education about CS/responsible use of technology

The vast majority of what’s been suggested in the OP and comments focuses on the technical: CS and IT. But, no one’s focused on “responsible use of technology”. I’d like to see a course that focused on the morality and ethics of usage.

Examples of possible classroom topics:

1. Is it moral and ethical to spread disinformation as a means to “good” end? Is it acceptable to spread truth if the consequences are likely “bad”?

2. Is it moral and ethical to use generative AI to effectively libel/slander a political opponent? Does it the analysis change if used for advertising?

3. Is it moral and ethical to pirate media? Does it depend on what’s being pirated? Does it depend on why it’s being pirated?

The "problems with such a course:

1. It’d require prerequisite of basic philosophy/logic and basic CS/IT. It could be a lot of material to cover. Course construction and presentation needs to be focused, rooted in experience, likely a passion project.

2. The audience may be too young to think in these terms. A little experience goes a long way towards understanding these topics well enough to have a good faith classroom discussion. I don’t intend ageism, in fact the opposite. I think today’s youth are more capable than when I was such an age: Make it known that the course is “hard”. Those that choose it will excel.

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.

I think your ideas are too non-practical/specialized/advanced/low-level for your stated goal of 'digital literacy". They read more like college intro/followup course material and are too esoteric to be readily absorbed, esp by generic teenagers, even if they’ve self-selected to be “lightly interested”.

Teach them how to evaluate sources on the internet.

Seriously, all the hardware/OS whatever is cool, but if you want to really make a difference that will affect everyone, teach them how to find information, how to evaluate it, and how to use internet reference material.

Do something that will make them laugh and enjoy themselves.

I gave a seminar once that ended with a demonstration of the terminal, ssh, and nginx. I had everyone go to the url where I was hosting a hello world. I killed the server over ssh and told them to refresh the page. Nothing there. I swapped the page, turned it back on, and told them to refresh the page again. I Rick Rolled them. They all laughed. It may not have been the most informative talk, I didn’t really ‘teach’ them anything, but I got some good questions afterwards.

Be creative and make it fun and they will come to you.

One thing I’ve been reading is how the younger generations haven’t grown up with what we call traditional technology. There are people entering the workforce who have used iPads for most of their lives and don’t know what a directory structure is, or a file share, or basic word/excel/pp skills. Think about it, iPads made it so easy by showing most recent items that they don’t even really know ehat folders are.

Those are all things I took in my first few computer classes. How to make a word doc. Basic formulas in excel. How to make a PowerPoint do a star wipe. Those are real tangible skills that everyone should know entering the workforce. Then, if people show a talent for it, I would encourage them to pursue something like programming.

People here are suggesting low level things like bash scripting because it’s what we know and think is important, but for most people it’s things like how are files stored, and how do I sum a column in excel?

I think about this all the time, I really could see myself getting into computer education ten years down the line.

What I would do is this:

• Focus on recreating styles of computing that produced our most digitally literate generation: Gen X (for context, I was born in 2000).
• Give everyone in the class a Raspberry Pi and a MicroSD card. Guide them through the setup process. This recreates larger, more complicated computers in microcosm.
• Start out with the Lite version of the Raspi OS, allow students to discover the different components of an operating system: Bash, window management, sound, the desktop, office applications. Take them through some common Raspberry Pi tasks.
• Do not allow the class to become the Adobe/Microsoft power hour. This is the number one way we are failing our students today.
• Have a unit focused around free software and the open source movement. Focus on social media literacy as well. Ensure that students understand how social media algorithms work, how these companies make money, understand that users are the product.

There’s probably more I could come up with if I sat down to really plan out a week by week lesson plan, but this is off the cuff where I’d put the focus. So many of these topics have Connections-style related points. “Why is my computer at home different from a Raspberry Pi?” gives you a great opportunity to expand on CPU architecture, which leads to how computers actually “think”. I remember when I was a child one of the things that I was most confused by was how a computer was able to turn Python into something it actually understands, that can be a fascinating lesson in the right hands. How does a computer know where to look on the disc when it boots up? It’s great!

Kids already know how to use phones and tablets. Take concepts from those, concepts they are already familiar with, and then explain the deeper process behind it. Computers are engineered by people, you can understand them, it’s not magic.

I would go with tasks where they get to “hack” or learn about each other. Give them usb sticks, make them put a silly trivia on an encrypted 7z with passwords that are somewhat crackable. Then, take their usbs from them, and distribute them randomly, and let them use jack the ripper or so. Twist, you would have added a virus or something into the USB stick, so they get infected with a “silly pop up” once they start jack the ripper. They get to play, and the exercise will stick with them.

Teach them about 10 minute mails pages, to open a silly account t somewhere.

Make them use a VPN like mullvad or some that you have set up to access a specific page or make web searches. They can notice the difference in content depending on the country they are exiting with. Twist: you control the VPN, provide them at the end with a list of accessed pages so they understand how the vpns do not ensure privacy. Explain simply what a VPN is (tunnel,etc).

I held a basic digital security course for the 6th-8th graders when I was in 12th. My favorite topic from that was Phishing and Password theft.

I only had the time and resources for some PowerPoint slides of emails, where students could point out what exactly is suspicious but that wasn’t very engaging.

If I had the time though, I would have set up some trackable links for the students and told them to try Phishing School staff and their friends/parents. It would have been some free pen-testing for the school, plus students would have been way more willing to internalize information that allows them to do something “naughty”. The main point is that most digital risks don’t come from some high-concept hacking, but from social engineering and a moment of inattention. Everyone can fall for it, no matter how smart they think they are. I think that’s an important lesson to learn.

The Chaos Computer Club Initiative Chaos macht Schule might be able to help you with some materials and guidance.

hand out USB drives/cheap SSDs

learning some “real” programming

1. Handing out drives has to go hand-in-hand with education about how “you shouldn’t just plug in any drive that someone hands you or you find on the street.” That’s basic security consciousness at this point. You might point them towards the Open Source schematics for this USB Firewall: https://globotron.nz/products/usg-v1-0-hardware-usb-firewall

2. Don’t start with “real” programming. Start with scripting. A place where you can get the feel of the ideas of programming while starting somewhere more basic. Linux scripting and Powershell scripting are both good places to start. You still get programming fundamentals (what is a loop, what’s an if-else statement, etc) without jumping into confusing versioning or where to get updates (should I let Windows update Python, or do I want to update it with pip? You have to choose one or things get fucky with them overwriting each other).

3. When I mean more basic I mean literally things like SYNTAX and PATH are way more important for students to be understanding before they start programming. Syntax and path (relative and absolute), in my opinion, are easier to learn when you’re learning them on the OS you’re using. That means “real programming” is obfuscating things like syntax and path, and students need to understand these core concepts before they move on to "real programming.* EDIT: Like seriously, students need to understand what the fuck a delimiter is and why it is!

I consider myself to be a fairly tech literate person. Not a professional, but better than average. The guy my family comes to to troubleshoot computer problems, basic working understanding of programming and networking but not nearly enough to do it professionally.

I think you’re shooting too high on some of these.

Basic hardware is good, but don’t spend too much time on it or go into too much detail, just kind of basic overviews. Boot chain is probably pushing it, but basic overview of operating systems is good.

I probably wouldn’t go so far as having them install their own Linux distro, that feels like you want to take a week of your class time to troubleshoot all the potential issues that come up, if you do it on school computers you’re probably looking at a nightmare getting that cleared by your IT department, and if it’s their personal devices you’re probably going to catch an earful from some parents for messing up their/their kids computer.

I do think it’s a good idea to have some computers running Linux for them to use so they can see what it’s like, and probably some macs too, I’m not an apple guy but there’s a lot of them out there and people should be at least a little familiar with both.

I don’t know what the current state of things in schools is, but you can certainly hand out some flash drives, but there’s a decent chance they already have some. I know over a decade ago when I was in high school pretty much all of us were already carrying around flash drives.

Programming is good to introduce them to, python is a solid choice, but unless these are kids who are pretty sure they want to go into computer science I wouldn’t go too deep. It’s not a particularly useful language for actual usage but I think that BASIC still has a useful role as a way to teach the fundamentals of programming to people in an accessible way to see if they may want to pursue it further. I know programmers hate it, but visual basic is also kind of satisfying because it makes it pretty easy to crank out something that looks like an actual finished product.

I’d keep networking pretty straightforward. Network stack and OSI are probably a little too high level to go into, but basics about WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, routers, switches, firewalls, etc. are good to know.

Basic typing and general computer use are probably something a lot of kids could use some work on. A lot of kids these days have a lot less experience with keyboard and mouse computer use thanks to smartphones and tablets. Don’t shun the touchscreen devices though, they’re more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for, and since that’s the way technology is trending figure out how to push the borders on what you can do with them.

I love all the ideas you have! Explaining how computers work, on a basic technical level, is something everyone should know nowadays.

I would suggest to focus the programming on something small, fun and instantly rewarding. Something like Snake in Pygame is not overly complex and you can take it step by step, so that every student will have something to show at the end, with varying levels of complexity. I would advise against using templates for projects, a lot of courses do but in my opinion it makes it harder for the student to replicate the work on its own later on.

In terms of networking, setting up a small test network with a WEP access point, a WPS access point and a WPA2 access point and letting the students (in groups, probably) try to figure out how to access/crack the passwords for them. (WEP and WPS should be easy, but WPA2 would require the deauthing exploit, which is a tad more complex).

Also the idea of cheap usb drives, which they can put on a live distro (or make it come with one) is a great way to start the lesson. This way they can have a setup that’s detached from the usual limitations school pc’s give. (if that’s still a thing).

Do make sure to teach them the ethics around hacking, cracking and downloading. From what I remember, Germany used to be decently lax on all three, but started to crack down on it in the past 10 years. Teaching responsibility and what the consequences are is very important.

I think self-hosting a simple, static web site on a Raspberry Pi would be a good project.

• There’s something satisfying and motivating about creating a website from scratch and publishing it for everyone to see.
• It’s a good starting point for interested students to dive in even further, by updating the website, self hosting other things, or learning to program.
• Learning to host a website touches on many fundamental technology areas:
  • Basic linux commands, which introduces concepts like directories, executable files, and the root user that are applicable to all OSes.
  • Basic networking, answering questions like: How does the internet work? What really is “the cloud”?
  • Basic security, covering things like defense in depth and social engineering. I think for this one I would ask the question, “What would we need to do if this website accepted personal info?” as a way of talking about the enormous technical and legal complexity of securing data.

Overall, I think a practical, interesting project is a great way to make lessons concrete and engaging, and this particular project would an excellent springboard into a variety of topics that are fundamental to the invisible technology that underpins everything we do day to day.

I wouldn’t start with python. Just do bash scripting. Python is inaccessible still if you do not use it regularly and it still has the ridiculous complexity problems of all languages.

I think the scope of all computing is hard for anyone to take in effectively. It really takes something like Ben Eater’s 8-bit breadboard computer project (YT) for a person to really start understanding fundamental computing.

My favorite microcontroller experience is Flash Forth. You can put it on an Arduino with an ATMega 328 too. The simplicity of FORTH can teach a ton in a short amount of time because it gets a person straight into access to bits, registers, and assembly, along with the hardware documentation. Once FF is on the microcontroller, it is running the FF interpreter natively. At that point, you only need serial access through USB. It is quite easy to flash an LED, read the ADC and setup basic I/O. Branching and loops are a bit more difficult. This eliminates the need for a language that uses a lot of arbitrary syntax. It does not require a lot of documentation, and you do not need to fuss with an Integrated Development Environment.

I would focus on the ideas, that anyone can count to 1 and anyone can break down logic into if statements. It might be bad code, but bad code is better than no code when it comes to someone getting started.