**Learning to Think Computationally for Kids** This course is dedicated to kids with limited reading skills and minimal programming skills. A set of hands-on exercises will be given to students to guide their studies. All projects will be some how directly linked with each other, so that the learning experience is connected and re-inforced. **Content Outline** The objective is to help students establish a foundation for managing their own learning skills. That means they need to acquire the logic and transformation tools to organize knowledge in their minds. The first six weeks are going to set up a series of exercise to help them understand the hardware and software aspects of a computing system. The hardware content is divided into 6 sections. For explanation of these titles for each lecture, please see [Hardware View][1]. 1. How do you know you are right? 2. What are numbers and names? 3. Memory = Space * Time 4. From Symbols to Reality 5. A Universal Device 6. Automatic Translation In parallel, we divide the software aspect into another six sections, to be explored in roughly six weeks. To see the meaning of these terms: see Software View 1. Game as the Matrix 2. Decompose the Matrix 3. Matrix into Stack and Queues 4. Name Space Management 5. Functions and Forms 6. Hardware Interfaces After the first six weeks, we will then organize the course as one big system. So that the content is going to be about a networked operating systems. This part of the course will be using the development tools presented in earlier part of the course. Moreover, we plan to add Netlogo as a computing platform for connecting various devices. To better understand the rationale of these four weeks, see System View. 7. Infrastructures: Operating Systems 8. Mindset 9. Privacy and Security 10. Networked Society Then, the remaining course will be about creating a system by student teams. For a sixteen week course, we plan to have all students present their project via electronic platform by week 7. That means, these learning activities should happen in parallel with the lectures. Then, the schedule will be likely to be managed in the following sequence: 7. Project Proposal 8. Unit Test Plans presented 9. System Test Plans proposed 10. Stress Test Plans In terms of meet-up times, we will have the following activities: 11. Beauty Contest 12. Website Demonstration 13. Knowledge Management Summary 14. Final Presentation 15. Process Data Analysis 16. Overall Reflection The purpose of week 11's Beauty Contest, is to get all participants to start visualize the results as early as they can, so that they can start modifying the content before the end of semester. Then, they have to put the content on a publicly, or at least public to the learning group, so that people can start giving each other feedback. Week 13 is a lecture, explaining the strategy and approaches to manage collective intelligence, and how it applies to our existing projects. Using the feedback here, students should have about two weeks worth of window time to prepare their final presenation. Final presentation is done here, so that we have two more weeks to analyze the learning process data, and eventually have a public reflection period to officially examine what we have learned together. **Key Reference:** A major part of this course is inspired by Nand2Tetris, its official website is: [http://nand2tetris.org][2]. The formal name of this course is The Elements of Computing Systems by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken. The Nand2Tetris course has a great set of exercises and inter-related projects. In our course, we will explicitly add two more important aspects of computation. That is information security and networking. These two elements will help students better understand the interactive aspects of computation. Ideally, we should apply information theory to perform design computationally. This approach is possible, given that Cybernetics was originally founded to tackle this problem. Moreover, the notion of encoding and decoding, by definition is all about managing interactions with degrees of difficulties. We need to think about how to solve these problems using these mathematical tools in an inventive way. [1]: https://osf.io/wn2ak/wiki/Hardware%20View/ [2]: http://nand2tetris.org