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…

  • oktux@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.