My 2 cents. Kids want to have fun, and it would be awesome if they learned something on the way. I don't think 10 year kids need to know assembly. Might be better to plant a seed of "thinking like a computer scientist" and showing them the concepts of programming than teaching them binary. (I was taught binary at 10, and never touched it again until college...when I had forgotten it all). What if students find your history of computers and computers 101 class too diffucult and not engaging...then you've turned those kids away from ever becoming really interested in Computer Science.
Do kids really care about "really" learning the science? And it's true that a bunch of kids won't ever progress further than making some fun presentations, but what's wrong with that? Not all those kids are going to go on to become computer scientists. For those kids who are really interesting in programming and computers, they'll continue with it.
Creating things is a important part of learning. If kids make fun presentations that they show off to parents and friends, they're gonna work hard on it. Stepping through a program on a virtual computer enviroment doesn't really allow for that.
The class you're proposing sounds like a class I took in college. You're teaching 10 year old kids, my suggestion is to "dumb it down."
Do kids really care about "really" learning the science? And it's true that a bunch of kids won't ever progress further than making some fun presentations, but what's wrong with that? Not all those kids are going to go on to become computer scientists. For those kids who are really interesting in programming and computers, they'll continue with it.
Creating things is a important part of learning. If kids make fun presentations that they show off to parents and friends, they're gonna work hard on it. Stepping through a program on a virtual computer enviroment doesn't really allow for that.
The class you're proposing sounds like a class I took in college. You're teaching 10 year old kids, my suggestion is to "dumb it down."