The Best of Creative Computing Volume 1 (published 1976)
Interview (classroom activity, public attitude towards computers)
Another new classroom activity from CREATIVE COMPUTING Magazine ......
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INTERVIEW
Here's an informative activity to do in a "Computers in Society" or "Computer
Appreciation" course, or for that matter,in a social studies or sociology
course.
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EXERCISE l
Make up copies of the interview form on the next page and give each student two
copies. (You may want to use a subset of the questions instead of the entire
list.)Each student should fill out one copy of the questionnaire himself. Then,
each student should interview an adult on these issues. Try to obtain interviews
with a diverse cross-section of people. Students may feel more comfortable
working in groups to get interviews;if so, let them pair off. But no more than
two students to a group; more than that tends
to overwhelm interviewees.
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EXERCISE 2
Tabulate the results, compare the various answers obtained, and discuss in
class.Can you draw any conclusions about the attitude of general public toward
computers? Do students' attitudes generally agree or disagree with those of the
interviewees? Are there any obvious relationships between the attitudes
expressed and the demographic characteristics (age, sex, etc.) of the
respondents?
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Send your raw results to CREATIVE COMPUTING, i.e., number of total responses in
each box, and we'll tabulate and print them all in a future issue.
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OPTIONAL EXERCISE l
Write a computer program to tabulate the results and compute average scores for
each question as well as percentage distributions.
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OPTIONAL EXERCISE 2
If your computer system has file capabilities, write a program to administer the
questionnaire via a
terminal, store the results and merge them with all previous results and then
print out the scores to date.
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For real pizzazz, print the results graphically like this:
COMPUTERS WILL IMPROVE HEALTH CARE
[image]
Or, show a bar chart of answers like
this:
COMPUTERS DEHUMANIZE SOCIETY BY TREATING EVERYONE AS A NUMBER
[image]
