What Interests High-School Students? 842
Jim Willis asks: "Our IT Division happens to be populated with some civic-minded people who are interested in making time available for local high-school students interested in science and technology. Question is, we're not sure the best way to do it. We're mulling around the idea of sponsoring a robotics competition or some sort of programming fair/competition. Unfortunately, we've been out of high-school long enough to not know what excites students about technology. Slashdot readers (esp. those of you in high-school): Where should we focus our attention and donate/volunteer our time?"
Sex (Score:3, Insightful)
sex (Score:2, Insightful)
video games (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't ask us, ask them. (Score:3, Insightful)
Providing your time [and more likely, some sort of facilities support and supervision] is more than enough. The best thing you could probably do is simply provide the environment for them to be creative and learn.
Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a new high for /. me thinks, to say nothing of the value of having knowledgeable (or atleast technologically aware) geeks in Government offices.
Hope the assumption here isn't that /. is full of highschoolers though (not to bilittle them in any way whatsoever).
Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
contact local schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignore the cynics posting here, you'll find plenty of kids interested in science and projects. Play top your strengths though, don't get involved in stuff that doesn;t relate to what you do or know.
You might consider something simple like a lecture on networking, followed by having them help set up a lan.
FIRST Robotics (Score:4, Insightful)
Serious suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish my school had held some sort of PHP competition. Will it attract everyone? Certainly not, but I doubt you would want to. A great many high school students ARE just focused on scoring, rims and car stereos.
Hacking 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
At least when I went to high school hacking was perceived as cool somehow. Even kids that know nothing about computers may be attracted to learning how people hack into systems without authorization. Tell them about tiger teams. Talk about breaking crypto. Explain how hacking isn't just limited to breaking into other peoples computers. I was the kinda kid that was always in saturday school and detention. I would never have been attracted to computers unless I knew that I could do "fun" stuff with them.
For added effect wear a mohawk.
Re:FIRST Robotics (Score:1, Insightful)
6000 for the tub of parts, 10,000 dollars to go national. Time to start rasing money, when the competition is every January and training is 1 year.
The source for the robot moving is written in lovely C++.
Re:A bit cynical... (Score:3, Insightful)
okay, there's lots of kids for whom it's true, but there's way more for whom it's not. there's an awful lot of kids in american schools who are actually interested in learning. science isn't the "thing" for all of them, but for many it is. i've worked with high school kids from various schools and backgrounds, and this holds (to varying degrees) across all of them. and the idea that all bright kids - or, more importantly, all kids interested in actually learning - are going to be anti-social nerds getting beat up in the back of the room is somewhere between stereotypically inaccurate and grossly outdated, likely based in personal historical issues.
to the poster: i don't really know what specifically to suggest you try, but please ignore the parent here. give your stuff a shot; you're likely to be pleasantly surprised by the response you get.
Re:Yes... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I am a high school student (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I am a high school student (Score:5, Insightful)
How many different versions of "Robot Wars" and "battle Bots" are there on TV? How many pop culture references towards fighting robots have been made in just the past couple years alone?
If you want wide appeal, robots are the way to go. Anyone will watch a robot do stuff, and the geeks would love to learn to make one. My science teacher in Middle-of-nowhere, New Mexico was able to offer a high school robotics course, and the kids loved it.
Just have a couple fighting robots, then show they can be done for other stuff, etc, and you're guaranteed to garner interest IF it is promoted right. (Link up with the school's student council to get them to promote it.
Sorry, but playing with a calculator won't appeal to that many people.
Re:I am a high school student (Score:3, Insightful)
In about one hour, we've come up with... (Score:2, Insightful)
Does this mean we have no good ideas on what high school kids are interested in or is it that high school kids are not interested in anything that would be suitable for a school environment?
Just teaching them some critical thinking skills and scientific method to make them less credulous and more logical would be useful in their collective futures.
I recently read Unweaving the Rainbow [ox.ac.uk] by Richard Dawkins and realized that *I* was a bit rusty in my critical thinking and statistical ability.
Humans love coincidence and try to recognize patterns in chaos. I think a "fun" logic course could have a lot of cool examples and make them a little less herd-like.
Focus your audience (Score:3, Insightful)
Want the real hardcore, shy away from the sun geeks?
Go for the programming contest, and they will come. The audience is going to be fairly small however.
Want a bit larger geek crowd?
Go with robotics, there are more science and tech topics involved so you will get a bigger crowd. If you feel like giving up several months of your life, mentor a local FIRST team. The kids will appreciate it. You can even get a taste for it first by helping out at a local competition.
Want to do something that will interest every teenager with a passing knowledge of computers?
Do something with HTML and some basic web design. Emphasize ways to pretty up their Xangas and LiveJournals.
Looking for more science than tech?
Sponsor a science fair. Offer prizes, maybe pose a problem and have the entries focus on a solution.
Some suggestions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Metric System (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, car speedometers measure in miles per hour. Therefore, speed limits need to be in miles per hour.
Unless you can change all the speed limit signs AND all the speedometers into kilometers per hour (AND educate all the drivers in america), it is going to be difficult to change this.
There are many other such examples.
Uh... that doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait. Let me get this straight:That just doesn't add up. I mean, when's the last time you saw a tv show [battlebots.com] about battling programmers?
Ask Them, not Us (Score:3, Insightful)
Student interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on your region. (Score:2, Insightful)
Some unconventional ideas. (Score:3, Insightful)
From what the students told me, here are some ideas to get them interested in science/computing:
Network security: Present a challenge to the students to get past whatever "web-minder" or "net-nanny" type filtering scheme the district has installed so they can get to the more, er, colorful websites. (I was very surprised and delighted to see a group of inner-city students circumvent the filtering measures the school had so they could browse the pages of low-rider magazine online. When I caught them, they were a little scared, until I told them "I won't tell on you if you show me how you did it". They showed me, and man those kids were bright.)
Physics/bio-chemistry: While many people will look down on this, kids are going to smoke weed, and no amount of force-fed DARE propaganda can stop them. Now, you have to be very careful about how to present it, but interesting projects might include Bon..er, "water-pipe" construction, asking the kids "What chemical reaction is going on when the smoke is filtered through the water?", or "What is the best diameter for the main shaft of the pipe for maximum efficiency". I once found a student going over extensive notes, with diagrams and calculations for the design of his custom water-pipe.
Of course, neither of these could ever be seriously put into play in a public school, but for a great deal of motivation for some students is found in the desire to do something they shouldn't be doing. I for one learned quite a bit about computer software trying to get pirated games to run when I only had 640k of base memory to work with. The games themselves were incidental, it was the fact that I could take any number of cracked games and get the old DOS to run it which made the process interesting to me.
I think you'd get a lot of students interested if you can somehow create the illusion of misconduct in the exercises.
Re:I am a high school student (Score:3, Insightful)
As he was saying, you get a lot of bang for your buck with programming. You can make something that'll impress people within a day's work.
There is an exception, though - I think that if you stick to lego mindstorms or other canned robotic solutions (so that in general what you're talking about is programming robots rather than building them), then it become more possible - as long as you stay away from things like "navigating a maze" or "picking up an object using vision" which are the kind of things you get in college and professional level robotic competitions.
Fighting robots are WAY too expensive for high schools to actually be able to do (and I'm speaking as a friend of someone who made one that competed in battlebots), while simultaneously teaching very little about robotics, and a lot about remote control cars.
I'm not sure you're right about the calculators...I was known as "the calculator magi" in my school. People would come to me to get games, programs, and other things for the calculator, and I think I impressed a few. Sure, I didn't become popular just because I was good with my calculator, but I did meet a lot of people that way that I probably wouldn't have met otherwise. Oh, and I even got a scholarship for one of the programs I wrote for it. There are bound to be a few like me.
One thing I do & two I'm thinking about. (Score:3, Insightful)
Stuff I think about doing later:
2. Teach them how to program a microcontroller and use it to control motors, leds, etc. (STAMP or OOPIC are pretty easy). Build something fun.
3. Get a group of kids and head to the dump. At our dump there is always a pile of old PC's and monitors, every one I have ever left with has worked fine. Have each kid find an old junker or two to work on. Bring it back to class and help each work through getting it to come back to life, then hand out the fedora CD's (or whatever). Teach them how to set it up as a web server/web development platform/firewall/whatever.
4. Profit!
IT Internships (Score:2, Insightful)
By far the best way to get students involved is to offer them some time in your shoes. As a freshman at a private school, the instructional technology coordinator somehow noticed that I was both interested in and somewhat competent with computers, and offered me a volunteer summer internship assisting the Computer Services department with various tasks. That first summer, I did a lot of manual labor and not so much technical stuff, but I started learning the ropes, and was hired as an hourly staffmember (part-time during the year, full-time during the summer).
My previous computer experience had really only involved administering a very basic home network. At school, I learned about NT domains, network hardware and infrastructure, deployment of software, servers, group policy, zones and subnets, and numerous minor details specific to my school's network. I also honed my hardware and software troubleshooting and optimization skills. But most importantly, I learned about dealing with ornery clients -- most often older faculty -- and minor network sabotage by students.
By the time I left for college this fall, after my fourth summer of work, I was far more competent in dealing with computers than I could ever have hoped to be had I not had the opportunity to work in CS.
It might be a little risky to just kind of open up tech internships to every student at your school/district -- you'd have too many people applying and among those applicants would be too many incompetent ones. So my suggestion would be to have a screening program that would involve fixing various problems; an interview process; and a provision that (like me) the student would have to work a period of time as a volunteer. You'd end up with a program that would only allow a select number of students to participate, but that would both help you and would help those students skilled enough to get the job.