Ask HN: How should I present computer science to high school students? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should I present computer science to high school students?

7 pointstik14 comments

I volunteered to help a friend (a physics teacher at a local high school) by presenting computer science to the science club he in charge of. I believe the idea is to give about a 30 minute presentation to expose them to the topic so they can decide if it's something they want to pursue further, perhaps in college.

The students range from sophomores to seniors in high school with at least some interest in science and mathematics. The presentation can get technical even it's a bit over there heads. Also, I just found out they can have access to laptops for each student if need be.

I'm looking for ideas on how to present the topic in an interactive and attention keeping way.

You'll probably want to present it in a way that integrates real-life examples.

For example, I didn't see the value of functional programming during college, or at least it wasn't emphasized to me in a way which made me interested in it. It's only been the last couple of years in which I realize how valuable it is -- I started looking more into it as I saw companies like Twitter latch onto Scala.

So it's probably helpful to give them an idea of what sort of problems computer science is solving in the real world -- whether it's how Google uses MapReduce to process their huge datasets (and what that data is used for) or how integral computer science has been in the field of biology (with fields like bioinformatics). Talking about Facebook and how they use technology is sure to get them interested, or at least, keep their attention

I also found a site called Computer Science Unplugged (http://csunplugged.org) that has some nice activities to demonstrate computer algorithms in the physical world. I might pick a couple of those to show some of the challenges facebook and twitter were faced with.

Maybe you could have them code a simple program that does something funny.

How well do you know <student name>?

Then do a multiple choice. Then they will probably share the quiz with their friends.

Video games. That's how they hooked us in my limited high school computer science classes.

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