Teaching kids about computers...

On 23 Nov 2007, at 01:07, Chris M wrote: Not pointing fingers at you in particular, Chris, but I've been following this thread casually, and it seems to me that a lot of people's views of this are clouded by their own perspectives. I don't know what you interpret as "knowing how a disk drive works", but it's useful to understand that a hard-drive is a metal disk which spins on an unlubricated bearing at 7000rpm. By counting up the bits in 100gig demonstrates how small the "ones and zeros" are on a hard- drive and how small the tolerances are - hopefully this will discourage children from dropping hard-drives by careless handling! I was about 8 when my family got its - ummm... my father got his - BBC micro, so to some extent I've grown up with this. IMO the trick to teaching kids about computers is simply to give them the resources - they'll pick up what they want to, and absorb it like a sponge. The availability of BASIC on olden personal computers was undoubtedly a boon for my generation - you could start out with '10 print "i was here" ; 20 goto 10' and work from there, actually seeing the results of your programming on the screen. My introduction to arrays was a "write your own adventure game" book in which each room was stored in an array, which documented the writing of the sample program and which then encouraged you to go on and expand the castle. My father's interest was also very helpful - he had an "introduction to microcomputers" board and book from the Open University lying around the house which I was able to pick up and follow. The board had one or two figure-8 LEDs on it, some traffic lights and a 12- button keyboard for entering programs in machine code. But I was certainly never directed to this - at most he said "here! look what I did today" and showed me how he'd written a traffic-lights program on it (following from the book). So I certainly believe that the availability of a BBC micro or a microprocessor board make good toys, and that any number of "how computers work" kids books are worth having around - I spent my own pocket money on the latter, although the best ones are probably no longer available. But abstract discussion here of which teaching method is best and what "should" be learned "in the classroom" bears no comparison with the results of hands on experience - IMO the OP will have to try different books and computer models and see which makes his kid's eyes light up. IMO what's most important is AVAILABILITY - there'll come a stage when your kid asks "how do I do this, Dad?". Most kids don't have a platform on which arbitrary real tasks can be performed, so I'll assume that the kids of members of this list are ahead on this front already, but when the answer is "write a Bash script" just be ready to sit down and show him (or her). IMO the number of teenagers making significant contributions to Open Source Software is a testament to this "availability" theory. Stroller.