This assignment had two goals: 1) find out what my new students can do, and want to do, with computers so I can try to meet their needs with a course curriculum that is mostly up to me to design, and 2) see how many of my students have figured out how to make attractive and informative slides, and see if they help other students catch up, since making slides is increasingly something students do for assignments and presentations at school now.
I showed the students a few tricks (how to find an image, download it, and place it on the background of a slide, or how to change the opacity of the fill of a text box so that some of a background image showed through) but I only showed them once. Those who were already somewhat familiar with Microsoft Powerpoint (or with Google Slides) could pick it up and apply it, but others who had never done this sort of thing had no basis for remembering it.
In the next phase, I will ask each student to complete a checklist of each of the skills these slides demonstrate, and say whether they (1) can't do it, (2) can do it, or (3) can teach it. Then I'll match them up during Digital Tool Skills lessons. We're not going to spend so much time on this that every student has to know how -- there's too much else to cover -- but students will have an opportunity to learn, and will definitely know their way around slide designs better after.
NOTE: The 6th graders had an easier time with this assignment. I suspect that's because our elementary schools have been involved with the "CS for All" partnership with UMass Amherst for a couple of years, so 4th and 5th grade teachers have been teaching skills that our 8th graders were not trained in. They have to pick it up as they go, or not.
This assignment had two goals: thinking about 1) what computers systems do with data (input, storage, processing and output) and 2) how individual devices that are either part of such systems (like mice or monitors) or other systems (like satellite dish antennas or TV remote controls, or even dishwashers or traffic lights) perform similar functions.
There are few "right answers": is a USB drive a data storage device only (it clearly is) or does it also do input and output, since you can put data on it and get data from it, as some students said? I said that we only consider "input" and "output" when the computer system is connected to something outside, like a person moving a mouse or touching a keyboard, or a satellite dish antenna receiving radio waves from space. Is a traffic light an output device only (I think so), or does it also have a processor to convert signals to light patterns (I does -- most electronic devices have processors).
I said that we only call something "processing" if it changes the signal in some irreversable way, according to some plan (I'd say "algorithm" instead of "plan" but we haven't used that word yet). So there is no "processing" done when sound is converted from a microphone to an .mp3 file, because if you play that .mp3 file you get those same sounds back. But if I use an audio production program to distort the sound, then I AM doing processing. We're going to apply these ideas when we start writing programs, because programs control the input, storage, processing and output of data.