[cheesymuffin]

Do a presentation on all of the problems technology has caused for humans. Bring in a small aquarium full of fish and dump crude oil in it and dissect the fish. Talk about research on the effects excessive technology use and automation have on the human brain. You can use cardboard cutouts to represent different neurotransmitters. Show them videos of the war in Syria.

Then talk about how you're helping them by getting them addicted to technology early so that in adulthood they won't remember being sober.

[tunap]

My idea was to run a "smart" phone through wifi router & be amazed while i.d.'ing all the easter egg packets and servers connecting to fuel the surveillance economy. But alas, kids don't care and "have nothing to hide". Your idea sounds more better... let's skip hurting the inbred fry mill types, just grab one from a local water body & test for pharmacology, perhaps.

[Theodores]

You have a point but there are ways to talk about the positive future. It is not all doom and gloom.

When I was at school maths, physics and computer science was for losers. Losers as in social misfits, people who weren't good enough to hang out with the cool kids.

Against this backdrop I had a father who would preface a lot of things with 'in Germany...'. So, according to my dad, the German kids did learn their science and engineering with the cool kids being the ones that excelled at those things in Germany. Allegedly the German 'loser kids' were the ones that aspired to the easy subjects.

Obviously my dad was egging the pudding a bit, however he did have a point.

In today's world there is this place called China. I know that is a tricky subject with people regurgitating whatever they have read in the New York Times about the place being an evil dictatorship, however, the fact of the matter is that the Chinese government are a bit more serious than the UK/USA governments when it comes to education. In China the cool subjects are tech, tech and more tech.

Sure there are some kids that want to be a footballer/air force pilot/pop star/actor but those kids are not in a teaching environment where the hard subject - STEM - are shunned. Tech is cool. You can have full on 'maker scene' in the class room in China, plus the kids have more than a tatty blackboard in the class rooms, I would say that the level of advancement is verging on the ridiculous.

The nit pickers will be able to say this ain't so in darkest Yunnan province where they haven't invented the wheel yet, but in the nation of 1.3 billion people there are some class rooms that put whatever school you are needing to guest teach in to shame.

It is possible to entertain the kids with some impressive demo of tech but this might be just that, entertainment, not education. There is also a mismatch with where the STEM education leads to, the jobs are perceived as boring.

With my dad's efforts to encourage me to do tech because the 'German kids do it', I could escape the local bubble whether at school or university where arts subjects were cool and anyone doing tech was to be ostracised. I 'knew' what they didn't know that I would be able to mix it with the German kids when I got older, I would have a wider world open to me. Back then Germany was as ahead as it is now, but, the better benchmark for today's world is China. In the UK/USA we are in danger of slipping miles behind, stuck with a class mentality in the UK that prevents tech being cool and similar mental hurdles in the US where everyone has to be famous or die trying.

Having China as the place where tech is cool and all the kids want to do it (allegedly) is definitely credible when you have every computer, phone and other high tech gadget seemingly made there. We don't want to be the B-team, second-11 in the UK/USA, English is the language of STEM and it can be fairly stated that opting out of science and tech is cowardly - 'those Chinese kids are not better, are they...?' Time to instil some competition and can-do mentality rather than convenient resignation.