Young children can use hands-on activities to learn about computers. Assign a project to draw a picture of what the children think a computer looks like on the inside. Offer crayons, colored pencils and paints along with paper for this lesson. Children can use their imagination about how a computer works. Another activity is to build a computer with old cardboard boxes. Repurpose shoe, cereal and tissue boxes into a computer for young children to pretend to use.
Computers work by using the binary number system, which is a series of ones and zeros. Older elementary school children can better grasp computer science by studying binary numbers. Students will make a set of five binary cards with plain white paper. The first card will have four rows and four columns of four dots, which makes 16 dots total. The second card will have eight dots in two rows of four dots. The next card will have four dots in total with two rows of two dots. The fourth card will have two dots, one in the top right-hand corner and one in the lower left-hand corner. The last card will have a dot in the center. The cards make new numbers when you add them. When you turn over a card, it represents zero. Place the cards together with some facing up and down to create binary numbers.
Middle school students can learn about pixels, or picture elements, and how photos and other images are stored in computers. Create large grids on paper and have the children fill in boxes to create a letter or image as the computer would. This represents pixels, and the children can use numbers to represent the line of the grid. For example, if the first row of the grid with four spaces has one empty space and three filled spaces, it would represent 1 and 3 numerically. Have students create their own images with this system of grids and numeric representations.
High school students can learn how a computer stores its information without using a computer. First ask students what they think information is. Computer scientists measure information by how surprising it is. To understand this concept, students will play a game of 20 questions with each other to guess a number one student has chosen. This strategy of "yes" and "no" questions can be drawn into a "decision tree" that charts the guesses into the right answer. This kind of guessing is how a computer guesses what you will type next when you are texting a message and for compression systems.