Re: [Staffslug] input wanted
On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 22:27 +0000, Chris Snow wrote:
I'm soon to run a "lunchtime club" at the school which
I work at. It's
30 mins or so once a week on practical computing.
Hello Chris,
This sounds a great idea :-)
Would you like to contribute some suggestions? Here's what I plan
to
do:
I certainly will be covering PC architecture (I don't have other
hardware like MACs) - Disassembley and reassembly, other physical
stuff. Networking too, ending up with 5 machines on a LAN running web
servers.
This is useful stuff - network knowledge is shamefully neglected
in preparation for a world that can't exist without TCP/IP.
However while disassembly/re-assembly is great fun (in pre 8-bit
computer days I spent my youth building wirelesses and analogue
synthesisers :) - I'd say you may need to broaden it to get
non-geeky kids, and particularly girls, to join in. Which is why...
I plan to get them to code some simple "hello world" php,
then connect to their server and view their pages.
... web stuff is such a great idea. It's instant :-)
I'd be more inclined to start the kids off with Python, for all
sorts of reasons, but if PHP is what you know well then it makes
sense to start with that.
Once they've got the idea of scripting languages and dynamic
webpages, you could move on in the following term to some
Ruby-on-Rails if there are a few solid geeks emerging - writing
some blogging software with a few lines of code should open
their eyes to the possibilities of today's web frameworks.
Before you know it, they'll all be dot com billionaires. ;^)
On a more serious note, once they have a bit of IT knowledge how
about linking up with a local community group or two who need
IT help? It needn't be hardware/networking stuff; they could
help set up and admin a CMS for example.
Best of luck with this, and I'd be interested to hear how it
goes, whatever you decide to do.
Cheers,
- Richard
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Richard Smedley, rs(a)m6-it.org
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