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Name: Cathy
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Around 1995
Question:
How would you teach your field (computer science) to K-6 students?


Replies:
Well, I am not actually a computer science teacher at any level, but I guess the question is how would one teach computer science? The essence of computer science is programming (at least in my opinion, though a lot of computer scientists make rather poor programmers) so getting K-6 students to learn even some simple programming language is probably a start. Somehow one has to convey the concept that computers are there to obey your orders, and you can tell them to do just about anything (that involves manipulating symbols like text or numbers). I am not sure whether the actual way computers are put together would be a good subject, but students are bound to have questions so one should perhaps have them learn the following concepts too:

--- central processing unit (CPU)
--- memory (disk and RAM as varieties)
--- Input/Output (I/O) - to screen or paper, from keyboard or other
--- Program
--- Operating system (a complicated kind of program that controls the running of other programs, and their access to memory and I/O)

Of course most of them probably already know all this. It would probably also be fun to have an old computer on hand (anything 10 years old or so is probably ready for this) and open it up to show them the circuit boards and connectors and stuff.

A Smith

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