Kids Think the Darndest Things About How Computers Work (acm.org) 226
"When visiting a series of eight primary school class rooms recently, CS professor Judy Robertson talked to children aged 5-12 about how computers work and discussed pictures they drew of what they thought is inside a computer," writes Slashdot reader theodp:
"In my view," Robertson writes, "computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation — the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all out computational thinking ourselves; that's why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it."
She notes, "What the pictures, and subsequent classroom discussions told me is that the children know names of components within a computer, and possibly some isolated facts about them. None of the pictures showed accurately how the components work together to perform computation, although the children were ready and willing to reason about this with their classmates. Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer. One boy, who had been learning about variables in Scratch the previous day wanted to know whether if he looked in his computer he would really see apps with boxes full of variables in them."
Time to get the Walk-Through Computer (1990 video) out of mothballs?
"Many of the children knew the names of the components within a computer: a chip, memory, a disc, and they were often insistent that there should be a fan in there. They knew that there would be wires inside, and that it would need a battery to make it work...."
But one student confessed that while they knew that a computer was full of both devices and code, "I am not sure what it looked like so I just scribbled."
"In my view," Robertson writes, "computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation — the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all out computational thinking ourselves; that's why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it."
She notes, "What the pictures, and subsequent classroom discussions told me is that the children know names of components within a computer, and possibly some isolated facts about them. None of the pictures showed accurately how the components work together to perform computation, although the children were ready and willing to reason about this with their classmates. Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer. One boy, who had been learning about variables in Scratch the previous day wanted to know whether if he looked in his computer he would really see apps with boxes full of variables in them."
Time to get the Walk-Through Computer (1990 video) out of mothballs?
"Many of the children knew the names of the components within a computer: a chip, memory, a disc, and they were often insistent that there should be a fan in there. They knew that there would be wires inside, and that it would need a battery to make it work...."
But one student confessed that while they knew that a computer was full of both devices and code, "I am not sure what it looked like so I just scribbled."
Well ... (Score:2, Interesting)
They also don‘t know how a car or a locomotive works and if they are from the South, how Evolution works.
Re:Well ... (Score:4, Funny)
And if they are from the west coast, how human reproduction and genders work.
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When you believe in God, a baby comes out between the legs.
Is this the standard Catholic defense when caught with pants down and with a child? It doesn't seem very convincing.
How a car works ... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right - and it's not just kids.
A couple of years ago I was asked to teach a Masters level course in software development. During one discussion, we somehow got on to the subject of cars, and what made them go. Faced with baffled faces and a stunned silence, I drilled a bit deeper and found that none of them actually knew how an internal combustion engine worked - had no idea as to what made it go other than they had to put petrol in every so often. They had cars, drove them, but none of them knew anything about the mechanism under the hood.
This reminds me of a visit to France earlier this year. My wife and I were walking past a couple when my wife slowed down, turned to me, and said "I don't think the man knows what to do about their flat tyre - the girl has just said to him that he'll have to ask someone." They were well into their 20s, but neither had a clue. With the help of my wife as a translator, I changed the wheel for them. You should have seen their faces when I 'amazed them' with my knowledge, e.g., I knew that there'd be a special adapter required to take off one of the wheel-nuts; and that it was probably in the car's glove compartment (which it was).
I'm at a loss to explain this. Where has 'curiosity' gone; especially in males!? They all seem too much into self grooming products and how they look these days.
Curiousity in automobile technicians (Score:3)
Where has curiosity gone in automobile repair technicians?
My car overheated out on the highway and had to be towed in. I OK'd the repair shop of the towing company to work on it.
They assured me the water pump was fine but the electronically controlled fan was not coming on. They replaced, at considerable cost, a special ECM operating the fan. That didn't fix the car, so they recommended replacing my "plugged radiator" at considerable expense, especially in labor considering the tight "packaging" in
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What your need to learn is that:
What I learned (Score:2)
What I learned is that I should have stood up to my wife and executed on my plan to drive her 24-year-old Chrysler without working A/C up to my dad's place and exchange it for our 21-year-old Camry with powerful A/C so we weren't under pressure to repair the 23-year-old Ford to drive around the in-laws coming into town on a hot, summer holiday weekend. My wife admitted later that my plan could have saved us a bunch of money, either with a do-it-yourself water pump replacement or making a family decision w
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What you should have learned was don't buy a Ford and also change your coolant every two years whether you think it needs it or not unless you are running an alternative like Evans NPG.
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Ruling out the fan for example is normally pretty straightforward. Usually there's a simple temperature switch that turns the fan on and off. You can heat this up with specific temperatures of water and check the resistance values against spec. The fan itself can be tested by bypassing this temperature switch.
Or ev
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It's not a lack of curiosity, it's a lack of opportunity/need and directing their attention elsewhere.
I learned to charge a tyre when I saw my dad do it. These days cars are a lot not reliable and I've never had to use that skill. The younger ones just don't have the opportunity to learn or a pressing need to.
Same with computers. Even the embedded people often don't know much about the hardware, they just buy a driver library or protocol stack. Someone else mentioned Arduino and Pi, but both of those are mo
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There are too many things to be curious about. I know how to put computers together, have built my own since a guy I knew when I was 14 who worked for Digital helped me put in a second HDD in my store-bought computer and took the time to point out the different parts.
My car had a flat some years back. I had a general idea of what to do, but I ended up having to get a friend to come give me a hand anyway with the details of how to most easily get the car propped up on a jack and so on. I suspect I can do it
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Where has 'curiosity' gone; especially in males!? They all seem too much into self grooming products and how they look these days.
There are probably a lot of small reasons that contribute. Here's just a few off the top of my head:
I suspect that a sizable part of it is that increases in minimum wage have resulted in higher teen unemployment. If you can't find a job (because you don't have sufficient skill to command receiving the minimum wage), what else is there to do but sit around and preen. If you can't afford to buy her flowers, you'd better damn well look good? I learned plenty of useful skills doing low wage work that I would
Re: How a car works ... (Score:2)
There are fewer points awarded for trolling an A.C.
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"This reminds me of a visit to France earlier this year..........They were well into their 20s, but neither had a clue."
Dude... they're French. Bad example.
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To be fair, a lot of the opportunities of the past are now gone. I designed and built my own 6800 computer in high school using wire wrap and TTL parts and, of course, a 40-pin 6800 microprocessor, and wrote my own assembler for it (cue the AC old-guy diatribes). That was in the late '70s. My brother and I also blue-printed and hot-rodded a 350 V8 Camero from the frame up a few years later.
I still design and program electronic things for a living, but soldering up a Beagleboard is not something you can do a
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Where has 'curiosity' gone; especially in males!? They all seem too much into self grooming products and how they look these days.
Very insightful. I would argue that "curiosity" is actually a very rare trait amongst people, adults in particular. In a way, "curiosity" is being actively bred out of society. There is no need for curiosity and its existence challenges those would seem themselves as our masters.
Ignorance is a glorious way to live. Magic becomes much easier and more visible. *sigh*
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In france, the compulsory formation before you get the driving license teaches you how the car works, and how to do simple maintenance on it, including changing a flat tyre and checking lubricant levels. You have to pass an exam and cannot get the license without demostrating this knowledge.
So I find your anecdote... quite peculiar.
What can I say .. it happened in Caen; perhaps the locals there know how to get around the regulations.
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My kids do. They can see the pistons (Score:2)
Any kids who spwns much time around me end up knowing how an engine works, because I show them any chance I get.
Showing them the internal workings of a CPU is a bit more difficult. My four-year-old will have some understanding within the next few years, somehow. She already understands wireless internet uses radio waves from the towers she sees, or our home router / AP. She understands that her iPad can't do video in the car because we're too far from the router and the radio waves can't reach. She can't S
I came to say this (Score:3)
Less the apt but unnecessary dig at creationists.
It's progress when people don't have to know what's inside the box. People used to have to know how their car worked so that they could work on it all the time. Cars used to have daily maintenance which had to be performed by a mechanic. Now they go thousands of miles before the first time an inspection even has to be performed. Computers, the same. No more checking for corrosion on wire-wrap terminals.
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Yep. Curiosity is good, but it's impossible to know how everything works. There are countless critical processes that most people know nothing about. When's the last time you had to know how a credit card transaction is authorized? Or how glycolysis turns the food you ate into energy? Or how earth generates the gravity that keeps you on the ground?
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Things are fundamentally shifting though. Moore's law is dead with doubling on track for two decades. Building frameworks on top of frameworks on top of frameworks layer of layer with no understanding of what is happening beneath and just masking the leaks and problems in the highly generic code beneath isn't going to work going forward.
Faster and better chip design along with a bit of old school optimization and collapse of all those intermediate layers is going to be required and that means understanding
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That's how they got GEOS to work on a Commodore 64. Can you imagine the performance of modern software if it were done that way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Language, disability, image quality, platforms (Score:2)
One difference is that end users' expectations of software functionality have increased.
Re:Language, disability, image quality, platforms (Score:4, Funny)
"Can it display, for example, all the characters of a newspaper in Chinese, as well as right-to-left cursive text in Arabic or top-to-bottom text in Mongolian?"
Slashdot can't for sure.
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LLVM can help.
In what ways? If for the cross-platform stuff, I'd be interested to see an LLVM backend for MOS 6502 or Intel 8080 whose generated code is noticeably more efficient than that generated by cc65 or SDCC. The attempts I've seen to make an LLVM backend for LR35902, an 8080 variant used in the Game Boy, have run into problems where the thing runs out of registers fairly quickly, with too many things competing for access to register A (the accumulator) or HL (the primary pointer register).
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"just a theory"
You also don't know how science works. Theories are tested-to-exhaustion, nobody-could-disprove-this, oh-and-it-works. You may be mistaking it for either an hypothesis (a good idea if it works and tests out) or bullshit. Probably your're only familiar with bullshit, as it's the primary output of most of humanity and cows.
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Yes we do need to know this. Programmers not knowing assembly language and not understanding why sanitizing input is what made stack overflows so common.
And this is a security problem that is easy to find and to fix. With our current layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of APIs and frameworks, obscure security problems that someone with at least a halfway decent understanding of how computers work would never make will pop up. And they won't be easy to find and even harder to fix.
For reference, see the cl
Most programmers, too (Score:5, Insightful)
Truth be told, most people in the tech industry don't seem to know either. Or don't want to know. Most of our infrastructure is built on layers upon layers of buggy software, as if software was a platform.
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But that's FINE! at least its now responsive!
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Nothing gives you responsiveness like being on fire. This is true.
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Re: Most programmers, too (Score:2)
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Your mechanic may not be able to build a car from scratch, but he or she probably knows how to get the best mileage out of most vehicles.
And I dare say that most mechanics would refuse to build a car which only works with a certain brand of fuel, or spies on the driver and passengers, but that's a topic for another day.
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Truth be told, most people in the tech industry don't seem to know either. Or don't want to know.
Yes -- and that was kind of inevitable, given that two of the primary techniques used in software development are abstraction and encapsulation. Both are designed to allow (and encourage!) the programmer to not know about (or care about) what is happening at lower levels of the system, including the hardware.
It does sometimes lead to comic/tragic situations (especially when it comes to optimizing/performance), but there are nevertheless good reasons to do it:
(1) software written with full knowledge of the
Sometimes, all programmers (Score:2)
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Even that doesn't help these days. Not only do we not know how our CPUs work, we're not allowed to know.
Most [Kernel] programmers, too (Score:2)
Then Linus and crew is out of a job then.
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Linus and crew don't work at the level of any ring below 0.
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I cannot determine whether your comment is snark, sarcasm, or uninformed. That said...
Having read a few of the comments and arguments in LKML over the last few decades about preserving cache residency, page table management in the VM and VFS layers, networking and other subsystems, I think many of the kernel guys are not only working at a level way below ring 0, they are quite good at it. Based on various performance measures (which admittedly move backward on occasion), it seems to me that they are doing i
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I suspect Pseudonym was referring specifically to microcode and Intel Management Engine.
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And the equivalents from other vendors, yes.
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Moore's law says nothing of speed. It's transistor density.
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Moore's Law hasn't stopped, but it hasn't given us an automatic performance boost across the board for a while now. It's still there, but it's giving us things like wider vector units, more cores, etc. You know, all the stuff that Python and Javascript programmers can't take useful advantage of.
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Moore's Law stopped a couple years ago.
Not exactly, but it's slowing down. All societal exponential curves are really S-curves whose asymptote is still distant. Remember all the scary population curves we had going a generation or so ago?
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What a ridiculous study (Score:2)
When I was in primary school, I had heard of a computer, but I did not even know what it was.
When I was in middle school, we got a C64. I knew you could play games on it, and even make your own simple games. Other than that, I did not know what it was good for and certainly did not know what was inside, or care for that matter.
Yet, somehow, by some miracle, I, as an adult, with money to buy things, am able to purchase PC components to cobble together my own machine. Even a couple hackintosh machines.
I can e
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Thanks for the offer however I think you confused me with your dad.
Horray for Arduino and Raspberry Pi (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to write "Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others like them". But then I couldn't think of any other organisations really pushing understanding of computing technology. Perhaps Micro Bit and Beaglebone?
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RPI and its like are just an abstracted computer. At least modern computers still separate the main distinct components. The Raspberry pi is just a magic credit card that you can play minecraft on.
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If you're playin minecraft on it then you're missing the point the GP was making.
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But there is a more critical issue that the study, and most educators mi
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What has the Raspberry Pi actually contributed to learning about computers? As a development machine it's quite a bit underpowered and for learning low-level computer stuff it's also quite useless as you have a whole Linux between you and the hardware. It's useful as a small and cheap computer, but for learning I find it much less useful than a regular old PC.
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I was going to write "Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others like them". But then I couldn't think of any other organisations really pushing understanding of computing technology.
RasPi is cool not because it teaches how computers work, but because it's affordable enough to put one in every kid's hands. It's complicated enough that it doesn't teach how computers work. Arduino is the good stuff, though. It's simple enough to be instructive at that level. What would be wicked cool would be to have kids build their own "PC" out of Arduino parts. I don't know what itsy bitsy operating systems have been written for/ported to Arduino, but if you could actually use it as a PC, that would be
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While checking out a packet of "naturally rolled oats" at the local supermarket, I casually asked "how does one unnaturally roll an oat?" The checkout guy replied "When I find out, I will upload the video to youtube - direct from Sodom and Gomorrah".
Which explains where most Youtube videos come from, but I still want to know about the oats.
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Really?
Oats are seeds. Specifically, seeds from a cereal grain variety of grass.
The seeds are oblong and have a seed coat. They resemble wheat seeds. (which are another cereal grain)
They look like this. [greenthickies.com]
To roll an oat, you first remove the seed coat, either through mechanical removal, or the use of a caustic agent, like lye. Then, you steam the oat to soften the starch inside it. Then, you take the steamed oats, and squash them with a big steel roller. Hence, "Rolled".
The process makes it significantly easi
My childhood - Usborne books (Score:3, Insightful)
This is where and how I started my love affair with computing. :-D That didn't stop me reading the cover-to-cover many times over :-D
Back in '84 my school library got a few Usborne books in stock - a year before we had access to a computer
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs-of.html
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Way too young (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was 7, I thought that by writing a game's name on a floppy disk, you copy that game from one disk to another. When I was 17, I wrote a full hardware emulator. Children this young are not supposed to know the intimate details of how a machine works, give them a break.
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?? Why on earth would that be bullshit. By the age of 7 I had already started taking a stab at very simple programming (if, else, etc). I was annoyed that I couldn't copy games because I only had a single tape drive, and had to get friends with dual-casettedrive stereoes to copy games for me.
The dumb down effect in action. (Score:2)
Perhaps it is past time to remove the industry-wide dumb down http://3seas.org/EAD-RFI-respo... [3seas.org]
Sesame Street anyone? (Score:3)
Clearly the kids who made these drawings never saw this old Sesame Street clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Then again, if the episodes I have seen recently are any indication, I doubt Sesame Street plays the kind of really good educational clips it used to anymore (I suspect it started going downhill when someone decided they could make a lot of money selling plush toys (especially that ugly red thing) and switched the focus away from the educational clips and towards more clips featuring the Muppet characters who could be marketed via toys and such.
TRS80 (Score:4, Insightful)
y'know... there's a reason why a friend of mine, when his children asked "dad, dad can we get a computer", he went up into the attic, brought down a TRS80 and a stack of byte magazines, dropped them on the table and said, "here you go!"
they looked at him like he'd grown two heads or something. when they asked him about it, he said, "when you've gone through all of the programs in there, and typed them in and seen how they run, i'll get you a PC"
i have never heard of any other parent doing this. basic self-running computers just do not exist these days. not even arduinos: they require ANOTHER COMPUTER to program them.
BBC Basic, the Jupiter ACE (which ran FORTH), the ZX-Spectrum, these were computers that were *critical* to understanding.
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This is exactly how I learned computers. I was in 5th grade and our little school in the southwest of Virginia got a TRS80 that was sitting in the library. None of the adults knew what to do with it. I was the kid that liked taking things apart and figuring out how things worked, so they let me go play with it during school. It had a cassette drive and there were a couple of programs, but otherwise I taught myself BASIC on it. My parents got me a subscription to BYTE magazine and I learned everything else f
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BBC Basic, the Jupiter ACE (which ran FORTH), the ZX-Spectrum, these were computers that were *critical* to understanding.
As someone who still owns a master and a real original ace (including the cutely written book), I disagree.
At the age of the kids in the article I didn't understand that much. By 12 I was starting to get the hang of it and could program simple games and build very simple circuits by following instructions. I did later dive much deeper and learned 6502 asm using the inline assembler on th
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I suspect the kids meant to say "Playstation", not "computer".
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The computer you typed that post on is one. Jeez. Browsers magically compile and run any HTML/Javascript program you create and BASIC (among others) is a free download.
https://thenib.com/mister-gotc... [thenib.com]
You want kids to learn how computers work... (Score:2)
... then you need to get them close to the metal but make it less tedious. For instance, I would have them start with modified assembly language that was based on research, with libraries that gave kids a leg up to do cool things quickly (aka make little games, etc).
The problem with learning how computers work, it's often divorced from what kids want to use it for, aka learning for most kids will always be grunt work so you should tap into what they'd like to make the computer do and their natural curiousi
How would *you* explain it? (Score:3)
Besides the absurdity of including 5 year olds in a survey of computer hardware knowledge, how would you explain to them the basics, in a way that doesn't result in blank stares?
It's a good exercise both in communication skills (shifting your point of view) and creating a top-down view of a complex body of knowledge. Often those heavily involved with a field can't abstract.
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Or how would you draw it? I have taken low level hardware courses. If asked to draw the inside of a computer I would draw a rectangular box with squiggles inside.
MY drawing skills are well below a grade 1 level, and I never took a course explaining how to draw any computer schematics.
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Besides the absurdity of including 5 year olds in a survey of computer hardware knowledge, how would you explain to them the basics, in a way that doesn't result in blank stares?
It's a good exercise both in communication skills (shifting your point of view) and creating a top-down view of a complex body of knowledge. Often those heavily involved with a field can't abstract.
I suspect that teach is of the mindset that somehow every child is a genius, and that any child can be anything they want to be, if they only try hard enough. Probably spent too much time watching those annoying commercials where some little kid imparts great and profound knowledge to all the adults around them.
When in reality, there is a whole spectrum of abilities and interests. And what was once amusing, where children would be asked questions, and give amusing answers - think "Candid Camera" or that s
Their knowlege looks fine to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know, but their knowlege looks just fine to me. That one drawing emphasises two fans - I presume you can hear and/or see them easyest - and just has simple connections between components, not even plus and minus, but let's be honest: Do *you* know how the north and southbridge play together? Or which faulty resistor makes your memory defunct and which one the USB? The last plan of a computer I saw was the C64 layout that came with the manual - and that was pretty much abstracted away too, containing only information that some tinkerer would need.
That someone thinks a piece of cheese is inside a computer is obviously someone who won't be an engineer but probably a manager or a farmer or something. But children think like that - no big deal.
Example: As a 4 year old kid I watched the Stan & Laurel piece where they take a rife and shoot at a house and at the same time it explodes because of some dynamite or something. That was the joke but as a 4 year old I didn't get it, couldn't connect the dots between one shot showing a burning fuse, them shooting and the house exploding. I went for a few years thinking that rifles have the power to blow up houses with one shot. Big deal. Children reason as good as they can, and if they learn the details behind things they correct their opinions. That's how reasoning works.
Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
Re:Their knowlege looks fine to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know, but their knowlege looks just fine to me.
Yup - it is fine
Example: As a 4 year old kid I watched the Stan & Laurel piece where they take a rife and shoot at a house and at the same time it explodes because of some dynamite or something. That was the joke but as a 4 year old I didn't get it, couldn't connect the dots between one shot showing a burning fuse, them shooting and the house exploding. I went for a few years thinking that rifles have the power to blow up houses with one shot.
My own confession - when I was around 4 or so, I was chatting with my father about our car. That was in the days where you weren't constrained to a seat belt. I was standing on the seat beside him and he was showing me things like the spedometer and odometer, and gas guage. He told me that the further we travel, the lower the gas gets in the tank, and eventually it runs out.
My logical but completely wrong mind jumped to the conclusion that driving the car forward removed gas from the tank, so driving in reverse should fill it.
And yet now, I have great knowledge about internal combustion engines, the fuel that propels them, the various mechanical devices that trasmits the force they produce to the surface they are sitting on.
Despite modern ideology, little kids are stupid. Cut them a break everyone. Live isn't an Xfinity commercial where an annoying little child teaches stupid adults about stuff. Big deal. Children reason as good as they can, and if they learn the details behind things they correct their opinions. That's how reasoning works.
Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
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My logical but completely wrong mind jumped to the conclusion that driving the car forward removed gas from the tank, so driving in reverse should fill it.
How wrong can you be? If you were driving a nice electric car and instead changed some of the directions:
Driving a car up a hill removed charge from the battery, so driving the car down the hill should replace it.
Your brain came to a great conclusion given the limited information it possessed. I'm always fascinated by the things children say. Reminds me of a joke:
Q: How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?
A: Open the fridge door and put the elephant in.
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My logical but completely wrong mind jumped to the conclusion that driving the car forward removed gas from the tank, so driving in reverse should fill it.
How wrong can you be? If you were driving a nice electric car and instead changed some of the directions:
Driving a car up a hill removed charge from the battery, so driving the car down the hill should replace it.
Your brain came to a great conclusion given the limited information it possessed. I'm always fascinated by the things children say. Reminds me of a joke: Q: How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator? A: Open the fridge door and put the elephant in.
Ha! I guess I was just ahead of my time.
But you are correct about the child's approach, and at times that is very valuble. Unencumbered by knowledge and not being afraid to be wrong, a simple yet obvious (to them) answer that we might not figure out because we know so much, and get stuck on the details.
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The encumberment of knowledge only becomes an issue when combined with assumptions. Not knowing how something works is okay, knowing how something works is great, *thinking you know* how something works can have really dire consequences.
It leads to classic overlooking. We're at work in the process of commissioning a large compressor at the moment. I have nothing to do with the project I just happen to stick my head in to hear an arguement about the control system saying that the substation is "not ready". T
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My own confession - when I was around 4 or so, I was chatting with my father about our car. That was in the days where you weren't constrained to a seat belt. I was standing on the seat beside him and he was showing me things like the spedometer and odometer, and gas guage. He told me that the further we travel, the lower the gas gets in the tank, and eventually it runs out.
My logical but completely wrong mind jumped to the conclusion that driving the car forward removed gas from the tank, so driving in reverse should fill it.
When I was a kid, I thought the car somehow determined how hard it was raining and adjusted the speed of the windshield wipers automatically. Many kids today will think the same thing, except this time they'll be right.
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Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
That's both the most true and the most false thing I've read today. I'd say 99% of software people don't have a clue what's inside their shiny beige/silver/black boxes they use daily to get work done. If you open it up and show a kid the insides, they'll shortly know more than 99% of those software devs.
There is the opportunity of great financial renumeration for that 1 percent who are willing to learn both about the coding and the innards of those shiny boxes.
I'm not an expert on what oddness drives a person to want to find out about both, but I do know mine started early. I had a truly irresistible urge to look into electronic devices to the point I got in a lot of trouble at home. My Grandfather in his wisdom, sent me monthly boxes of old electronics to tear apart.
And it's been like that ever since
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I'm not sure which film you're talking about, but I do know that it was a Laurel and Hardy movie: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Just a minor nitpick, but I do like to see people get things like that right.
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The last plan of a computer I saw was the C64 layout that came with the manual - and that was pretty much abstracted away too, containing only information that some tinkerer would need.
I thought that the C64 came with full schematics? Certainly [at least some of] the Amigas did; my 500 did, and I think my 2000 did as well.
Reason (Score:2)
The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all out computational thinking ourselves; that's why we invented computers in the first place.
No, we invented computers not to avoid the computational thinking, but to speed up computational repeat work, in particular the work of code breaking.
Using computers to avoid thinking is a new use case.
It's not so long ago that you had to be able to think and troubleshoot far more than the average person in order to use computers.
Not everyone should code (Score:2)
This is why we shouldn't be trying to teach everyone to code. We'll wind up with the homeopathy of programming.
True of most adults, even many software engineers. (Score:2)
Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer.
Okay, you software developers out there, how many of you understand every step of how your code gets converted to binary, then executed on the silicon, down how to make logic gates from transistors and how those transistors actually work?
(Not that we need to, but I imagine some number of the nerdiest among us actually do.)
When did grade school ever focus on hardware (Score:2)
Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it.
Please, describe the time and place where focusing on hardware and how code (I'm assuming assembly) executes on it, was taught in grade school?
Given what's described, it sounds like the kids know more than what they need to know. Given how few people actually ever deal with how hardware executes code, versus more people who are going to need to code (in probably abstract and managed languages), this sounds like going in the right direction.
Not just kids (Score:2)
Most adults don't understand how tech works.
The are *users* of technology and considered (sometimes) technically literate but most cellphone, tablet and PC users have no idea what goes on inside their device or how it communicates with the world.
Nobody REALLY knows how computers work. (Score:2)
All the different Spectre security holes is proof of this.
A lot of people know how some parts work but nobody knows how everything works.
But we don't need to know all that either. Depending on what you want to do, different abstractions and simplifications are good enough. Kind of knowing how a computer works is good enough for most programmers, and for others it's enough to know that the "f" on your mobile phone brings up Facebook.
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Dumb (Score:2)
Kids are dumb as hell, who cares what they think?
That 1990 video hurt me (Score:2)
That 1990 video hurt me, and something inside died a little.
Re:How would *you* explain it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have them make a few circuits with bulbs and switches. The configuration of switches controls which bulbs light. The computer screen is just an extremely complicated set of very small lights. Then show the a relay, a switch that is controlled by electricity. The CPU is then a very tiny circuit of a very large number of electronically controlled switches that determine what gets shown on the screen.
Obviously this leaves out a lot, like memory and programs, but it's enough to get the general idea across. Should they show curiosity about those things, I'm sure the explanation could be extended further.
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The problem is not that they can't tell you how huge, complex machines work together, the problem is the alarming lack of knowledge on how things work generally.
Indeed. The dumbing down of the public is scary. People know a lot of tidbits that are needed to pass tests, but understand very little, and are generally unable to figure out anything. Especially so with Google and Wikipedia at their fingertips. The word "why" might be dying, because people don't feel a need to understand anything. Even simple things become magic that's just accepted.
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I am a Computer Science Professor, and it astounds me how many people have zero curiosity and manage to go through life without understanding how or why anything works around them. They use magical thinking. They don't care how anything works!
I tried to teach my nieces about basic physics like mechanical advantage. I built a sling with block and tackle and showed 7 and 6 year olds how they could lift heavy weights. They didn't care. They are both adults now. One is a nurse. They can't/won't change a tire. T
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...And I remember with some fondness the scene in "The Hammer of God" (A.C. Clarke, of course...) when one of the protagonists buried volumes I and II in his backyard to help with the recovery process after the Event.
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Lucifer's Hammer (Niven/Pournell 10+years prior) was better and had a similar scene