Ask HN: Seeking ideas for preschool/school projects

I'm reaching out for some creative suggestions. I have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old attending preschool/school, and both sets of teachers have asked for ideas from parents for skills they could show or projects they could help with in the classroom.

I have a background in computer science, primarily focused on web development these days. Additionally, I have loads of potentially useful toys at home, including a 3D printer, DIY CNC mill, webcams, Raspberry Pis, old laptops, etc.

What are some engaging activities or projects I could bring to either level of the schools that would be both fun and educational for the kids? Particularly ideas we could do as a class vs breaking into smaller groups.

I have had a couple of ideas so far - Processing based art interactive which the kids can suggest updates for and instantly see the changes. - Something RTLSDR based, so we can play with antennas and catch some radio waves.

Looking forward to your creative ideas and suggestions, thank you.

My big suggestion is ask your younger child what they would like you to do first. Then separately ask your older child what they would like you to do.

Do them both. Good luck.

Pottery plus blinkenlights.

3D printer and CNC are sort of too specific ... at that age, for most projects, cardboard prototypes are better (cheaper, faster, more rewarding, more parallel). Pottery is even better though because it becomes a permanent piece and lets you do painting as well.

In later school maybe basic robotics works with a pi... lesson by lesson skill building like "synth speech", "parse speech", "sensor data acquisition", "internet query", "database 101", whatever...

I'm a lecturer and it strikes me you are talking about some pretty advanced stuff there:-)

I would go for a hands-on, making exercise. I think my son was around 7 when I made a crystal radio with him. He was pretty bored until he heard voices in the earpiece. I will never forget the look of surprise on his face. You are an extremely curious, independent learner. Most students are not in my experience. The biggest challenge in education is moving the least able, to the most able forward. So consider activities that work for all. You suggested group work which is a good idea as you can assign members specific tasks.

Minecraft has a mod called ComputerCraft, which adds lua-powered computers to the game. They can read various state from the world, like redstone levels and chest contents, and move things between chests and set redstone outputs and play sound and etc. You can also upgrade them into turtles, which can move around and mine blocks and stuff. It's a nice environment for basic robotics programming with immediate feedback.

(IIRC there's theoretically an "educational edition" of this, but I don't know if I'd put much stock in that; you're close enough and personalizing the learning enough that you're probably better off just using the normal mod.)