A few weeks ago me and my boss (wife) had this crazy idea … we have some space in the attic which we’re not really using so … why not set it up like a small classroom ? (to make it look formal-ish) and get the children to do some IT stuff with us.
Both were really into it and started looking on Marketplace for various stuff that we’d need for our little project … stuff like a whiteboard, a desk or like a big table, some office chairs, some drawers for office stuff (markers, erasers, paper, etc). A few days later we got lucky … a company which had its offices nearby (5 min drive from home) was giving away for free a big table , some drawers and a chair because they were running low on space. When we saw the add we were like: Oh yeah! 🙂 and 1h or so later we were loading the stuff in our car.
Next day, everything was ready and we showed the new “classroom” to the children and told them what we wanted to do. The children loved the idea of getting their hands on “daddy’s laptop” and most importantly learning how to “make the computers do stuff for them” so we agreed to have one of these workshops every week and each workshop would be at most 1h – 1.5h long.
So far we’ve had 4 workshops starting with components of a computer, basic intro into how computers “think”, we talked about operating systems, web browsers, did a bit of googling because that’s a good skill to have 🙂 and even got our hands dirty and replaced some drives in a PC.
For us spending time with the children and teaching them something new in the process is priceless also considering the fact that IT is at the core of everything i’d say it’s not a bad skill to have no matter what they decide to do with their lives.
