Conversation

When I first started teaching folks to use computers, it was job training. And people were panicked. They knew if they couldn’t learn this new skill, their jobs were at risk. But they projected this fear onto the computer itself

The most effective technique I found to address that was to have my classes gather round while I disassembled a computer and let them touch the various components. This is the motherboard. It has the CPU on it, that does most of the work. Here is the RAM, that stores what the computer is working on right now. Etc.

It made things like copying files seem much less mysterious, and even helped with using shared drives (instead of the wire from motherboard to disk to talk to a disk, you’re using the network cable to talk to a disk on someone else’s computer)