I’ve been surprised at how hands-on disassembly makes my daughter understand computers better. The fact that she can pull out the memory or SDD, or point to the giant battery, or ask what’s under the fan seems to have made her much more curious and interested in learning about computers.
Has anyone else had a teaching moment through being able to open up their laptop easily?
Not a direct answer to your question I suppose, but the only reason I make decent tech job money now is because as a kid I used to break my dad’s computer then had to scramble to figure out how to fix what I broke before he got home. 😅
lol!
One time, I took an old server to a school with screwdrivers and had the kids disassemble it. They loved it. They were all like, “I know where the pictures live!” And “This is where the Internet goes in!” It was actually even fun for me, and the teacher had a bunch of questions too.
Best way to turn an old server into scrap.
It always helps for kids to see how things are built/work. Curiosity is piqued, thought process goes beyond surface level use of items. My niece at about 9 was building cad data and running a 3d printer for the parts she designed–engineer in the making
Oooh, this is awesome. Way to provide the resources and let the kid smarts loose.
If only education was hands on and real instead of infodumping and homework.
We brought a bunch of old (but still working) computer parts to a Scout meeting, took one machine apart as a demonstration, then let them loose on the pile of hardware to see how many working computers they could build.
What a cool challenge! I love that you coupled teaching with real potential for a (competency-based) success story outcome for them.
Probably not. You could try and use it as prop in teaching but it’s not going to be as good hands on experience as a desktop.
The framework components are largely hidden in plastic shells that all look the same. And screws are clearly marked and all connections are EZ.
It’s fun to build the DIY but I can’t say that there’s much to learn that way. It’s almost idiot proof.
Change the question to teach parents. Kids know more about computers than adults.
I teach programming to 18-20 year old students. They don’t know what Downloading a file means. They don’t know what hard drive is. They have never heard about an operative system. Ally kids know now is apps and cloud services
