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…
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.