What ever you do, you should incorporate the say command. Have the computer talk to the students. It will be a great attention grabber.
Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
101–110 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#102Show them the life-sized animals in AR through Google Search since a lot of phones have ARkit now
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/2/18649312/google-ar-search-...
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#103A mechanical calculator might be interesting, if you can get your hands on one for reasonably cheap, as a way to show how the ideas behind computers have been around for a long time (relatively speaking), even though modern computers are a new invention.
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#104I love the roomba that screams in pain when it hit objects:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv...
Everybody find it funny, kids can record their own voice, you see programming (with python) and sensors (with raspi).
With a raspi, you can also make a big red button to make the sound of nuke on another computer, or a nerf dart gun attracted by sound.
With a computer, you can make a youtube video downloader, a password generator, or just a joke windows stating you have a virus.
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#105- Voxatron & Pico-8 video game platforms
- kinect
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#106Pico-8, discuss programming/gamedesign, agree on a simple design, allow them to each create a couple art or music music assets. Game can be simple. Complete game in school or shortly after. Make it available publicly so they can easily access it and show their parents and friends. I did this for a game design activity for cub scouts den and it was a hit.
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#107I was recently asked by a friend who teaches 5th graders to do something similar for their school's "career month." I tried a few different things, and found the most successful was showing them how to use a web browser's built-in developer tools to inspect the source of and make live modifications to web pages. My reasoning behind this exercise was: - I checked in with their teacher ahead of time and confirmed that…
“Hey kids, did you know you can change your grades online? Check this out. Oh hey Jimmy, lets make that C into an A”
“Wow!”
“Change mine, change mine!”
I was impressed with dev tool live edit as an adult, unless kids already know about it, they’ll probably love it!
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#108something something raspberry pi blinking lights
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#109I have shown the '7 minutes of terror' video every time I go in to my kids school for the Hour of Code events.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1090
I gives me the chills every time I watch it and is a great starting point to talk about how software / engineering can solve cool problems. I also like that it has both men and women from various ethnic backgrounds.
Another video I've started showing is the Human-Machine brain implant helping this quadriplegic control his arm again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6oNoLWcDqw
With that all said, I show these specific video as they are enabled with the tooling my company produces and I think that's an important part of the message as it helps connect the dots between the presenter (me) and the uses cases shown.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
#110I was recently asked by a friend who teaches 5th graders to do something similar for their school's "career month." I tried a few different things, and found the most successful was showing them how to use a web browser's built-in developer tools to inspect the source of and make live modifications to web pages. My reasoning behind this exercise was: - I checked in with their teacher ahead of time and confirmed that…
That could be a cool way to give them an introduction to https://glitch.com/
Free, fun, collaborative place to learn and show code, remix things they like and add their own stamp and an easy way to ask for help.
https://medium.com/@kellylougheed/dark-stormy-night-with-css...
You might not have time to do something like this, but it'd be nice to include it in a resources to explore list for later. https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/create-a-multiplayer-pir...
Pretty sure all I wanted to do was make cool graphics and games at that time.
You could also show off some cool pens from codepen.io which also let you remix and play.
If you think they'd be into interactive fiction games/stories, you can run twine or texture in the browser, too, you could ask them for prompts, 'where do we go next, the cave or the castle' and then make it happen.
https://twinery.org/ https://texturewriter.com/
A little deeper in, but I once went to a tech talk where the speaker setup a http://johnny-five.io/ bot that and changed the LEDs on her belt in the room when people tweeted colors at it. You might not need a whole belt (or even LEDS, you could have a webpage change colors or words or music), but that kind of live demonstration is always fun (and comes with the caveat of live demos, which somehow don't always work when in front of an audience of skeptic students).
Have fun!