I am a student in Germany myself and got the rare chance to influence the education about CS/responsible use of technology people get in a special course I will give for the interested in my school this year.

The students will be eight grade and up, and it is a reasonable assumption that I will not have to deal with uninterested students (that and the probably small course size gives me an edge over normal courses beyond my actual planned lessons).

My motivation for investing substantial amounts of time and effort into this is my deeply hold belief that digital literacy is gonna be extremely important in the future, both societally and personally. I have the very unique chance to do something about this, even if only on a local level, and I’m gonna use that. I fail to see the current CS classes in German “high schools” (Gymnasien), and schools with our specialization (humanism) especially, provide needed education. We only had CS classes from grade eleven—where you learn Scratch or something similar and Java basics (most don’t really understand that either, or why you should learn it (a circumstance I very much understand)).
This state of affairs, and the increasing prevalence of smartphones instead of PCs means most students lack any fundamental understanding of the technology they’re using everyday.
My reason to believe that I’d be better at giving CS lessons than trained teachers is that these have to stick to very bad specific guidelines on what to teach, and a lack of CS graduates wanting to become teachers means our school has not a single one who studied any CS (I did).

Some of my personal ideas:

  • how do (basically all) computers work hardware-wise (overview over parts)
  • what is a computer/boot chain/operating system/program
  • hand out USB drives/cheap SSDs to students that they can keep (alternative: a ton of VMs and Proxmox users of one of my hosts) and have everyone pick and install their Linux distro of choice (yes, this is gonna be painful for all involved, but is also—as I suspect many of you already know—extremely rewarding and can be quite fun)
  • learning some “real” programming (would probably teach Python), my approach would be to learn basics and then pick projects and work alone or together (which is useful for learning Git/coding in a remotely readable way)
  • some discussion of open/closed source, corporate tech, enshittification, digital minimalism and philosophy of technology (which would be okay because, you know, humanistic school…)
  • maybe some networking (network stack, OSI, hacking Wifi networks…)

What are your thoughts and suggestions? Took me some time to get to an agreement with the school over this, so I’d like to do my absolute best.

Possibly relevant questions: what fundamental knowledge about tech do you suspect to be still relevant 15 years from now, what would you like to have learnt, what would you find interesting as a student this age…

  • teawrecks
    29·
    2 months ago

    When I was in high school I wanted to learn how to program, how computers work, etc., but when I took the Java course offered the assignments were boring basics that I couldn’t use for anything. Everyone in the class thought of it as a blowoff course.

    What everyone in the class was intrigued by was the fact that the teacher ran her own local network for the class and didn’t properly secure anything. It wasn’t long before someone figured out that they could shut down any other computer on the network using a simple shutdown command on the cmdline, passing another host as the target. Which led to an arms race of people finding ways to block themselves from being shut down, while also managing to shut each other down. Turns out a shutdown can’t be issued if another shutdown is already in progress, so the first line of defense was to issue a 24h shutdown on your own machine. But then we looked at the params to shutdown.exe and found the ability to abort shutdown options. Soon we all had a library of offensive and defensive .bat files, and the class was an all-out digital warzone!

    All that is to say, kids like:

    • to play games
    • they like to compete
    • they like to poke and prod things, make them behave in ways they’re not supposed to
    • experiment
    • feel safe breaking things and learning from the pieces that come out
    • “hacking”
    • and they like walking out of the class, seeing a random piece of technology, and having a new found understanding of its strengths, weaknesses, and how to manipulate effectively.

    They don’t like:

    • assignments
    • being told to do the same thing as the person next to them, print out some expected result, and turn it in
    • leaving the classroom and thinking “finally”
    • not knowing how to tie anything they learned back to their lives outside the class.

    I know you have a list of things you’d like them to learn, but most kids will look at how difficult and primitive the computer you’re showing them is, and then look at their phone, and say “why am I learning how to use an old style computer? New computers don’t work like this, they have touch screens, and voice control, and app stores”. You and i know this is a misguided mentality to have, but that’s what they will think. It’s up to you to relate everything in the class back to the computers they are actually familiar with. If you give them a new way to understand and interact with the computers they use daily, you will have them hooked.