Today’s students often think that computers are very recent technological advancements because computers as they know them did not exist 50 years ago.  You can challenge those ideas in a discussion about the nature and evolution of technology using a series of 12 slideshows, Lectures in the History of Computing, from our Engineering Pathway, that starts with the Chinese Abacus circa 3,000 BC.  Your students would be surprised to learn that the Z1, the first freely programmable computer, shown in the top of the picture, was developed in 1936.  This and other insights to deepen their knowledge of the history of computers can be found in The History of Computing, a resource provided by Math Forum, and in The Computer History Museum provided by the Internet Scout Project.  Explore our interactive Nature of Technology strand map and find a wealth of resources at the 6-8 grade level to address the benchmark: “Computers have become invaluable in science, mathematics, and technology.” For example, your students could watch a short clip interviewing Craig Venter who talks about Using Computers to Predict the Human Genome, provided by the BEN Pathway.  For students interested in further computer studies, you can suggest the AMSER Pathway course: Introduction to Computer Science using Java, that includes 87 chapters plus exercises, quizzes, flash cards, and reviews.  Or, they could choose to lean with Alice—a downloadable software teaching tool for introductory computing and for teaching problem solving and sequencing skills, that offers an innovative 3-D programming environment to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the Web.  This resource comes to NSDL from AMSER, Scout, and our own CS & Intro Tech and Math collections.  These last two collections also feature Scratch, a programming language designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st-century learning skills.  For all-encompassing resources, CSERD Pathway promotes the use of computers to do science—its aim is to help students learn about computational science and to help faculty and teachers incorporate it into the classroom.  The Ensemble Computing Pathway offers a variety of resources and tools supporting the computing sciences communities, including the Visual Knowledge Builder, an organizing workspace for teachers and students; Ensemble in Second Life; and Walden’s Paths, providing support for authoring, publication, and viewing of annotated paths over existing Web materials.  We hope you enjoy the wealth of resources that you can find via NSDL to teach (and learn!) about computer science.