Halloween demystifying workshop at UNCC

Well it was Halloween 2014 and the Urbana School District didn’t have school. UNCC stayed opened all day and it was the perfect time to try out a workshop with the kindergarten through fifth grade students.

Dressed up like Mary Poppins, Miss Hailley, the Community Ambassador for UNCC, brought in some desktop towers, old ball mice and keyboards that weren’t being used, and a few old video game controllers for a version of a demystifying workshop.

The goal of a demystifying workshop is to help the people in the workshop understand technology is not scary. In order to do that, we want to teach our students about the building blocks of computers. Sometimes it’s easy to see computers as magical boxes, but once you understand how the CPU works and the point of RAM, then the computer becomes many moving parts, all with specific functions to help you do the things you want to do.

A demystifying workshop is great because based on the people in attendance, you can direct the workshop to best suit their needs and questions. Since Hailley was working with K-5, she kept things simple, with an emphasis on taking things out and exploring the inside of the computer.

UNCC split the elementary students into two groups, K-3 and 4-5. This was a good split because we had about 16 students in each group, along with one or two adult helpers. The kids were excited to see the inside of the computer and Hailley also created a short and simple slideshow to provide some direction in what the kids looked for.

Once the kids had exhausted the computers, Hailley moved them over to taking apart a mouse, taking keys off a keyboard, or for some of the older students, working to take apart an old video game controller. As she and other adults walked around, they spoke with the students about the similarities they saw between the inside of the computer and these other devices. For the video game controllers and the mice, the students began to see that the same components were in all of them, but simply sized differently based on the device.

For more information on the demystifying workshop, including a PDF handout with potential workshop paths, see our “Nuts and Bolts” page.