Do you have any idea's for some one teaching computer engineering to 8th graders?

Question

I am a eighth grader and my teacher asked me to help her by teaching a computer enginering class to the class

Answer 1

Explain the binary number system, illustrate with switches.
Show & tell about the various computer I/O components:
Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse, Scanner, Printer, etc.
Talk about the different levels & types of storage:
Hard-disks, Floppy-disks, CD-ROM, RAM, etc.
Show them a CPU, either get a burned-out one,
or get permission to open the case & show it.
Explain how it controls all the devices through the cards.
If you know anything about programming, show them.

Answer 2

I would suggest starting with computer history, where hardware was expensive and labor was cheap and then compare it to the situation today. Include the changes that have occurred, where software engineers spent months or years writing very efficient assembler or even machine language code than ran slightly faster on processors running slower than 5 KHZ with 64 kilobytes of RAM, versus code written today, wasteful and not even assembled or compiled, that runs poorly on PCs with processors that are faster than 2 GHZ with 16 GB of RAM on a much faster bus.

At this point, I would suggest that you ask the class to decide if we should keep making faster PCs to keep up with cheap software, or start back at making better software? What are the pros and cons, and what else could make a difference?

Answer 3

Computer engineering is really quite involved. Perhaps an introduction into computer functions would be more appropriate.
Go the the Intel.com website and they have a lot of good materials to teach this.

http://www.intel.com/education/

Answer 4

Hands-on. Get an old PC (the older and bigger, the better). Dismantle it like a frog in Biology so they can identify the components, such as, the power supply, hard drive, mother board, CPU, video card (or video chips), etc. Pay special attention to the interfaces, like power cord, modem, ethernet, PS2 keyboard, mouse, video, USB, firewire, etc.