Computer exhibit and school lkids - was Re: Corn Puffs box misinformation

From: Hans B Pufal <hansp_at_aconit.org>
Date: Sat Oct 12 01:02:01 2002

Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Owen Robertson wrote:

>>I've always thought that computer literacy classes in schools should teach
>>computer history.

> There have been complaints made about my spending time in my Operating
> Systems class teaching the history! ("I don't want to hear about Gary
> Kildall; I just want to know what to click on!")

We are exhibiting some old computers (PDP8/f, IBM 5110, Tektronix 4052,
Xerox 1186 etc all working to some extent or other) and have had visits
from school classes. Yesterday a TV team came to film and part of the
show was an interview with a 10 year old or so girl who affirmed that
you could do more, and more interesting, things with old computers than
with new ones! The interviewer asked if she was sure and she said yes!
Out of the mouths of babes...

Another class a girl of about the same age who in the course of about 30
minutes managed to master binary, octal and was on the way to
understanding the basics of PDP-8 machine language before being dragged
away when her class left. There is hope yet!!

One thing I continue to struggle with is how to display a working system
so as to attract the interests of the passing visitor. Any display must
be quick enough to capture the visitors interest but not too long to
bore them. It must connect with the visitor to make sense to them and
must somehow show the essentials of the software. I don't think I have
solved that problem yet in any general way.

For the PDP-8 we have the CPU box, no terminal. I loaded a 30
instruction program to calculate the average of a sequnece of numbers
entered on the keys. It takes about 15 minutes of so to teach a group of
kids to enter binary numbers and read the result. The most common
comment (before we start) is : "Where's the screen and keyboard?"

  -- hbp
Received on Sat Oct 12 2002 - 01:02:01 BST