How Do I Talk To 4th Graders About IT? 531
Tsunayoshi writes "My son volunteered me to give a presentation on what I do for a living for career day at his elementary school. I need to come up with a roughly 20-minute presentation to be given to 4-5 different classrooms. I am a systems administrator, primarily Unix/Linux and enterprise NAS/SAN storage, working for an aerospace company. I was thinking something along the lines of explaining how some everyday things they experience (websites, telephone systems, etc.) all depend on servers, and those servers are maintained by systems administrators. I was also going to talk about what I do specifically, which is maintain the computer systems that allow the really smart rocket scientists to get things into space. Am I on the right track? Can anyone suggest some good (and cheap/easy to make) visual aids?"
Go Hands-on (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to add an analogy they can relate to, also bring a long a stack of encylopedias or an OED and do the "the words in X many of these books will fit on that disk" comparison.
Pictures of your data center (Score:4, Interesting)
I always get jealous of IT folks when I see that they get to work with racks of equipment. It seems to me like it is building with Lego blocks for a living.
In addition to software installation and security, our IT folks plan out the hardware with the power and cooling requirements. I would have been fascinated by this stuff as a kid (and I still am).
Sysadmin = roadie (Score:5, Interesting)
You're an aerospace sysadmin. So you're a roadie for rocket scientists.
Rocket Science = EXCITING!
So talk about how what you do holds up the exciting stuff.
Interactive (Score:1, Interesting)
Make it interactive. IT isn't all about obscure software and commands.
Bring some cables, tagle them up, see who can untangle the mess fastest. [These go great with pictures of a 'messy' server room installation]
Bring some old media, hard drives, etc, show them how they work.
Take along some cable testers, etc, show them how they work, maybe bring a crimper and have them give it a shot.
Show some pretty graphs, show them what happens when the 'slashdot effect' happens to a server.
Its the grittier side of IT, but if they are interested in it, it's what they will be doing, [Cable pulling, router rebooting, windows reinstalling, etc].
Two words: Video games (Score:4, Interesting)
Explain how online video games work from a networking and storage point of view.
You don't do video games? Doesn't matter.
Re:Keep It Fun & Exciting (Score:5, Interesting)
You could very easily combine IT and aerospace.. bring in a laptop with a paper-airplane making program. Help the kids design and fold some paper airplanes.
You could also focus on the IT side; take a computer apart ahead of time, bring it in in pieces, and put it together and make it work. Nothing too complex, just need to put in a stick of memory, hard drive, video card, perhaps a wireless if it's available at the school.
Dunno who tagged "You don't" (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't underestimate kids. They may be immature and annoying but they aren't stupid (naive and ignorant maybe but not stupid). Give them the tools and they will learn. I had my first computers (commodore 64 and a vic 20) at around 6 years old. I learned dos by 10 and had fixed dozens of electronic, computer, and mechanical devices around the house with no help from anyone (not even books). I'd be willing to bet that this anecdotal evidence is a mere drop in the pond compared to others on slashdot. I consider myself intelligent but I've seen tons of kids that blow me out of the water. The trick is just to find the right spark to get their curiosity going. (and each kid differs a lot in that realm)
tin cans and string, seriously (Score:1, Interesting)
Tin cans and string for props .. explain that you fix the string if it falls apart or gets cut.
Re:Interactive (Score:3, Interesting)
It was many moons ago, 1st grade, the teacher's boyfriend was a telecom tech. He brought about 6ft of 100 pair cable, chopped up to the right size for all the kids in class to make bendy wire things out of (rings, soldiers etc.) Not long after that I was introduced to a volt meter. By 9 I was 'fixing' (destroying) televisions. Visual aid material is important.
SysAdmins make it possible for people to share ideas and information as well as use computer based tools. When you think of it like that, you should be able to find a way to get the kids to share etc. and compare this to what you do. Two kids drawing rocket parts, putting drawing in an envelope (packetize it) and pass it along the 8 kids acting like a network to another 'engineer' who is designing a different part of the rocket. An estes model rocket (in pieces) for them to use as a guide to draw from would be good. Make the network kids on the ends hold a nic card in their hand. cat 5 cables between the other network kids etc. Make the kids 'part' of the networked system. Just a few thoughts.
Satellites and Google Earth (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot of angles you could approach your job from but if I can give you any advice, keep it entertaining.
I'd suggest a brief talk on satellites and then show them Google Earth. I give a presentation for my daughters 1st grade class on the solar system and ended on Google Earth. One flight to the Grand Canyon overlook and they were all clamouring to see various things (mainly local stuff like the school, where the teacher live, where they lived etc.) but I'm sure 4th graders would be far more imaginative.
Re:Keep It Fun & Exciting (Score:1, Interesting)
By the time these kids are ready for their careers IT will be somehow even worse than it is now. You might as well talk them into janitorial services or lawn care. There are other people from other countries more than willing to sell their services for peanuts, while criminal contracting firms explain to a moronic manager how sending complete control over their systems to foreign countries is better than keeping it local.
Tell them you work in IT but you're really saving lives as a nurse or something.
Tell the girls to become nurses so than they can marry rich doctors.
Tell the boys to become nurses because they will get $100,000 signing bonuses and be able to loot the aged baby-boomer bank accounts when the bubble passes through because their kids got bored with their "XTreme Granny" and her snowboarding and never visit anymore. Ideally they should be encouraged to go into old age health, taking care of rich patients who've lost their minds but not their penmanship on their checkbooks.
Re:Keep It Fun & Exciting (Score:5, Interesting)
Then he cranked a generator and laughed maniacally while we screamed and thrashed around, unable to let go.
A true visionary.
Putting together a puzzle... (Score:2, Interesting)
I once had to talk to my wife's 7th Grade Class, take in a PC and tear it apart and put it back together for them, or just put a PC together depending on how much time you have. You'll have them spell bound. I describe putting a PC together as the same process as putting a puzzle together. May sure you preload your favorite Linux distro before and so it will boot right up, one hopes when your done.
Be sure to keep it simply as they have as much understand of what you truly do as your average CIO but you'll get more respect and be a god among men to these kids.
Play Telephone (Score:2, Interesting)
I would add a game of telephone.
Start a message at one end of the room and have the students relay the message until it gets to the last student where it will be a total mess.
Your job includes making sure computer messages gets from Los Angeles, CA to New York, NY exactly the way it started.
You also might want to figure out a game to explain how literal and dumb software is. Part of your job includes baby sitting the stupid software. That's how I explained my job when I'd get alarms on my phone to my kid. You may want to ask the class to volunteer the "class clown" for the hamming-up the role of stupid software.
If you do it right, you have talked a little about hardware, software and troubleshooting with a few minutes to spare.
Mod Parent Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Putting some messages in envelopes and passing them around the room is a good one.
I'd work on a failure story of some kind. Losing an envelope with part of the message is a good one. You're the guy that fixes things when messages are lost.
Re:Above all, your number 1 goal (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Keep It Fun & Exciting (Score:5, Interesting)
(Bastard, you knew that half the people here wouldn't be able to help themselves.)
Clearly you don't fully understand this crowd. 85% of the people are geeky enough to want to figure it out (and likely in multiple font sizes so that they can pick an answer that relates to pi or e or the Planck constant or some obscure prime or, well, you get the idea). However, 65% of all Slashdot readers are rather lazy (as evidenced by their lack of reading any posted article, and in many cases, even bothering to read the summary). So, using those numbers, we can extrapolate that clearly 55% of the people would attempt to find the answer. In your haste to be the first (which places you in the 10% Frosty Piss crowd), you merely estimated and rounded and didn't show your work.
Font selection would best work as fixed-width. Per this article, http://www.lowing.org/fonts/ [lowing.org] I'll agree to Courier 12 pitch for it's simplistic measurements. Printed, this font is 12 characters per inch.
12 char per inch
1 petabyte = 1.12589991 × 10^15 bytes
circumference of Earth @ equator: 24,901.55 miles
((1.12589991 x (10^15))char / (12char/in * 12in/ft * 5 280ft/mi)) / 24 901.55mi = 59,467.1314 times around the Earth at the equator
(All math performed using Google calculator, because Google knows everything.)
Layne
Re:Series of tubes (Score:2, Interesting)
Talk about (1) Scaling, and (2) Detective Work (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) When you talk about *what* a systems administrator does, it doesn't sound that hard: installing and configuring software, patching, installing and configuring hardware, researching and comparing potential upgrade options, troubleshooting problems, etc.
What 4th graders probably don't think about is that none of these things by themselves may seem particularly hard at the scale of an individual computer, but when you multiply each of these activities by a gazillion servers, routers, clients, etc., then it has the potential to become a real nightmare. So you have to use tricks & technologies in a company's computing environment that you'd never bother with at home.
E.g., "Ever seen your mom or dad install a Windows update? Remember how nuts that made them? Now imagine doing that across 20,000 desktops in 10 cities, and being given only 3 days to get them all done!"
(2) Probably a lot of your time is spent being a detective, trying to puzzle out why something that oughta be working ain't. Telling stories about some of your successful detective adventures might be entertaining.
All people (including kids) like to be told stories, so the more you can populate your presentation with interesting anecdotes, the better.
And, as one person already wrote, bringing some old or broken hard drive, circuit boards, etc. to pass around the classroom probably couldn't hurt either.
Also, many 4th graders I know think that the *monitor* is the computer. They point at it and say, "That's the computer, isn't it? Why are you fiddling with that other box?" I know that sounds crazy, but that's the way many 9 year olds think. So don't assume any understanding of computers just because they know how to play Spore.
Re:Old gear? (Score:3, Interesting)
One cheap visual aid would be an old computer and or server, so you can show them what it looks like inside a computer. My kids tend to like watching me swapping components, at least.
So does my cat. Hopefully your children won't try to be as paws-on as the cat is. Like moths to a flame...
Re:Go Hands-on (Score:3, Interesting)
little lego blocks representing servers would be fine.
I know the next LEGO® Town set: Data Center. It would have racks that the minifigs slide 3x5x1 flat blocks into, and a fold-up computer display. Months of fun play.
Re:Flowcharts (Score:1, Interesting)
"Raise your hands if you have a computer at home. Raise your hand if your family has 3 computers at home. Good. Okay raise your hand if your family has 10,000 computers at home. Really no one? I take care of 10,000 computers at my job..."