "touch" anything on a car these days without running up 700 or 800 dollars in charges. If I have such a charge every other year, I am still "ahead" of the straight-line depreciation on a 25K car, even if it is 23 years old. It is just that I got hit with two such charges because the tow-place repair shop didn't know that if both the radiator hose and the cabin heat is cold, the fan is not coming on because the temperature sensor isn't "seeing" anything and the water pump is probably busted. Also, the mileage charge on the tow is not that much, so if you break down within, say, 30 miles of home, just tow the fine thing home rather than expect the tow-operator's shop to fix it.
As to "kids these days, they can name the computer parts, but they cannot tell you how it operates", heck, there are repair shops with techs who don't know the (mechanical) basics of how a car operates.
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.
Okay, you software developers out there, how many of you understand every step of how your code gets converted to binary, then executed on the silicon, down how to make logic gates from transistors and how those transistors actually work?
(Not that we need to, but I imagine some number of the nerdiest among us actually do.)
-- Alastair
Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it.
Please, describe the time and place where focusing on hardware and how code (I'm assuming assembly) executes on it, was taught in grade school?
Given what's described, it sounds like the kids know more than what they need to know. Given how few people actually ever deal with how hardware executes code, versus more people who are going to need to code (in probably abstract and managed languages), this sounds like going in the right direction.
Most adults don't understand how tech works.
The are *users* of technology and considered (sometimes) technically literate but most cellphone, tablet and PC users have no idea what goes on inside their device or how it communicates with the world.
All the different Spectre security holes is proof of this.
A lot of people know how some parts work but nobody knows how everything works.
But we don't need to know all that either. Depending on what you want to do, different abstractions and simplifications are good enough. Kind of knowing how a computer works is good enough for most programmers, and for others it's enough to know that the "f" on your mobile phone brings up Facebook.
One of the things we covered in my LISP course was how to create a LISP compiler for a system, when the compiler code itself is written in LISP. The trick is to write a compiler which can interpret some basic LISP functions. Then use that to compile the other more complex LISP functions needed by the compiler (written in LISP). Then use that to compile a complete LISP compiler. Nobody really knows what's going on in the machine code for the compiler, since the code giving you the full functionality of LISP was made by a compiler which was made by a compiler.which in turn was made by a compiler which was made by hand-coding.
When I was a kid, I had fully open systems with circuit diagrams. The idea of "DRM" didn't even really exist.
Today, most kids don't even have superuser access to their phone.
That's fucked up, and we're going to be in trouble in another generation.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Kids are dumb as hell, who cares what they think?
That 1990 video hurt me, and something inside died a little.
I am a Computer Science Professor, and it astounds me how many people have zero curiosity and manage to go through life without understanding how or why anything works around them. They use magical thinking. They don't care how anything works!
I tried to teach my nieces about basic physics like mechanical advantage. I built a sling with block and tackle and showed 7 and 6 year olds how they could lift heavy weights. They didn't care. They are both adults now. One is a nurse. They can't/won't change a tire. They fall victim to every scam there is. They are smart, but they are devoid of curiosity. It makes me sad.
The range of personalities and interests exhibited by the human species astounds me. It seems that a very small percentage of the population is responsible for all advances in knowledge and technology.
you start thinking about it and make up the oddest conjectures. As long as you can not or are unable to test those conjectures, it seems logical. And you start convincing other people of your logic, because you think you are correct.
Religion works the same way.
There's several Star Trek and science fiction films which outline this problem. It's possibly unavoidable as we as humans want to live mostly on the surface of an ever expanding sphere, not in the middle or bottom.