I was at a museum recently and I got to play with my kids and Ozobots.
My 3 year old and 9 year old were enthralled with them.
Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
51–60 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#52I volunteer for Black Girls Code, specifically the 9-11 year old age group, and the last thing I did that really blew their minds was build an Obby in Roblox. Almost all of them have watched youtubers go through them. Get one working, modify it, have a kid or two modify it on their own. https://www.roblox.com/create
Nice. I've just started coding roblox with my daughter (8). She plays and watches roblox players on youtube and I noticed you can make your own. So I took the time to start learning how to create a basic level and we did it together. We created a zombie tag with a large playhouse. She loved being able to manipulate the world. And she now has plans to make her own levels and youtube videos.
Edit: found roblox has an education page https://education.roblox.com/
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#531. Get a Ryze Tello drone from the DJI store (mine took 2 days to arrive by DHL), $149 with 3 batteries total
2. Show them how easy it is to program flight plans with DroneBlocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NGPrMP1r2Y
3. Everyone can try flying it from one smartphone
4. You have out-wowed most of the competition!
BONUS. You now have a Tello to play at home with.
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#54My son is 9 and in 4th grade. I got him this
https://kano.me/store/us/products/coding-wand and he loves playing and coding it.
If you think your audience is into Harry Potter, give this a try. It's like magic!
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#55Put on a "hacking" demo by using chrome debugger / inspect element to modify html. Ask kids who their favorite celebrity / athlete is, pull up their twitter and edit the tweets to say "Joe is so cool!", etc. Load the school's webpage and change the names of teachers. Make it goofy.
I've used in-browser HTML editing in elementary school classrooms to great effect. A great trick is to "hack passwords" by typing in a password (will be represented by dots), then change its "type" attribute from "password" to "text"
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#56Always Fun - kids react to Old Technology > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF7EpEnglgk
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#57How about a demo with Scratch or a LOGO turtle? You could start with a skeleton or simple sprite and let the kids suggest how to animate it or add behaviors. You'll need a laptop and projector but it would be interactive and provide immediate feedback.
When I was a kid, learning LOGO gave me the epiphany that software was "castles in the sky" and you could make anything you want.
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#58Ive done something similar before. Went with a videogame and showed them how it editing the code changed the game. They started requesting silly changes and went from there. Super fun.
I think this is one of the key things -- so many things in technology are just given to you as-is with no way to change them. The realization that all of this is mutable -- that the computer is just going along doing exactly what it was told, and that you can be the one to tell it what to do -- is a real eye-opener for a lot of people (children or not).
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#59I've done an interactive "do you know how many types of engineers there are?" for this age group that's worked really well. Timeframe: 5-15 minutes "Can anyone name a type of engineer?" and for each shoutout, talk a little about what each does. The guessing keeps everyone's attention. Types: software/computer, electrical, mechanical, chemical, environmental, civil, nuclear, aeronautical, etc. Bonus: bring 2-3 props (…
Oh gosh I just realized I don't have the self control to teach children. Context: I'm a software engineer. All my explanations would be the "realistic" but kinda sarcastic answers. Computer Engineer - Copy's pastes code until it works. Rocket Scientists - Spend 50% of the time designing rockets, and 50% of their time hoping the rocket doesn't explode. Locomotive Engineer - Whoops this isn't a real engineer! /s /s
Hey, at least locomotive engineers never copy and paste from StackOverflow!
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#60scratch.mit.edu My kid is using it literally this minute. You can very easily make a program where the sprite follows the cursor until it catches it. Or two sprites that bounce off each other. Or anything more complex, with sounds, background images, and so on.
+1 to Scratch. It's the most learnable programming environment for kids, kids can easily make things that are personally meaningful to them, and the community is great.
I'll also plug my own Python Play, which is a Scratch-like Python library meant to be used by kids as an intro to programming: https://github.com/replit/play