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 held a basic digital security course for the 6th-8th graders when I was in 12th. My favorite topic from that was Phishing and Password theft.
I only had the time and resources for some PowerPoint slides of emails, where students could point out what exactly is suspicious but that wasn’t very engaging.
If I had the time though, I would have set up some trackable links for the students and told them to try Phishing School staff and their friends/parents. It would have been some free pen-testing for the school, plus students would have been way more willing to internalize information that allows them to do something “naughty”. The main point is that most digital risks don’t come from some high-concept hacking, but from social engineering and a moment of inattention. Everyone can fall for it, no matter how smart they think they are. I think that’s an important lesson to learn.
I made course for 11th and 12th graders together with a friend when I at university. It was only one week long and the topic was neural networks (we hit the timing right, it was 3 years before the AI hype started).
I did that experiment where you give the students 5 random places and amount of time out of a week. You say that is the movement profile of a fictional person and the students have to find out why those places matter.
Makes them learn the importance of information and how linking data can be an insane tool for understanding as something. But it also teaches how easy it is to gather information from small data points and self aware you should be about your digital footprint.