History of computers lesson plans: 20 lessons from the abacus to AI
Computing history is a gift for a classroom: real people, real puzzles and machines you can act out with counters and paper. The hard part is finding the time to plan it. This is a complete unit for ages 11 to 14, one lesson a week for about a term, built around twenty free videos of 5 to 8 minutes each. You can use the plan below with any resources you like; our printable lessons follow it exactly, and Lesson 1 is free.
How each lesson runs
Every lesson follows the same rhythm, so pupils know what to expect after the first week:
- Think first. Introduce two or three key words and ask one open question before the video.
- Watch a part, then pause. Each video is cut into short parts. Stop at the end of each one (our lessons give the exact pause times).
- Talk. Two questions per part, in pairs, then share.
- Try it. A hands-on activity on paper: a game with counters, a cut-out timeline or a paper model of the machine.
- Check. A short quiz at the end, with answers for you.
Lesson 1 takes about 45 minutes and needs only pencils and about 20 dried beans or counters. Later lessons add scissors for cut-outs. No pupil computers are needed: you only need a way to play the video to the group.
The unit at a glance
Four blocks of five lessons. Each block ends at a natural stopping point, so you can teach one block as a short topic if a whole term is too much.
Block 1: From counting to codebreaking
| # | Lesson | Big ideas | Hands-on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beads, Pebbles and Dust | The abacus; counting with pebbles and boards | Pebble sums on a counting board; label an abacus |
| 2 | The Shipwreck "Computer" | Bronze gears from a Greek shipwreck; the first calculating machines | Cut-out timeline cards |
| 3 | The Computer That Was Never Built | Jacquard's punched-card loom, Babbage's engines, Ada Lovelace's notes | "Be the engine" with counters |
| 4 | Holes in Cards | A census that took years to add up; reading holes with electricity | "Be the tabulator" card counting |
| 5 | Turing and the Codebreakers | An imaginary machine from 1936; Enigma; the Bombe and Colossus | A paper tape machine; a turning-wheel cipher |
Block 2: Electronic giants to the microprocessor
| # | Lesson | Big ideas | Hands-on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | ENIAC, Baby and UNIVAC | Room-sized computers, the women who programmed them, and which was "first" | "Paper Baby" stored-program game |
| 7 | The Transistor and the Chip | The transistor; chips; a prediction that parts would keep doubling | Logic gates with counters; doubling sums |
| 8 | Big Iron | Mainframes, FORTRAN, COBOL and IBM's System/360 | "Be the compiler"; numbers from four boxes |
| 9 | Minicomputers and UNIX | PDP-1, Spacewar!, PDP-8, and UNIX rewritten in C | A "chalk disk" file list; "Move it" between two pretend machines |
| 10 | A CPU on a Chip | The Intel 4004 and the chips that followed | "Program the chip" with counters; four-bit numbers |
Block 3: Computers for everyone
| # | Lesson | Big ideas | Hands-on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | Computers Come Home | Kit computers, hobby clubs, the 1977 machines and the first spreadsheet program | A 256-box memory grid; a paper "what if?" spreadsheet |
| 12 | The IBM PC and the Clones | Off-the-shelf parts, an open design, clean-room copies | "Make or buy" sums; a rule-finding game; a ten-counter market model |
| 13 | Windows, Icons and the Mouse | The mouse, the 1968 demonstration, the Alto, the Mac and Windows | "Roll the mouse" grid game; pictures made from squares |
| 14 | From ARPANET to the Web | Packets, email, joining networks into an internet, the Web from CERN | Packets on paper strips; a paper web of linked pages |
| 15 | Computers in Your Pocket | Portables, laptops, handhelds, and the phone that did it all | Halving and weighing sums; a "count the steps" design game |
Block 4: Today's computing and AI
| # | Lesson | Big ideas | Hands-on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | The GPU | Game graphics and doing many sums at once | Pixels coloured by a rule; "share the sums" games |
| 17 | The Cloud | Taking turns on one big computer; data centres; renting by the hour | A "take turns" game; racks, hours and gigabytes sums |
| 18 | Machines That Learn | The perceptron, ImageNet and AlexNet | A paper "sorter" that learns from its mistakes |
| 19 | Large Language Models | A 1966 chat program, the Transformer, next-word prediction | A paper next-word model from a tally table |
| 20 | AI on Your Own Desk | Desktop machines with 128 GB of shared memory; a look back to the abacus | "Will it fit?" memory sums; a whole-series timeline card sort |
Tips from building it
- Act the machine out. Abstract ideas get concrete fast: a "stored program" is easier to grasp once pupils have been the memory boxes themselves.
- Teach "first" as an argument, not a fact. Lesson 6 asks which computer was first, and the honest answer depends on what you count. It's a great discussion lesson.
- Lesson 19 ends on a big idea for this age group: a sentence can sound fluent and still be untrue. The paper next-word model shows why, with no AI tool needed.
- Keep one timeline going. Most lessons include a cut-out timeline. Pin them up as you go, and Lesson 20 finishes with a card sort across the whole series.
For educational purposes only. The videos are voiced by an AI host; Kit runs Kitson Workshop and reviews every script, and each episode was fact-checked before voicing. Names and trademarks belong to their owners; no endorsement is implied.
Try Lesson 1 free. A 10-page printable lesson for the abacus video: a grown-up's guide with exact pause times, four pupil pages, a worksheet, the story in four pictures, an 8-question quiz and all the answers. Lessons 2-20 are $8 each, or all 20 for $129.
Get Lesson 1 freeWatch episode 1 · All 20 lessons ($129) · Every episode and lesson