talking about computers with kids
I was recently invited to speak at my children's school on "computers, the internet, and ai". It was a very short talk skimming the surface of these deep topics to a group of third graders and fifth graders (~ages 8, 11), and i wanted to make it fun and interactive. more a dialogue than just an uncle yapping at the kids. it was a lot of fun! Id love to have the opportunity to explore these rabbit holes with them a bit further, the kids were super engaged and had lots of questions.
computers
I open with the question "what is a computer"? there's not a correct answer. we look at slides of different things kids might find around their house: laptop, cell phone, nintendo. there's some discussion but general agreement that these are "computers". then i start pushing the limits a bit, wifi router? sure. microwave? hmmm. car? uhhh... a student suggests "well it has a computer inside it" and I agree. Now to really pull the rug out: what about you? are you a computer? a lot of discussion but the kids are pretty sure they are not a computer. Next slide: we learn about the real women that carried the job title "computer" that helped calculate the orbits and launch trajectories for NASA in the 1950s. ok, time to regroup: A computer does math and follows instructions step by step. And it will move through different parts of its instructions like a choose-your-own adventure book. A unifying definition but still too abstract.
To try and ground it: How do we get from here to... Minecraft? (all students know minecraft, though a couple say they've never played it). We explore two avenues for this: 1) how the minecraft "Creeper" enemy uses distance to the player to determine if it should chase the player or idly wander around, and 2) how math is used to render a 3D world to a 2D screen, by geometrically drawing a pyramid from the camera and then squishing it into a cube and then flattening it into a 2D image that can be displayed on the screen.
To conclude, we looked at a laptop with its bottom removed, and a series of images zooming in on the central processing unit, and then the internal sections, and down to the single nanometer components. We talked about different areas of the chip as different neighborhoods in a city. the residential area, the shopping area -- except for different kinds of math and compute. We closed with reviewing the different kinds of computers that we had discussed before and this time added a new one "a server", which helps with playing multiplayer games and watching videos, which connects us to the next section.
internet
The internet is a rather abstract topic and so i wanted to make it tangible by talking about it through some of the physical places the internet flows. We talked about data centers including a local one near the airport (one kid had been there with his dad). We found where the undersea internet cables that physically foster the photons come on to land, and if any of the kids had been swimming at that beach before (they had! and so had the teachers). We also talked about satelite-based int networks like Starlink.
ai
As part of the ai section, we played a guessing game with an AI chat bot (local LLM running on ollama, with "reasoning" disabled). We asked the AI to think of a word without telling us, and then we asked questions about that word to try and learn more about it ("is it alive?", "is it an animal?"). After some questioning, we knew it was a large mammal. We then asked for the answer, and the AI said it was an elephant. The kids nodded in agreement, clearly satisfied with the answer. Then i pressed the "regenerate response" button for the last message and the AI said that the word it had been keeping secret this whole time was a whale. what? is this a mistake? is this a "halucination"? no. the way this simple AI chat bot works, it just generates a message that fits the previous messages in the conversation. It has no hidden memory, no place to hold a secret (though not true of all AIs). it simply responded with an answer that met the previously stated properties of "large mammal". I found this to be a fun an intuitive way to show that these LLMs are interesting, relatable (we played a game together!), and also not what they may seem on the surface.
slides
you can find my slides here but they dont include the speaker notes / spoken content, so this blog post will have to suffice. the slides are arranged in topical "columns", so you navigate down, then to the side. https://kumavis.github.io/talk-what-is-computer/
this post was written by a human without the use of an LLM. consider any mistakes delightful unpolished humanity.
