Digital Skills

As part of our Youth Led Tech Program, we’re teaching youth digital skills. We’ve open sourced our curriculum in a series of blog posts. This particular lesson plan was adapted by Christopher Whitaker from the “Brief History of The Internet” from the Internet Society. 

Introduction to How the Web Works

This module will teach students the basics of how the web works including the concept of ‘The Cloud”, the World Wide Web, DNS/Web Addresses, and how content appears in the browser.

Part One: The History of the Internet

Let’s say you wrote a really cool song on your computer. Without the internet the song would just stay on your laptop. To share it, you’d have to have somebody come over and look at your laptop – or you’d have to download it onto a floppy disk (What they had before USBs) and physically carry it over.

This is how computers used to work. And it was a bit of a problem for scientists trying to work collaboratively. Instead of shipping documents from universities on the east coast to the west coast, it would be a lot easier if one computer could just pick up a phone and call the other.

Which is exactly what they did.

In 1965, a professor at MIT used a phone line to call up a computer at UCLA and send information back and forth. This was the first (very small) network. The government saw value with this and funded an experiment called ARPAnet. Computers from across the country were added to the network becoming a ‘web’ of computers.

But, this network had a problem. It began to grow large enough to where one computer couldn’t find another specific computer. Imagine that you’re wanting to visit a friends house for the first time, but there are no street numbers. You’d get lost pretty easily.

To solve this, Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn created the TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It had four ground rules:

• Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
• Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet (information) didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be sent again from the source.
• Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
• There would be no global control at the operations level.

The protocol also had a system for giving each device connected to the network an address called an IP Address.

Activity

Everyone take out their phones or laptop. Google “What’s my IP address”

Now, notice that if you’re not on the wifi your address is different from the one on your computer. Every internet connection has it’s own address. Every website also has an address too.

Now, go into the address bar and enter 173.252.110.27

See, it really works – that’s Facebook’s address on the Internet

DNS

The problem with the IP address is that nobody can remember all the numbers needed to get everywhere on the web.

So, they developed services called “Domain Name Servers” that give addresses like 173.252.110.27 names like “Facebook.com”

DNS servers act like Google Maps for your computer. It works like this:

1. You tell your browser that you want to go to “mikvachallenge.org”
2. Your computer calls up a DNS server to ask for directions to mikvachallenge.org
3. The DNS servers looks through all the addresses in all of the internet and find: 67.202.93.0
4. The DNS tells your browser where to find the site. Your browser then points itself to 67.202.93.0
5. www.mikvachallenge.org pops up in your browser!

Web Hosting

The other problem with the early network is that those computers had to be on and connected all the time to work. It also became hard for a lot of people to try to access the same file on a single machine all at the same time.

Could you imagine 500 people trying to call you at once? Doesn’t work that well.

The people who were building the Internet needed a way to serve the information to a lot of people at once. The answer became dedicated computers that would ‘serve’ people information called servers.

YouTube has hundreds of server room that hold thousands of cat videos. When you point your browser to the funny video of your choice, the server ‘serves’ your video to your web browser.

Not everyone has to have a server room to host their websites. Expunge.io uses a service called “Amazon Web Services” to borrow their server. (Yes, you really can order everything from Amazon.”

Conclusion 

This should give you a basic idea of how the web works. There’s a lot more complexity to it, but for those interested in learning more should check out these resources.

 

As part of our Youth Led Tech Program, we’re teaching various classes on digital skills. We’ve open sourced our curriculum through a series of blog posts. As we’ve progressed into the program, we received numerous requests from instructors and youth on activities to improve typing skills. To do this, we used a program called Typing Club which we’ll discuss below. We’ve featured this app before as part of our Connect Chicago work. 

As we developed the curriculum for Youth-Led Tech, we hadn’t fully considered the basics. We drove through our lessons, which are focused on how to use WordPress to make websites for yourself and others. But we found that many youth needed more work on keyboarding skills. Since we had previously learned about TypingClub from our friends at Connect Chicago, we started an account there and set up the youth there and we now include practice nearly every day.

Introduction to  TypingClub.com

TypingCub is a program that allows staff to monitor how the students are doing in real time so that staff can move over to help if they needs to.  The app also keeps track of students progress throughout the course. Here’s Rene Paccha from the Spanish Coalition for Housing explaining more.

How TypingClubs Works

TypingClub is a free online program anyone can register for regardless of if they’re in a training course or not. The course has a hundred different lessons aimed at improving the users typing skill to 90 words per minute. Users can take the lessons as many times as they like with the goal of getting three ‘stars’ per level.

For schools and digital skill trainers, Typing Club has additional features to help trainers manage their programs.  While students can use the software for free, to use the tool as a trainer you pay for the cost per students (about $2.60 annually per student license.)

When you sign up as a school, you get a custom domain address ( yourschool.typingclub.com) that you can send your students to. When your students arrive at your page they can register to take classes and access the content you’ve provided. As an administrator, TypingClub allows you to set up lessons plans,  assign additional instructors and set up typing tests. The software also allows you to view your students progress in real time so you can walk over to the student if they’re having issues.

How to get Typing Club

For individuals, they can simply start working right away on typingclub.com without registering for the site. Registration is only necessary to be part of a class or to keep track of progress.

For schools , you can register for a free trial on the TypingClub School Page.

In practice as part of Youth Led Tech

Every day the youth spend about one hour on Typing Club. We tend to do this in the middle of the day to allow staff a chance to catch up on things.  At least one staff member will monitor the youth’s progress on Typing Club to make sure that the youth are on the right site.