Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology
I've been asked to come to a 5th grade (ages 10-11) at a school with mostly underprivileged kids, from low income, immigrant families. The presenters are encouraged to do a cool "show and tell" about their job, get the kids excited etc. For example, I heard a lawyer set up a fictional courtroom and gave the kids a script to perform. A baker came in and had the kids decorate cupcakes. A FBI agent came in and let the kids try on a bulletproof vest & an FBI windbreaker.
I'm a software engineer, now R&D product manager at a cloud platform software company. Aside from programming, I'm into video games, photography, video editing, drones, and similar techy/creative hobbies.
I'd love to hear what ideas you all might have to totally wow some kids, get them excited about science/tech... And obviously out-wow any firemen, FBI agents, that might be presenting. Give me a fighting chance anyway!!
Thanks!
245 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadAlso, perhaps check if their are any makers, robot groups, model rocket groups, drones (look for a meetup) in your area. There may be someone around you. You might find someone with an interesting project to bring to the event.
After we explained the algorithm how the robot can follow the line by keeping the line between it's to photo sensors, we let them implement and experiment on their own. The programming GUI is intuitive and works with function blocks that can be customized and linked together.
It is 100% free for makers, and it is very easy to build your own voice assistants which work with it. I'm sure that the kids will love it ;)
This is the main reason RMS went from being a developer to an activist. He was (and is) trying to prevent this from happening.
Javascript Pacman.
I have a first grader who now knows how to edit the javascript file in Atom, increase the number of lives parameter, make edits to the map etc...
We also swapped out the pac man with my face, which is a source of continued amusement, especially the death animation.
Besides that, maybe doing a real-time demo of how fast it is to get a simple P2P chat webapp going with some off-the-shelf libs. Or an SMS webapp with Twilio, and then picking another parent maybe in the "crowd" to text live during the demo. Would be a great way to inspire them to try their hand at development, and might push a few over the edge who were already on the fence about giving it a try if they see how accessible the tools are to get started.
https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/
Teach them about persistent web tracking, clearing cookies, adblocking and the like and to use Firefox rather than chrome.
https://tinkerlab.com/makey-makey-review/
https://blog.eikeland.se/2015/04/24/banana-piano/
I did a peanut butter jelly robot - where I had the kids call out how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They had 10 minutes to write out the instructions. I took each instruction as literally as possible. Then I talked about algorithm design. It took about 30 minutes.
I'd suggest not trying to impress them. It's not a date. They're kids. Try to connect with them. Talk about your job, sure, but more important to share things you're enthusiastic about.
Also, from what you describe of their background, they may think that what you do is inaccessible to them. Try to reach them, especially the girls. And let them ask you questions.
Once they understand the idea, you show them the three-line code that does the computation (using opencv for python), and you let them change the math formula in whatever crazy way they want.
Now plug it into a monitor and show the bounding box around each face. They'll love this!
Show them the code. GIve them a really high level overview : "Here we tell it to get a picture from the camera. Next we look for faces. If we find one we tell it send power to the LED to light it up."
Now, another interactive moment:
Plug in a USB keyboard and Ask a student to change the color of the bounding box. Of course they won't know anything about the code. Tell them to find the word "green" (or whatever) and change it to another color name. Run it again.
Little low-risk changes like that is how most of us learned to code. Maybe it will spark interest.
But not just mindstorms, maybe LEGO boost is actually better suited: https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/boost
Everything related to coding and LEGOs can be found here: https://education.lego.com/en-us/coding
- I point them to the technology already around them, in their daily use, that they see as too obvious by now. And then share stories of how all that had come about to be. Simple things like soap, door handles, stairs, pencils, clocks, ...
- Ask them simple questions that they never asked. How does an eraser erase pencil marks? How is mass conserved as a tree grows out of a seed? Why do women typically keep long hair while men keep short? Why don't animals do their own photosynthesis instead of depending on plants (or why don't plants also move around like animals)?
- Another session I am planning will share bios of many famous people, showing them how extraordinary came out of the ordinary.
It seems surprising to me that we teach them about planets, exotic natural phenomenon like chemical reactions, magnets, etc., without first talking about much more relevant things like why does matter occupy space (or why don't we just fall through the floor below us). The result is kids (and adults) who commonly talk about voltage without having slighest idea of what it actually is.
Does technology have an answer for this?
Btw, the students find that question a lot more exciting than the others. Perhaps talking about the opposite sex is subconsciously more appealing to them, especially at that age.
This is key to teachinging about high-tech engineering: don't paint over vast swathes of the stack with "it just works" or "it automatically knows".
Take one specific thing it does, and drill down the pyramid, from high-level ideas about user intents way down through platforms and compilers and operating systems to wires and semiconductors.
There's nothing particularly magical about tech (apart from the fact that it often does what it's supposed to). The awesome part of engineering is all the work put in at all levels to make hugely complex stuff work together.
Indeed. I did one like that for software developers, just in the reverse order (starting from charges and voltage all the way up to how a microprocessor executes code). I just wrote about that in this comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20088868
I'm lucky enough that I started my career in software as an EE. As a result, while my CS friends and colleagues can run circles around me when it comes to high-level website/UI/game design, anything C, ASSEMBLY, BASIC or VHDL related they'll come ask me. Knowing what is happening at a physics, to component, to circuit, to system level really makes software "click" compared to the top down way of learning from my experience.
Give them magnifying glass and ask to watch subpixels while playing with MS Paint color fill.
As 5th grader I learned electricity with some old book from my father's shelf which explained it with hydraulic analogy[1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy
Having explained many concepts to my six year old son in an easy to understand way (things that would otherwise be out of reach even for high-schoolers) and in the form of bedtime stories (!), someone suggested me to open those up by writing a children story book. Coming one day ... :-)
There's an unspoken dogma that without a $1000 phone and pricey Mac, you can't be a creator.
Alternatively, demonstrate a very cheap Youtube or podcast production setup and show them how they could do a channel inexpensively.
Common theme is that the barriers to entry in many digital fields are lower than expected.
I've also had kids amazed with tools like React Native Expo where they can make a "real" app that lives permanently on their phone after the exercise in just a few hours (starting with some boilerplate code that they learn to customize). Walked a group of 10-year-olds through the process and they each came away with a very basic app on their phones that looked unique.
What framework(s) did you use?
You just made me realize an interesting cultural shift. I distinctly recall how an old 386 or 486 wasn't good enough to run the cool games anymore. But it was good enough for QBASIC and turbo pascal. So I spent time tinkering on that system.
Salvation came through Wal-Mart of all places and I convinced my mom that this $20(or $40, maybe I was paying half?) chip would just drop in that empty socket and double the speed of our computer. 486DX-40, that was nice...
https://www.roblox.com/create
obby means "obstacle course"
Edit: found roblox has an education page https://education.roblox.com/
Start by training it on different facial expressions or objects in the room, and transition into how ML is changing our lives at scale.