A couple of weeks ago my other half asked if I knew any scientists or engineers - the local Brownie pack were doing their science and engineering badge, and they really needed a “real life” engineer or scientist to visit and talk to the Brownies. I joked at the time that I had studied “computer science” at college, and sometimes my job was described as a “software engineer”.
A couple of days ago - after putting the call out and getting no replies at all - my other half caught me in-between washing up and putting shoes away;
“You know that Brownie thing? Do you think you could do it?”
“Oh, so I AM an engineer now ?”
I forgot all about it until late last night when my other half asked if I was ready. Oh Crap.
I started putting a slide deck together in Powerpoint at about 11pm, while waiting for the desktop PC to install Windows 10 (yes, I reverted back to Windows after Ubuntu had a difference of opinion with the nVidia graphics drivers). I think I finished at about 1am.
After leaving work a little early this evening and grabbing something quick to eat at home, we all headed off to the church hall where the Brownies meet. I grabbed the laptop bag, the memory stick with the presentation on it, and the old projector.
I haven’t visited Brownies very often during my other half’s tenure as “Brown Owl” (I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that actually - my other half has been “Brown Owl” for about the last 7 years), but every time I do I’m taken aback by the wall of sound. Thirty young girls talking, laughing, and singing at the same time is pretty fearsome.
While the leaders fought for a semblence of control over the children, I plugged the laptop in, and tried to plug the projector in - which would have been far easier if the right power cable had been put in the bag. We were going to have to do without the projector. Crap. I perched the laptop on a chair, and the children sat in a semi-circle around it.
I talked about what I actually do - how most of my job is travel, and talking to strangers, and writing documents. I talked about software developers being able to make computers do pretty-much anything, and that while it sounds fantastic, it’s also a bit of a nightmare - If you can do anything, what’s the best thing to do?
I showed the kids a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon of the “Transmogrifier” while explaining how programming gets turned into something the computer understands. The adults laughed.
By far the best part of the talk was showing the kids the various “famous” computers, and software developers. We talked about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the Colossus and Bombes at Bletchley Park, Eniac in the US, the Cray Super Computers, the Apple 1, the IBM XT, the Apple Powerbook, and the Raspberry Pi. The kids laughed at the Apple 1, but then got wrapped up in the story of Woz and Steve making it in Steve’s Dad’s garage - and Woz’s boss not being interested in it, because “why on earth would every house ever need a computer?”.
Because I was standing in front of a room of girls, I had deliberately filled the slide deck with female icons - Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Jean Bartik, Marissa Mayer, Lucy Bradshaw, Cammie Dunaway, and Corrine Yu. Some of the names are not well known, but some of the projects they were responsible for are - COBOL, Google, The Sims, the Nintendo Wii, and HALO.
I think perhaps the biggest surprise during the talk was the number of hands that kept going up, asking all sorts of questions. I fielded as many as I could, but had half an eye on the time - because I had something up my sleeve. A game.
I split the Brownies into two groups of 14. Ten of each group would line up in a row, holding pieces of paper in front of them with numbers one through ten printed on them. They would shuffle around until the numbers were all over the place. The remaining four children would be a computer program - they would repeatedly ask two people to step forward from the line, and swap places in the line - hopefully ending up with all of the numbers back “in order”. Oh, and why two groups doing it at once? Because it was a race.
I was stunned at how quickly the children formed strategies to speed up the sorting. One particular girl figured it out straight away - I shouted “Clever!” at her first instruction to the line of numbers.
After ten minutes of mayhem, cheers and laughter, we all gathered together, and I explained how a computer would do the sorting - stepping from one kid to the next, saying “are you bigger than that one?” again and again. I explained how the computer wasn’t as good as they had been at it, but it had the advantage of speed - being able to ask those questions, and swap the numbers millions of times a second.
I ended with a question.
“We might not be as fast as computers, but we are much better at figuring things out - why?”
A sea of hands went up.
“Because we have a brain.”