Thanks for the thoughtful post! I love that you’re giving this course to all students in your school and share your sense that it’s frustratingly difficult to know what students get out of these kinds of classes. Sometimes I take comfort in the fact that I’m sure our “liberal arts” colleagues (language arts, social studies, etc) must feel the same all the time. Some types of knowledge and growth are really hard to measure.

I REALLY like your course website and blog — lots of great, great stuff on there. Thanks for sharing your course with me!

We start by taking apart computers and having a good look inside, and I spend about a week and a half talking about hardware, operating systems, and the history of computers and computing, emphasizing the Jacquard loom (and the Luddite rebellion) and the analytical engine. I stress that the computer is just a machine, and that the power comes from the speed, not from complexity of what it’s doing — there’s no magic. This is the least successful part of the course. I feel like the material is really important, but it tends towards lecture. I’ve worked hard on it, and it isn’t as deadly as it used to be, but I’d love to find more hands-on activities here.

Then we spend about a week on computer security — worms, viruses, phishing, botnets, DOS attacks, and so forth. Kids really seem to be interested in this, more than I would expect.

Then a few days on binary numbers, how sound and pictures are encoded.

Then a few days talking about how the internet works — TCP, IP, DNS, routers, IP addresses and ports, etc.

Then on to HTML and CSS. We spend several weeks on this. They enter the tags directly via a text editor. We use a validator to find and fix syntax problems. Almost everyone enjoys this part of the course. To me, this step is very helpful in easing the way into programming later on.

One of the assignments in this part is to give each kid the name of some computer pioneer. They have to make a web page about the person, and also to present the person to the class. I’ve tried to find some offbeat and interesting people (John Perry Barlow, Jaron Lanier, Lynn Conway, etc) to humanize the subject.

From there we talk a very little bit about Google, client/server and cloud computing, and dynamic web pages, and we spend about a week on PHP — they work in groups, doing mad-lib pages. I don’t try to explain PHP programming, it’s all based on modifying templates that I give them. Again, most kids enjoy this.

Because I teach in a sort of a magnet school for kids who are interested in medical careers, we spend some time working in groups learning about how computers are used in medicine, from public health surveillance and GIS to medical records to bioinformatics. Everyone dreads this, but it turns out to be an eye-opener for quite a few.

The last part of the class is about 5 weeks of programming, getting a minimal procedural introduction to Python — loops, branches, subroutines, variables, lists, some simple graphics with Livewires — that’s about it. As you know, some kids are much more successful with this than others. Some eat it up, some can’t wait for it to be over. Because I have all the students in the school, I feel like I have to go easy with this part, to be fair to the kids who suffer through it.

The other thing that goes on is that each student writes a paper on Robotics and AI, including some topics that I specify (Turing test, strong vs weak AI, explaining what “autonomous” means in robotics), and everyone gives a presentation to the class about some particular aspect of robotics or AI that interests them (Art, prosthetics, miltary robotics, robots in movies, whatever) These presentations take up the last few days of the class, and many of them are really good.

It’s hard to say what they get out of the class, or what specifically they can do that they couldn’t do before. This is both frustrating and alarming. They have a regular current events assignment, and they clearly have (or think they have) a better understanding of what’s going on in the world. That’s certainly valuable. I have a handout that I give them on the last day entitled “Things I hope you learned” that lists some specific items we covered, I can send it to you if you like. I guess it comes down to a quote I like from Carl Sagan: “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” Just trying to do something about that. . .

So, that’s about it. I’d love to know more about what you do, what other folks do or are planning to do, etc.

Thanks!

Andy