Okay, it's Friday, March 6th, 8.15am, drop number 101, actually the 580, about to get on the Richmond San Rafael Bridge. And I need to record some notes and ideas about how to teach, but how to engage this students age 6 through 11, possibly 12, in a class about computing. The good part is that I don't have to get into engineering technical details because none of these guys are born engineers, and I don't have to get deep into math. And I don't have to, you know, I won't have to field technical questions from them. So it's kind of an open slate. I'm going to give them stories. You know, any audience will never be engaged without a story, compelling stories. So what do kids want in their stories? Now they want video games, they want. They want to know that, you know, there are people, there were people just like themselves trying to tackle life's problems and learn life's lessons all at the same time. There were people who had short attention spans because stuff was just boring. It's not related to a disease. So you don't start talking about a timeline and you don't start talking about names and birth dates and all that. You talk about the substance of what had happened. So what is the substance of the history of computers? How can we get to this age of, you know, you big wood is computing, which is already an outdated term of mobile. Even mobile sounds like it's something special when all it is is computing everywhere you go now. So what are we talking about here? We got your sixth graders who, if all loud, could clearly distract the class, although fourth graders can do it too. Fourth, fifth and sixth graders need to know that they are in a cool place. What are they thinking about? Well, they're definitely... They know a lot of math. So I mean, they're going to be ahead of the, they know how to read, a lot of the reading. But the most important thing that they can be for the younger kids is the younger kids need to watch them learn how they act. But they need to be put in check to make sure that they don't act irresponsibly. So how do we do this? Well, let's think about how we got from, how we got from the time where really didn't have computers. To a time where we can't live without them. So we talk about Charles Babbage, Alan Turing. There was a time when all we were trying to do was build calculators, faster calculators. And that's really just the age of... That's when computers were just essentially glorified calculators. So there's the computer is just a fancy calculator. And then there's... Computers, you got to the point where basically if you can get two computers to share the problem, you can have a bigger computer. That won't fail as much. So there's speed, there is reliability, and there is sharing. How do we get from games? What was the first game? What else? The first game was most likely a game we already played that you can play without a computer. That's when they started teaching computers how to play chess. Or checkers or a number of games, but chess ended up being the most popular because... You know, there was already... There was a big enough pool of people who can play chess very fast. And after we could get computers to play games, we could basically... So how do we go from calculating to playing games? That's when you want a computer to... You want to test of how much better are you than a human? Because computers can do so much more. I can't lecture. I have to show an example. What are good teaching aids to keep people engaged? It's almost like it has to be animated. I asked them about how good they are chess. They make them feel like they're learning from them. It's okay to get bored when you learn. It's okay to not like what you're learning. If I put them in the teams, they can all compete with each other. The game is the history of computers. You don't need to know who did what when. You just need to know what's obvious. It's going to be fun. I don't know if I can use the iClicker or a simple buzzer. The computer will answer it first. Good first day. Good first day. Now I have to come up with the questions.