Two feet of snow on the ground, a good time to respond . . . I teach
high school kids, but I really think that most of what I teach should
have been covered in middle school.
I'd recommend:
1) Having the kids open up computers and taking a good long look at the
stuff inside. Talk about what's in a chip, what a printed circuit board
looks like,what a bus is. Take it out of the realm of magic, make sure
that kids know it's just a machine -- albeit a really really fast one.
2) Talk about the history. Show them some really old computers. Talk
about the Analytical Engine. Make sure they know what Moore's Law is.
3) Show them some things about operating systems (the task manager, a
DOS command window) and talk about viruses, worms, zombies, botnets,
cyberwar. . . stuff like that
4) Make sure they know how binary numbers work, and how sound and images
can be encoded.
5) Teach them about the internet -- packets, IP addresses, TCP and IP,
routers, DNS -- not in detail, just enough to demystify it a little.
(In the very first class I taught, I vividly remember one student
sputtering in frustration, "But what IS the internet?")
6) Have them do some simple web pages by writing HTML tags with a text
editor.
7) Introduce them to programming. I use Python (starting with RUR-PLE)
but for middle school, I'd do Scratch or Alice.
8) Have them research some cool/scary things that are happening with
robotics and AI, and have them give presentations to the class.
To me, the important thing is to get them to not think of a computer as
a magic black box, but instead to get under the hood and think about how
things work. (see
http://extremities.com/pct/index.php?nxt=intro&sub=guyundercar) The
very first thing I have kids do is make up a list of things that they
wonder about -- I'm actually rather proud of that particular assignment:
http://extremities.com/pct/index.php?nxt=intro&sub=goodquestions
Best of luck -- I'm eager to hear what you come up with.
Andy Judkis
Academy of Allied Health and Science
Neptune, NJ
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