Very cool, if true

A couple of days ago I went in to Sophia's room at nursery in the middle of the afternoon and spent fifteen minutes talking to a group of fifteen four-year-olds about what I do for a job.

Obviously, I can't share the cute photo I have of it (not without whiting out so much of it that it would be completely pointless), but I had a good time, I had many many questions and comments (my favourite being the child who told me that his father had ten computers, one of which could turn into a robot and shoot people), and the kids seemed to enjoy telling me things about computers in their lives.

Here are the bullet points I wrote in advance, in case anyone else needs to talk about computers to a bunch of people with very little experience of them:

* Who has an adult who uses a computer?
* Do they look like a box, with a screen and a keyboard? (multiple responses about laptops here)
* Computers can be big or small. As big as a whole room sometimes, or so small you could balance one on your finger.
* They're all around us, inside lots of things, like phones, and tablets, and watches, and TVs, and (multiple responses about other things that might be computers)
* They think very fast, but they are very stupid. You have to be very very careful what you tell them, otherwise they'll do the wrong thing.
* Mostly they do maths - lots of simple things with numbers.
* It turns out we can turn a lot of things into numbers - like words, and pictures, and videos, and even games. And once we have, computers can then move them about, and change them, and let us play with them.
* Lots of computers can talk to each other. So people can put things on one computer, and then everyone around the world can see them. Like pictures of cats (cue many responses about other things you might see on the internet)

Sophia was delighted to have me in her room, and was very happy to sit in the front row and make intermittent faces at me. I'm now kinda looking forward to doing the same for her when she's in school :-)