Ask HN: How to introduce cloud computing to high schoolers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to introduce cloud computing to high schoolers?

Have been taking the analogy of Electricity. You do not produce electricity on your own but take service from the electricity provider(maybe government or private players).

I am totally bored myself o this analogy. As I have repeated this in many classes. I want to provide some other analogy. What could I provide?

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Inform them that you've put the answer key to their upcoming final exam on a poorly secured EC2 instance or s3 bucket. This technique serves a variety of students in different ways. Those who have no idea what you mean get a valuable introduction to independent study. Those who have the chops might up their game enough to crack it. Those who are rich enough to hire a smart kid to do it for them impart a valuable lesson to the group on the nature of privilege. Those who are neither smart nor rich are incentivized to stay in school. To top it off, make the final exam consist of thought provoking essay questions whose answer key takes the form of detailed notes and citations.

Slightly off-topic, but my personal take: instead of analogies for students, I wish we were teaching public servants that the same money poured into centralized data centers could fund good networking infrastructure nationwide, turning every home into a node in the country’s cloud. Decentralized by default, instead of renting capacity back from a handful of providers.

I run my own mini-server kind of thing, by putting TrueNAS into a 2nd hand bought thinkpad. Works pretty well, just gotta put tailscale to make it accessible from anywhere even under a NAT. Add pihole(as dns) and nginx(reverse-proxy) for allowing free local domain names by masking original ones using your own personal dns.

In my mind it is about access to a high performance network inside the data center and to the rest of the world as much or more that I can rent a machine there.

I'd also say there are a lot of cases where we only need intermittent service, like why pay for a whole server to sit there to serve 100 requests which could be handled by a simple Lambda function?

Emphasis on waveform concepts that make sense in the context of cloud computing and quantum computing give students a fork in the road to specialization for them to decide on their distant future.

Well I was involved with quantum computing back when you’d talk to the top people in the field and they would tell you they didn’t have any money for postdocs and I think the future for quantum computing is about as promising for a young person as it was then.

A good one I have used is the roads and transport idea. You do not build roads to travel you just use shared infrastructure when you need it same way cloud works.

You can check the Interest Lens feature on studocai.com , it will help you built different analogies on the basis of interest.

A library analogy could work too,borrow resources when needed.

Maybe they can handle a direct explanation. How many of you have a phone? How many of you use a laptop? The laptop overheats sometimes, huh? But it can do more? Well, server farms have air conditioning to let them heat up, but you can do even more. Like AI, ChatGPT Claude Gemini you know? Those fake videos you see all over tiktok?

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