Hardware dismantle

On July 20th, we decided to have a day to dismantle hardware. One of the things the mentors had discussed was that many of us grew up building, and taking apart, our own computers. This is unfortunately becoming less and less common these days; most computers come as a device that is sealed up so the kids don’t necessarily have a lot of access to the pieces that make up a computer. We thought it would be eye-opening to get a bunch of old hardware and dismantle it. This allowed for discussion about what each removed part was, what it functioned as, and how it looked to each of the kids. Another great idea one of our mentors had was to keep a list of each country they see the parts coming from. I believe we had more than 10 different countries represented; this was great for the kids to see, a glimpse of how much was involved in the building of each of the devices they use.