Re: high-school presentation, suggestions?

Johanne Fairchild  <jfairchild@tudado.org> wrote:

I'm going to present something about the exact sciences to high-school
students I never met.  In the area of mathematics or computer science,
what would be a nice short presentation?  What is the computer about?

I'd get even more fundamental and explain what a computer actually is,
because most people seem to have no actual idea. 

I explained to the CIO of a large government agency that a particular
system wasn't a computer at all because it wasn't a finite automaton,
and they had no idea what I was talking about.  It turned out the whole
notion of fetch/decode/execute/store had never been explained to them
and they didn't really know what a computer was.

It is best to nip this in the bud, hopefully in middle school, but
high school is better than nothing.

Once you do that you can talk about what to use it for.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."