For educators
Ready-to-use material for teachers planning a visit or a classroom unit. Lesson plans are mapped to the Georgia Standards of Excellence.
How to use these
Start with a lesson plan or discussion guide, add the scavenger hunt for the visit itself, and use the catalog fact sheets as reading for students. Every page prints cleanly.
Ten-minute classroom activities
How much is 5 million characters?
Read the IBM 305 RAMAC fact sheet. Ask students to guess how many of these disk units one phone photo would fill, then work out an answer together.
Check a source
Pick any fact sheet. Students open one listed source and find the line that backs one key fact. Ask what a reader should do if two sources disagree.
Find your day
Open On this day. Each student finds an event near their birthday and tells the class what changed.
Lesson plans
Grace Hopper: The Admiral of Abstraction
A high school lesson plan on how Grace Hopper
The Spark of the PC Revolution: A Lesson on the MITS Altair 8800
A high school lesson plan on the MITS Altair 8800, the 1975 kit computer that launched hobbyist computing, with activities on binary, primary sources and the birth of the software industry.
Field-trip scavenger hunts
Pre- and post-visit discussion guides
Guided paths
Audio tour scripts
The Odyssey Begins: The World
A narrated audio guide to the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console, and to the engineer Ralph Baer who dreamed it up.
The Black Cube: A Guided Tour of the Thinking Machines CM-1
A 14-minute audio script about the Connection Machine CM-1, a 1980s computer with 65,536 simple processors in a black cube of red lights.
Pixels and Polygons: The Evolution of Computer Graphics
A comprehensive 15-minute guided audio tour exploring the pivotal artifacts that transformed computer graphics from laboratory experiments into the foundation of modern visual culture.