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…
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.
To build on this: teach them what social engineering is and how it can be predatory.
This.
In my experience 95% of crimes committed on a digital platform are crimes of social manipulation.
Impersonation, phishing, scams, … It’s all just a social game.
Yup. In a properly secured facility with the best digital security, the weakest link is often the front door. All it takes is a careless front desk attendant, buzzing an “elevator repair tech” into the facility without bothering to check and see if anyone is actually scheduled to be working on an elevator.
Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.
I’d argue that this is also the job of language and history teachers. “How to do research and vet your sources” could be an entire class on its own. Reading comprehension is in the toilet, largely because people have lost the ability to infer a piece of media’s intended audience. That’s a major component of reading literacy; Being able to read a news article, see an insta reel, see a meme, read a comment, etc and infer who it is aimed at. You should be able to see a news article aimed at conservatives, and recognize that it has a conservative bias and is aimed at conservatives. You should be able to notice the different ways they will phrase the same events, to add a particular spin on them.
People have become accustomed to having everything spoon-fed by an algorithm that is tailored specifically to their interests and worldviews. When someone sees something that doesn’t perfectly conform to their interests or worldviews, they used to go “oh this isn’t aimed at me” and they would quickly move on. But now they have a tendency to attack the creator for failing to aim it specifically at them.
You see a comment talking about the proper way to do something physical, then there is an entire swath of “but what about the people who can’t do that physical thing due to illness/disability/inexperience/etc” responses. Because those responders have failed to infer the intended audience. If you’re disabled and can’t do something physical, you’re obviously not the intended audience. But people have forgotten how to recognize that, because they have gotten so used to having everything on their For You page be specifically chosen for them.