In 2011, my neighbors kid was coming over a lot to play games.
I always tried to give the kid a mix of 1/2 edu-tainment homework in order to earn game playing time.
When I asked if he wanted to see the inside of my PC, he said 'Yeah!'
When I opened it up the first thing he did was to stick his finger right into the CPU heatsink fan.
That’s when I figured I should teach him what’s in there and I made him a slideshow.
I share this link on my website for the show, but it’s way out of date.
I was updating it but thought it might be a fun group project for Level 1 Techs.
You do the info, I will coordinate it and do the final art just so the whole thing has some consistency.
I will try not to impose my designs on the group.
Naturally, everyone is welcome to customize the show to cater to their own child.
The first thing we need to change is the title. It’s funny for me but not many kids are into R-rated Woody Allen movies. I don’t know what I was thinking back then, I think the art is kinda ugly now. Some of the slides are too complex. I welcome design input or images. This is mostly about changing DDR3 to DDR4, for example, but any and all CONSTRUCTIVE input will be welcome. I’m sure I made some mistakes back in 2011. We are redoing the whole thing so help with the corrections. The slideshow is mostly hardware focused now but I think it needs networking, software and anything else you might feel that would be USEFUL FOR KIDS.
What do kids do on computers these days besides gaming?
What’s cool for your kids? What colors do they like?
How long is your child’s attention span?
What will your kid ask after they are done with the show?
The Plan:
Review the 26 slide PDF.
Pick a slide and please limit your comments or images to one slide per post.
Please do not attempt to redo the whole thing by yourself.
Suggest stuff to be deleted in the name of simplification. There only 26 pages now. I think there should be less, not more, to keep a fidgety kid who just wants to play Rocket League interested.
Dumb it down and simplify the slide you are working on.
Our target audience is 6 years old. Please think of the children.
This will get confused if a post says ‘the GPU should be a future proof VEGA3 with a 5 nanometer process, that SDD should be a Samsung model X47-alpha, all kids need a water cooled CPU radiator, Fiber is the only network that kids will ever need to know about’ all mashed up into one post. I know how much everybody loves to discuss specifications. That is not needed this time.
Generalize things so an ultra-n00b can understand it.
Try to be fun and informative.
Let’s try to make it so after a kid learns it, she can teach it to their Grandma.
Real Real Simple.
Id stick with one subject. If your talking hardware, just talk hardware, if you want to talk networking, make a separate one on how computers communicate.
I think you might need to pull back on some of the topics a bit. How well is it received? Do 6 year olds actually understand some of your assumptions? volts, alternating current, usb, MB (you never said this is short hand), I/O, IDE, SATA, aluminium, platter, articulator, record needle, magnetic pulses, IT, transistors, SOC.
Maybe some 6 year olds will know some of this? (ive no idea), but this seems like a lot of stuff that a 6 year old probably doesnt know, some of them are just words for a thing, but others are concepts that you need to know more about (volts, current, transistors, etc.)
This might be a good video showing different levels of explination
I’d keep the topic singular, explain the parts of a computer, id keep the language simpler and use words that don’t need further explanation to a child unless they are really required.
Thanks. I figured if we target a 6 y/o, we may reach an 8 year old. I taught 3 boys 6 ,8 and 10 with it once.
I loaded each slide and did not read from it at all. The kids needed practice reading, so i left some complex stuff up for them so I could figure out their comprehension.
Lesson plan: Here is a complicated jpeg,
Here the wire inside my running PC (Don’t Touch It!) and
I’ll try to make my simple TL;DR explanation short.
That is one of the main things I need help with. Shortening the text and Simplifying it.
When i showed the kids they were bored to play games so I just skimmed and I only did one revision 7 years ago. At the time it earned a few hits.
You can take slide three and merge several details, from the next few slides, while expounding on that information later.
Slide 3:
Title - Internals: The Basics
(Leave the image as you have it, because that’s great)
Motherboard
CPU
RAM
Storage/HDD/SSD
I would leave GPU off (for now), as some computers have an integrated graphics chip. And, technically, a GPU is not required for the boot process. I guess neither is the HDD, but it’s more common than the GPU.
While you’re spending more time on Slide 3, you’re saving more time flipping between slides and potentially creating confusing (same image, different words).
When you dig deep on the components later, remove the image of the motherboard and use the secondary images you have.
Sorry, I know you asked us to not “change the whole thing”, I do not want to over step my bounds or offer information overload. Just some suggestions coming as they hit
Most kids don’t care about the computer.
They just wanna play games. Show then the eye candy and they will get into PC’s.
This tutorial was made for them to poke in my PC while I was talking.
My PC has a fancy GPU in it, so I had to explain where the pictures come from.
How about cutting the GPU part by 1/2, but not completely?
