Career Day in kindergarten: how to demonstrate programming in 20 minutes?

Posted by Péter Török on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Péter Török
Published on 2010-03-16T15:42:54Z Indexed on 2010/03/16 15:51 UTC
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kids

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children

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teaching

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subjective

I was invited to the kindergarten group of my elder daughter to talk, and aswer the kids' questions, about my profession. There are 26 kids of age 4-6 in the group (plus 3 teachers who are fairly scared of anything related to programming and IT themselves, but bold enough to learn new tricks). I would have about 20-30 minutes, without projector or anything. (They have an old computer though, which by its look may be a 486, and I am not even sure if it's functioning.)

My research turned up excellent earlier threads, with lots of good tips:

How would you explain your job to a 5-year old?

Career Day: how do I make “computer programmer” sound cool to 8 year olds?

What things can I teach a group of children about programming in one day?

My situation is different from each of the above though.

So any advice on how to teach the kids (and their teachers) in a fun way about programming is appreciated.

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