OVERVIEW:
Learning to write code is easy when you have a teacher. Or when you have a bunch of resources to teach yourself. And even then, it might not be easy for everyone. But coding started under a much more complicated time in world history. In order to communicate with his commanders throughout Europe during World War II, Hitler used secret codes that he transmitted over a series of radio messages. He never thought anyone other than the Germans would be able to crack those codes. But they did.
This violent conflict, known as World War II, took place at a time before computer technology was even a part of the daily conversation. Understanding that time in history means going back and understanding a little bit about the conflict. And if we understand the conflict, then we can look at the people who had the biggest impact on resolving that conflict, including some of the technologies that they created.
LEARNING GOAL #1: The Basics of Web History
Students will understand how the Internet evolved from a classified government research project into a world wide resource with the help of highly educated teachers and students.
During the 1930s, two leaders emerged in Italy and Germany who became the cause for great concern among the people of Europe. History calls them fascist leaders because fascism is the forcible oppression of anyone who disagrees with the government in power as well as a forcible control over the way society should be managed. In Germany, this kind of fascism was led by Adolf Hitler, who believed that certain people were part of an inferior race. So he gathered up all those he classified as inferior, and put them into brutal concentration camps in a practice that began in 1933 and became known as the Holocaust.
Between 1938 and 1939, Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany, invaded and took over two nearby countries, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Because a high number of Austrians and Czechs were originally German, no one in those countries put up much of a fight. But Poland, which was also nearby, began getting nervous. So they asked for help from Great Britain (England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) and France to defend them if Hitler were to invade, which he did in early September of 1939. So began the world at war.
When the United States got pulled into World War II, the most brilliant minds in our country, just like today, were all of the teachers and the students. These were the people constantly studying and learning and designing and building and researching. So when the government wanted to find answers to problems, or find solutions to really big challenges, they gathered up as many teachers as they could find. And the teachers would then go ask their best students to join them.