this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Teacher here.
My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.
The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.
The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.
I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.
I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.
The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.
It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.
Damn, we need more ICT teachers like you.
Wow, just WOW 👏👏👏.
I wish there were more teachers like you in schools. Inspired people, in general... that's what's lacking in society nowadays 😔.
That is incredible. Good on you.
Out of curiosity, how much had you already taught them about the tasks? Was it just expected that between the whole team there would be someone who knew this stuff?
Thanks!
If I recall correctly I didn’t tell them much about anything. One of them had a nerd dad who set up his daughter with Linux at home but she wasn’t familiar with the install process. I gave them some basic info when I gave them the rules (you have to connect the hard drives and ram) but for the most part everything was new to them.
On the other hand, I also ran a computer club with some other kids (in a younger grade) where we took that pile of broken computers and salvaged working parts. We ended up with 3 or 4 working pcs that we ran Linux mint on. They used the computers for Roblox or something at lunch lol. The computers ended up being a popular attraction at lunch!
🏆
@maxprime my technology teacher in middle school did something similar with me and a bunch of other kids in 1995 or so. That's how I fixed my first pc, and eventually started a career in IT. There was no team competition, but he basicallt said "these are some broken computers, if you can fix them you can have a lab to play Doom or whatever you want. He helped us setting up the IPX network tbf, but we had to check what dimm banks were working, which not, same with hdd and processors, and put togheter everything and install Windows 3.11
🏅
@maxprime @nayminlwin Great story! Reminds me of Cathy Malmrose's "The Un-Scary Screwdriver", https://thegnomejournal.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/the-un-scary-screwdriver/
Thanks! That’s a very nice story too. I have a baby boy and can’t wait to introduce him to computing.
@maxprime @nayminlwin you sound like the teacher i would've wished for.
If i were to become a teacher in the future (unlikely, but not impossible), i'd hope to be just as caring and enjoying the craft as you are. Keep it up! ☺️
I had some of my classes (14-15yr olds) assemble their own computers as the first class. It was cheap junk anyway, and I was willing to risk it, but it set the stage for the year. I dont think I got them to install system on it (whole school run on Linux btw), thats a great touch. And making it into something that entertaining, and stereotypes breaking is brilliant!
@2ndStar
So ein geiles Projekt von @maxprime !
Und da wirft man Lehrpersonen mangelnden Enthusiasmus vor.
@maxprime @nayminlwin This is it right there, the moments everyone will remember. Not always possible for day to day work I guess, but all too rare.
@sabriunal @maxprime @nayminlwin
I think they had the hardware disassambled and part of the challange was to put all things together to run the OS and finish the task.
@maxprime amazing, thank you for sharing!
@nayminlwin
@maxprime @nayminlwin so basically... School of Rock but for nerds. You are Jack Black.
There aren’t enough reactions on Mastodon to express how much I loved this, so fav-ed, re-blogged and commented.
@maxprime
This is so full of awesomeness :D
@nayminlwin
@maxprime @nayminlwin Ah, a wholesome IT teaching story. That's something I might get into, when we train new interns and apprentices.
@maxprime @nayminlwin what an amazing story. I love that this could be gamified for them and made more fun. I presume you had a guide or helped them when they got stuck?
@maxprime @nayminlwin was the disk with correct partition table. So only mount the disk to recover the jpeg data. Or else?
What 9th grade is ? How old are kids here?
Yeah I had formatted and partitioned the disk ahead of time. The JPEG was in the root directory IIRC. I warned them to not plug in both hard drives during the install process to be sure not to overwrite the wrong drive. They were labelled physically but were otherwise identical.
Ninth grade is 14/15 year olds.