I have an hour to teach a group of 8-year olds about computers, what should I teach?

[TheDataMiner]

In this hour a want to get these kids excited and make them want to keep learning on their own.

Here are the resources I have:

Desktop PC (built by myself)

Laptop PC

Raspberry Pi

[Camacha]

Just one hour? I think they can learn enough about the higher level stuff themselves, maybe try to do some very basic logic gating? Maybe you could make it into a game. Just to imprint the notion that there is actually some clever stuff going on in there and not just electronic magic. If they get triggered by that they will work stuff out on their own.

Of course, a more comprehensive cascade model explanation (start at hard drive, end at processor cache and calculations) would be an a bit more traditional approach, but I worry that this will bore them and do more harm than good.

[Nuke]

tell them they can play the free version of minecraft for the pi. then tell them they have to instal it themselves. they can learn them some linux.

[Seret]

What level of computer experience do they already have? What are your objectives for the hour?

Things like Scratch should be appropriate for that age group, but get anything done an hour you'd need to provide quite a structured lesson. Programming isn't necessarily the best thing to try and tackle in a single hour though, other topics like online safety might be more practical.

[Amagi82]

+1 on Scratch. Visual programming languages are IMO the way of the future, and a way to get a lot of results for very little time spent.

[Nuke]

+1 on Scratch. Visual programming languages are IMO the way of the future, and a way to get a lot of results for very little time spent.

i dont think so. in the future programs are going to grow even more complex than they are now, and its very hard to discribe a complex system with diagrams. case in point, hardware description languages. in the olden days when you wanted to design a cpu or other digital device, you did it with schematics of the logic gates, which are themselves very intuitive. but as digital design become more intricate, schematics were no longer sufficiently intuitive. languages such as vhdl and verilog came into existence to define that hardware with code. initially for simulation, then for use in devices such as clpds and fpgas. they are also used to design new architectures. designing a modern cpu would be very difficult with schematics.

there are some niches where it works though. robotics is a good one, you got things like ladder logic and robotos. where the control over the system need not be very granular. also for educational purposes, like what the op wants. i remember programming my lego smart bricks was always fun (though these days i use nqc/nxc).

Edited June 18, 2014 by Nuke

[hugix]

You could tell them the history of the computer. Nothing technical. Just the story of Bletchley park, Jobs & Wozniak, TimBL, Microsoft.

[rtxoff]

or you can show them

:-)

[Red Iron Crown]

You could teach them the importance of spelling and grammar in online communication, along with the importance of avoiding duckfaces in selfies. Or selfies in general.

[theend3r]

Have them play with the command prompt. I remember when we had lessons on Linux terminals and we spammed each other with message loops which made it difficult to turn them off and some people even composed simple songs or made other people beep furiously. Great fun and you learn a lot. The teacher went crazy though when the all the computers started producing high pitched sound sent by one guy - we had to disable all communication. In other words some basic networking should be both useful and interesting. Or teach them how to hack passwords by resetting bios and booting from external drive

[lajoswinkler]

Go with the history of computing. Abacus, ENIAC, you know the drill.

[xcorps]

GIGO. Not just in programming, but in "social" networking. Putting garbage on Facebook gets you garbage back and has consequences.

Edited June 18, 2014 by xcorps

[Whirligig Girl]

Try showing them an hour of code. http://csedweek.org/

[cantab]

I think you have to decide what you want to teach (and know what the school are expecting). You've got the very fundamentals - play with things like mechanical logic gates, build an adder, that kind of stuff. Or "models" of a computer that have the children following defined instructions. Then you've got stuff like coding, which is pretty neat but I'm not sure how much you can cover in an hour. Then there's user-level stuff, which might be less "inspirational" but things like how to stay safe online are definitely worth teaching. And you've even got hardware maintenance, build-your-own-PC type stuff, though I wouldn't recommend that for an 8-year-old class since computers are pretty spiky inside and you don't want kids wearing plasters at the end of the class.

[SolarLiner]

8-yo children might be far more intelligent than you might think! My sister helped me sometimes getting me out of bugs I wasn't able to remove myself, just by telling her what I was trying to accomplish, what did the script do, and obviously, explaining the logic. In 20 mins it was done!

And there's one thing too: they have to relate to things while learning. That way, showing real examples from what they like, and then explaining how it's done (kid-mode huh, not the technical aspect right off ^^) helps them relate the knowledge to things they appreciate, and if they have the taste to learn and discover (which a lot have, it just gets turned down by a lot of things), they will be interested.

So, learn a bit about them before teaching them; what they do, what they love (technology-wise of course), and then try to adapt yourself and you'll hit their brain in the right spot. For example, if the majority answers that they love playing Angry Birds, you can start on doing some logic by saying "When the bird is launched, the game then constantly looks if the bird is going to crash on a pig, a block or any other item. In fact, everytime the bird moves, the game thinks "okay. Is the bird going to touch something? No? Then continue on. Yes? Then look what type of object it is. It's a pig? CRUSH HIM! It's a block? DESTROY IT!

Then the game continues on, the bird moves a little bit more, and the same checks starts all over again."

Just like that, you introduce them to logic, and then can break down to boolean logic: "I need a pear and an apple. Do I have a pear AND an apple?" and then "DO I have a pear OR an apple?" "Do I have a pear XOR an apple?", explaining each the the terms.

I don't think you can go as far as teaching about coding if you take that path. But if you really want to make them discover coding magic, you can then check out Tynker, I never used it, but from what I read it seems a good options for "littles" to get in touch with programming.

[TheDataMiner]

Do you think it would be a good idea to demonstrate basic computing principles via minecraft redstone? You can store bits and build logic gates with it

[vger]

Computer logic with if-then could be fun.

Not that they need to learn to code, but if you handle the coding, you could have a very basic game, and have the kids making suggestions in pseudo-code to teach an AI how to accomplish something. They'd probably have a lot of fun with that.

[ZedNova]

Whatever you end up doing, integrate candy into it somehow.

[Skyler4856]

Scratch, and basic software dev.

[Seret]

Or you could teach them something disguised as fun. Show them how to set up a Minecraft server. You could hang a lot of teaching points off that: the client-server model, software dependencies, how a config file works, internal and external IP addresses, etc.

[KvickFlygarn87]

Hm, teach them online safety - don't use the same password on everything, use secure passwords, don't share your passwords with anyone you know, etc.

[lodestar]

Python for kids.

[Nibb31]

Scratch

http://scratch.mit.edu/about/

[tom1499]

I think the problem with teaching them programming is they learn about software, not the hardware itself. But then the problem with logic gates and the like is that there is a VERY big difference between Gates and a full Computer. It would take a long time to explain how it fits together, especially to 8 year olds. I was going to say I think scratch is wrong, but then I thought back to when I was about 7 or 8...

The IT teacher had this program thing, where you had a blank white space, and a window at the side with arrows in it. The idea was that a you stacked up these arrows paired with numbers, to move this robot thing on the canvas. So you would do:

(turnClockWise) 90

(forward) 5

-where the text is replaced by an icon corresponding to the action (duh)-

to turn the robot clockwise 90 degrees, then move forward 5 spaces. It then moved on to having a pen that traced a path, and you had to draw shapes with it. Hate to brag (I don't) but I beat everyone in my class, and had moved on to the advanced shapes because I had finished all the normal ones. Then I sort of naturally wanted to learn programming 2 or 3 years later. But we only did that program on day, never again. But when I went home I looked it up and tried to download it. I think the thing with teaching the kids to code with scratch is to make sure that it draws their interest in so much that they do it at home. 1 hour can't teach a kid to become a master scratch programmer, but a weekend playing with it might. You can teach a kid some stuff about Motherboards and screens, for them to forget, or the way of the code, which sticks in your head forever. Of course that's my onion.

TL;DR

Some stuff about how I thought teaching hardware was better than programming, had epiphany, thinks getting the kids to program themselves at home is better.

Edited June 27, 2014 by tom1499