<p>Think back to when you were 10 years old. If you could go back and teach yourself the most fun and interesting things about computers, what would you teach the young you? </p>
<p>Would it be programming? robotics? math? art so you could use computers to make really great graphics?</p>
<p>What would be the most fun activities to do in a computer club with other 10 year olds?</p>
<p>Be fun and creative in your answers! Do not answer relate this to college in any way! We are talking 10 year olds!</p>
<p>*** The reason I'm asking my 10 year old son loves programming (C++), flash animation, is working on a webpage. He's done a programming camp (Cybercamp), a game programming camp (IDTech), and this summer is doing flash animation camps with both the above outfits, as well as a video production camp. Mostly he learns about computer stuff from books and his older brother. He wants to start a computer club at school and I don't trust an elementary school teacher to lead them in the right direction, so I'm asking for your help! ***</p>
<p>Computers have signals called clocks. These oscillate at a known frequency and virtually everything is timed to the clock in some way. The faster your clock, the faster you can perform operations. Overclocking refers to setting the clock higher than it is set at the factory, either by increasing the CPU multiplier or the Front-Side Bus speed (the actual clock usually). I'm sure you could read more about it on wikipedia.</p>
<p>I was building systems from components I picked out by your son's age--so I guess as low-level as you can get without actually fabricating the components yourself. If your son has no experience with it you might want to let him mess around with some older systems that you don't mind trashing first.</p>
<p>There are very cool robotics kits where you can design and program your own robot. There are ones aimed at kids, but don't get those. They have a class at MIT for programming your own robot to see things and pick them up, etc. -- that's probably the right level. I don't know where one would get these. Other Techers who are more into this stuff, do you know?</p>
<p>LEGO.com MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 2.0
LEGO® MINDSTORMS™ lets you design and program real robots that do what you want them to. With the Robotics Invention System 2.0™, the core set of the LEGO ...
mindstorms.lego.com/eng/products/ris/index.asp - 19k - Cached - Similar pages</p>
<p>The LEGO MINDSTORMS™idea is a good one. We actually did that last summer in my basement as a 2 week summer camp for about a dozen kids ranging from 9-13. An all-girls junior high age FIRST Lego League team came out of that. </p>
<p>For my son's computer club we could start off doing Lego League (because the competition is in the fall).</p>
<p>Then I got a suggestion on another thread to do easy game programming in Visual Basic and/or Flash. We could do that in the winter.</p>
<p>In the spring they could build and take apart some computers. That would give me over six months to figure out stuff about hardware, or find someone else who actually knows what they are doing.</p>
<p>The world has changed radically (and in a good way) if there are enough elementary schoolers interested in programming and robotics to fill a club... that certainly wasn't true at my elementary school.</p>
<p>Things like the Lego competitions are great because they give kids something concrete to aim for and a chance to meet other kids interested in the same things. Good luck and come back to tell us how it goes!</p>
<p>My DS1 also programed games in his Atari computer when he was 10. One of his earlist game is like tennis play. He used Basic. He used the little physics in the game like Snell's law and soon inclued relativistic effect. He later build a flight simulator and a game of life. His early knowlege of algebra came from a book called Algebra the Easy Way. I wondered his doctoral thesis on large scale simulation of excited electrons can be traced from this humble origin many years back.</p>
<p>Ben,
The world actually has changed radically, for children, especially. When you were in elementary school the choices for accelerated learning and exploration of specialized interests were
1) learn from books in the library (however, learning science/math from books only requires a special kind of cross-over verbal/analytical intelligence)
2) having a lucky choice in parents and family circumstances (so that they could answer your questions)
3) going to a special kind of private school or doing a talent search class (very pricy)</p>
<p>There was no way back then to get a core of bright kids with similar interest together in a neighborhood elementary. Inverse's children and their friends got the benefits of Inverse's knowledge, but there was no way to leverage this into the wider community.</p>
<p>For the cohort 5-6 years younger than you, talent search summer programs became more widespread, distance learning for gifted kids started up, and the world was much better. But still, adults were largely the gatekeepers to the opportunities.</p>
<p>Now, for 10 year olds, there's art of problem solving, there's the Davidson Young Scholars bulletin boards, there's CC (how do you know some of the questions you field aren't from 10 year-olds?) The kids can connect with their intellectual peers on their own. So, the idea for a computer club may have been DS2's own, but it probably developed during a chat with a young friend in cyberspace.</p>
<p>The upshot, I think, is that more bright kids are going to have more confidence and be able to develop more initiative because they are no longer quite so isolated.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Inverse's children and their friends got the benefits of Inverse's knowledge,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I didn't contribute any knowledge as I could recalled. We did went to bookstore and electronic shop often and bought him whatever books/parts he requested.</p>