Computer Science for Kids

20. The Real World

Standard: 2‐IC‐20: Compare tradeoffs associated with computing technologies that affect people's everyday activities and career options

As you emerge from your adventure underground, miraculously growing back to your original height, you reflect on the challenges you've faced over the past days and the progress you’ve made in learning how to address them. You created machines in support of fireflies and prototyped protective enclosures to surround rare moss species. You built a 3D world to envision ways of protecting a grove of petrified wood and dabbled in data science and databases to build a circulating library for visitors to safely study the interesting stones that gather in the stream. Finally, you created a winding story online for others to learn the hidden narratives that the field mice wanted the world to know. Congratulations on your accomplishments!

As you bid goodbye to your Guide and walk home, you think about how you might translate the work you have done in this forest to help human populations. What kind of app, story, game, or data science could you use that might help in the “real,” human‐focused world? Could your project fill a gap that has been caused by the digitization of the world?

Do Some Research

Software infuses the world around us, and while software is still “eat(ing) the world” by disrupting older, more established technologies, as Marc Andreeson said in 2011 (https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world