Entry level computing text books [closed]

Question

I am looking for some good text books in the public domain, which could be used to teach computing to school kids aged (10-15). I couldn't get any googling for it. Can somebody out there point me to good links. If text books are not available any information on what is taught commonly to this age group as part of computing curriculum will be helpful.

Answer 1

"Computing" is an awfully broad topic. Do you mean teaching them how a computer works (like on the inside), or how to use computer applications (word processing/spreadsheet/internet), or how to program them? I think all three would be good topics for 10-15 year olds.

My dad, a computer engineer, taught me much of the above on my own around that age (of course, it depends upon how motivated your students are). Mostly it was through experimentation, and asking questions. I'll point out a few good resources that I went through when I was that age. While these books aren't public domain, they're not that expensive (you can purchase all the books I mention below for under $100US at the time of this answer, cheaper than a single college textbook; the movies you could try finding at your local library). Note some of these are from MS-DOS 3.x era of 10-12 years ago, but honestly, the basic concepts haven't changed that much. The IBM PC platform still has the same architechture, it's just been upgraded. Applications have changed though.

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How a computer works

• You might want to teach about all of the different parts in a modern computer tower by opening one up and explaining to them what each part is and does, and how they hook together. It doesn't even need to work, you just need to be able to show them stuff. A good, simple book that explains the parts of a computer is How Computers Work by Ron White. I believe there is also a Magic School Bus episode on this ("The Magic School Bus Gets Programmed", Episode 50 From Season 4).
• After that you may want to explain about the startup process, and how the computer first turns on, and doesn't know anything. Then you could explain about how the BIOS chip finds all the various things hooked to the motherboard, and then uses the hard-drive to start the Operating System (Windows/OS X).
• There are some interactive programs that describe how all of these things work, although I can't think of any off the top of my head. There was an old learning program called "What's in that Box" that I used, but it's so outdated now its useless.
• If you have really motivated students, you may want to introduce them to the electronic foundations of the computer, and binary numbers and gates. A good (teacher level) introduction to these things is Charles Petzold's Code. You try explaining how computers talk about things using 1s and 0s. Also, there is a Bill Nye the Science Guy episode on this (Season 4, Episode 78).

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How to use applications

Honestly, I'm really not sure what to tell you here, but I imagine you can find lots of tutorials on this if you google. Explaining Word, Excel, etc. to students is beneficial and I imagine widespread. NB: Teach students how to touch-type at that age. I didn't learn how to touch-type until I was in middle of HS, and it was hard. By that time, I had already learned how to do stuff on computers and play games on the keyboard, and so had my fingers memorized to go to all the wrong spots. If you catch them early, they'll do well.

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How to program

• The way I learned how to program at age 10 was this way using a language called BASIC (BTW, that link gives lots of other ideas for learning how to program at a young age). I'm certain others will have good answers on this too. A book that I used to learn from after that was QBasic by Example, that a computer bookstore owner gave to me when I was 12 from his throw-away pile. That was my programming bible, and I read it cover-to-cover.
• Note, though, that some students will want to do "cool" things when learning how to program; admittedly, how I learned would not be classified as cool. My old computer science prof from undergrad is involved in a program with inner-city kids that teaches them how to program robots using a language called LOGO, Sun's SunSPOTS, and LEGO Mindstorms NXT (depending upon the class focus). You basically give commands to the robot and it does them, and you can watch the robot do what you told it to do. Very cool, and interactive. It can get them thinking about programming, and how its about telling the computer/robot what to do, and how you can be a "robot commander" or "computer commander." This is, essentially, what computer programmers do everyday.
• The new children's show Cyberchase teaches critical thinking skills that are a foundation to programming skills.

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Just some thoughts to get you started. I think many kids would appreciate a hands-on approach; most of those in the industry got started because of hands-on exposure and not rote book-learning. The above early education, along with some books, worked for me, most of that stuff I rattled off from memory.

Also check out Woz.org; Steve Wozniak (programmer/hardware engineer, designer of the Apple ][) now teaches grade school children computers.

Answer 2

Try How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing, by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt and Shriram Krishnamurthi. The book uses a language called Scheme, which is freely available and designed to be used by students. The book is available online at www.htdp.org.

The book was designed to be used by high school and university introductory programming classes and is intentionally written to teach how to design a program, not just how to use the syntax of a particular programming language. It stresses things like how to design readable programs, thinking about the structure of your program before typing anything, and general programming concepts such as recursion and encapsulation.