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I 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…
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> Ask them simple questions that they never asked. This is key to teachinging about high-tech engineering: don't paint over vast swathes of the stack with "it just works" or "it automatically knows". Take one specific thing it does, and drill down the pyramid, from high-level ideas about user intents way down through platforms and compilers and operating systems to wires and semiconductors. There's nothing particular…
>> high-level ideas about user intents way down through platforms and compilers and operating systems to wires and semiconductors. Indeed. I did one like that for software developers, just in the reverse order (starting from charges and voltage all the way up to how a microprocessor executes code). I just wrote about that in this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20088868
I'm lucky enough that I started my career in software as an EE. As a result, while my CS friends and colleagues can run circles around me when it comes to high-level website/UI/game design, anything C, ASSEMBLY, BASIC or VHDL related they'll come ask me. Knowing what is happening at a physics, to component, to circuit, to system level really makes software "click" compared to the top down way of learning from my experience.
One of my interns did something like this for himself as the school’s dashboard for grades worked inconsistently (high school) so he built a tool that logged in once per hour and checked his grades for any changes and notified him when there were.
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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!
(by flexible hours I mean he has no sleep schedule and may have to work 12+ hour shifts at any time of the day, with the possibility of a 8 hour break and another 12 hour shift)
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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
Rocket science is easy! Rocket engineering on the other hand...
If so sign me up! :D
I once attended a banquet dinner and shared a table with a female FBI agent and her husband. The entire table was enthralled by her fascinating stories of the field. Someone finally asked the husband what he did. He said “IT”. The conversation quickly shifted back to his kick-ass wife.
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Make sure they didn't do this in school already before you do, my 5'th grader was trying to show this to me yesterday :-)
Yeah. My kid in Year 4 (Grade 3) has been doing this with his classmates. They fake their on-screen scores on TT Rockstars (a times tables game) and other shenanigans. So they might not be impressed if they have already discovered it.