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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});
And if they are from the west coast, how human reproduction and genders work.
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
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?
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