[Edu-sig] CS teaching approaches

[Andy Judkis]

Two feet of snow on the ground, a good time to respond . . .  I teach 
high school kids, but I really think that most of what I teach should 
have been covered in middle school.

I'd recommend:
1) Having the kids open up computers and taking a good long look at the 
stuff inside.  Talk about what's in a chip, what a printed circuit board 
looks like,what a bus is.  Take it out of the realm of magic, make sure 
that kids know it's just a machine -- albeit a really really fast one.
2) Talk about the history.  Show them some really old computers.  Talk 
about the Analytical Engine. Make sure they know what Moore's Law is.
3) Show them some things about operating systems (the task manager, a 
DOS command window) and talk about viruses, worms, zombies, botnets, 
cyberwar. . . stuff like that
4) Make sure they know how binary numbers work, and how sound and images 
can be encoded.
5) Teach them about the internet -- packets, IP addresses, TCP and IP, 
routers, DNS -- not in detail, just enough to demystify it a little.  
(In the very first class I taught, I vividly remember one student 
sputtering in frustration, "But what IS the internet?")
6) Have them do some simple web pages by writing HTML tags with a text 
editor.
7) Introduce them to programming.  I use Python (starting with RUR-PLE) 
but for middle school, I'd do Scratch or Alice.
8) Have them research some cool/scary things that are happening with 
robotics and AI, and have them give presentations to the class.

To me, the important thing is to get them to not think of a computer as 
a magic black box, but instead to get under the hood and think about how 
things work. (see 
http://extremities.com/pct/index.php?nxt=intro&sub=guyundercar)  The 
very first thing I have kids do is make up a list of things that they 
wonder about -- I'm actually rather proud of that particular assignment: 
http://extremities.com/pct/index.php?nxt=intro&sub=goodquestions

Best of luck -- I'm eager to hear what you come up with.

Andy Judkis
Academy of Allied Health and Science
Neptune, NJ