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Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

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Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#221
post #120

My Dad did the coolest one for my fifth grade class that everyone still remembers. He showed us how binary addition in a calculator/computer works by giving us all 0 or 1 notecards. Then since the class is already arranged in a grid, each row is a single digit (8 bits). Then He gave input numbers and we raised our cards according to which bit we were an the person to the left of us. Honnestly I don't remember the spe…

Each kid is a little bit

Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#222

Not super relevant to your problem, but a fun anecdote: I used to be a game developer at EA Tiburon, the studio that does Madden among other games. Somehow I got roped into giving a short talk to a bunch of visiting high school students. Beforehand I emailed a bunch of game teams and asked them to send me screenshots of their weirdest bugs. I got all sorts of fun stuff. When a game with rendered animated humans goes…

I'm not a game developer, but I was playing around, writing a simple iOS game that uses OpenGL ES. Some of the bugs were pretty trippy. This one was actually animated with the cells continuously changing.

https://i.imgur.com/jX0KNxt.png

Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#223

Maybe I'm old school but I think it would be neat to bring an old rotary phone and pull out your cellphone and explain how modern phones would be magic to someone 50 years ago! edit: this is probably boring and would not be age appropriate

The way area codes of major cities (e.g. 212) are compressed is really clever, but sadly, I don't see it impressing fifth graders.

Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#224
We do a club at my kid's school called What's Inside. It is modeled after the popular YouTube channel by the same name. But we don't simply smash stuff open like they do on that channel. We give the kids some tools and let them take apart various gadgets, then talk about the stuff inside. It has been a hit. We usually ask for broken gadgets to be donated for the club. They are usually electronics, but anything that is safe to take apart is fun and educational.

Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#227
- Demonstration of an evolutionary algorithm, e.g. http://boxcar2d.com/

- Things you can automate, e.g. scraping cartoons from the web with a simple shell script

- Capturing insecure web traffic with Wireshark, e.g. making someone post secret data with their mobile phone that you can eventually see

- Show how you can remotely access another computer

Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#228
Grab a makey-makey, some aluminium foil, some cardboard boxes and a laptop running Stepmania. It takes about 15 minutes for kids to hands-on make their own DDR machine. (Dance dance revolution). I've done this multiple times with upper primary and lower secondary, and it's always gone down really well.

Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do you call an engineer that designs/optimises/etc. locomotives?

I'd go with SapporoChris's answer with Mechanical Engineer. Locomotive Engineer's basically are the one in charge of operating the locomotive. What most people think of as a "Conductor" is actually a lower level job and is mostly paper work from what I hear. Source: Close friend is a Locomotive Engineer in Canada.

We call them train drivers in the UK. I think it's a bit too muchbto call them engineers...

Re: Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

#230
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To enable experimentation like that, I'd like to see mobile browsers include developer tools as well. More and more people grow up using a smart phone as their main computing device, and I think they should be given the opportunity to tinker with that as well. I realize that developer tools are information dense and fitting them on a smartphone screen would require a significant effort to redesign the layout (especia…

You can use Chrome Remote Debugging to access the developer console for a mobile device. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/remo... You can also load Eruda with Javascript. https://github.com/liriliri/eruda

The problem with remote debugging is that it apparently requires a separate device, whereas I was thinking about people who only have a smart phone. That's what I meant by "Maybe it would be possible to connect to the remote debugger with an on-device client?"

The Eruda approach to inject the debug console with a oneliner in the address bar seems like a possible solution, though. Thanks.

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