One of the summers when I was still living in East Austin, I volunteered at a summer program trying to introduce less privileged elementary and middle schoolers to some of the foundational skills that could build up to a career in the technology sector.

Luckily, I wasn’t a complete stranger to teaching children, I taught Balavihar long enough to know how vicious tiny humans can be, so I prepared for the worst.

Kids like props, I thought I’d bring a cool computer.

Not sure where it is nowadays, but I last remember it was in an office at UT Austin.

It was what was left one of my earliest PCs. i7 4790k. 4 alternating red and blue sticks of G.SKILL ddr3 memory. Big Shuriken 3 cpu cooler. gpu had long been repurposed. And can’t remember the mobo or the psu. But, I’d moved it to an open air case after moving to Austin so I figured it was flashy enough.

So I grabbed everything and headed over to chat with the kids. The computer, some old drives 3.5”, 2.5”, and m.2; some old cpus I turned into keychains; some extra sticks of ddr3, and my 64 Bit Driver Kit from iFixit. Not an ad and no shame plugging them, I bought the kit in late spring 2018 for $30 and it is still kicking.

First I took out the computer pc parts and walked them through what everything did. The CPU is the brain of the computer. It’s a very special piece of sand. Anytime the computer has to do something, it has to go to the CPU to get a response. Then there’s the memory, ddr3 ain’t the fastest but it’s fast enough. The CPU doesn’t have enough storage on it to keep track of a lot of things, so we have a specialized component that only handles data for the CPU and keeping it fast to read and edit. Then we have storage, and I got to walk them through how we started with magnetic tapes, eventually that shrank down to the spinning disks that were being passed around. After those, I introduced 2.5” hdds and ssds, and then got to show how we made them even smaller with m.2 drives. The psu was pretty simple to explain, one end goes into the wall, the other into the computer, power goes through the middle. They were fast on the mobo too, basically the skeleton and blood-vessels connecting everything together.

One of the kids who’s family came from there lit up when they learned that much of the silicon we use to build chips comes from Costa Rica.

Then I got to really wow them. I took one of the laptops they had been using to learn some basic 3d modeling and how to use the printer. Slotting in the right sized Phillips head, and took off the backplate.

They thought I broke it. I was gonna be in so much trouble.

So I hit the power button, it turned on just fine, and I logged in.

While it was running I pointed out all the different parts on the motherboard. They quickly pieced together that they were smaller versions of the big ones we just went over.

Kids are pretty sharp, much like my late grandfather around 2010 asking me in my folks’ basement how to use email, and then literally taking notes so he wouldn’t forget. We don’t give people enough credit for their ability to pick things up.

Natural segue.

I then told them about what I do for a living. I started off fixing computers very early in the morning and late at night. Now I listen to a lot of people and type on a keyboard to make software. Or as they call them, apps.

Data coming in from a variety of places, getting processed by some fancy digital plumbing, and then displayed on their screens.

Scratch is a pretty good programming language to learn with. There’s a reason Harvard CS50 starts with it.

And much like the parts of the computer, they picked it up pretty quickly too.

They learned about variables. How to control the flow with things like if statements. How to repeat actions with loops. How to capture tasks with functions.

By the end of it, they had a working flappy bird game.

Throwing all the shade I can, if children are able to pick up these basics, so can tech professionals.