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Slides from my talk to a classroom of 13-year olds at Sedbergh Junior School in the UK.
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What do Computer Scientists do – and why?Justine Sherry, Real Life Computer Scientist
@Sedbergh School || Sedbergh, UK 15 June 2012
Hello!
My name is Justine
I am a Computer Scientist
I study Computer Networks (like the Internet)
About Computer Scientists
What do they look like?
What do they do all day?
Why do they do computer science?
WRONG
What do they look like?
What do they do all day?
Why do they do Computer Science?
That’s a harder question.
It’s different for everyone.
Computer Science is a set of tools that let you solve problems: but everyone has a different problem they want to solve.
A problem: Internet in Poor Countries
People in poor countries often don’t have access to the Internet.
Especially people who live far away from big cities.
A solution: build new long-distance networks
My friends Yahel, Shaddi, and Kurtis build special long-distance wireless networks to connect rural villages to the Internet.
A problem: how to tell apart sick brains from healthy ones?
Brain scans generate so much data that it’s impossible for humans to read and understand it all!
A solution: use a computer program to analyze the scans
Rosalia, Laura, and Professor Shapiro wrote computer programs that can read brain scans and detect when something is wrong.
A problem: making automobiles safe!
We test cars over and over again to make sure they’re safe for people to ride in at hundreds of km/hr.
Modern cars have computers in them.
How do we tell that the computers are safe, and aren’t going to break while someone is on the road?
Solution: hack the cars (for good, not evil)
Karl, Franzi, their professors and collaborators hacked cars for months – they tried everything they could to break the computers in the cars.
Then they told the car companies about the problems they found.
A problem: designing realistic video games
Some problems we want to solve are “just for fun!”
Solution: let people use their whole bodies as the controller
Many people at Microsoft Research here in the UK worked on designing the Kinect!
My first computer code
Some problems are small!
When I was 12, I really liked these books
I started writing my own stories about the characters.
I wanted to put my stories on the Internet for people to read them.
So, I built a website with my friendSara and we put our stories online.
What are some problems you can think of?
What are some important problems you can think of?
How might you be able to help solve them with computers and technology?
