I don't deal with high-schoolers much, so take this with a grain of
salt. But I have tried to teach mechanical sympathy to young engineers
from non-traditional backgrounds, so I have one small suggestion to add
to the excellent advice so far.
My mechanical sympathy started with working on machines where
performance issues were visible. On an Apple II, you knew if disk access
was the problem because the floppy disk made a lot of noise; you could
hear the seeks and the steady reads. You knew about network activity
because you could watch the modem lights blink, or pick up the phone and
listen to the pattern of the bits flowing. So early on, when something
was slow, I developed intuitions as to why.
My computers have since gotten very quiet, but I still have the right
edge of the screen devoted to a gkrellm display with a dense display of
indicators. And any time I'm waiting, I check it to make sure the
displays match my intuition. When I'm wrong, I pull out richer tools to
find out why.
So my suggestion is to provide visual or auditory indicators of what you
want them to have sympathy with. Then, every time they are waiting on
the machine, quiz them as to why. Get them in the habit of guessing as
to what the machine is doing and then finding out whether they're right.
As to the finding out part, you also might want to get them some copies
of Julia Evans' zines, which cover topics like perf, tcpdump, strace,
and debuggers. They're lively, approachable, and excellent. Her
enthusiasm is contagious.
The zines themselves are here: https://jvns.ca/zines/
She also has a blog that I like a lot: https://jvns.ca/
William
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