Hey Erik, One thing to think about (and I'm no expert at middle school kids) would be to relate search somehow to a topic they are interested in. My 12 year old nephew loves the NBA, so if I were to talk to him about search, I would try and relate it to e.g., NBA.com, or understanding the difference between Kobe (beef) say, and Kobe Bryant. Or trying to explain relevance in the context of looking at Cars (the movie) versus looking for Cars (automobiles).
As far as interactivity, cutting up the document is a great idea. You may also want to make a handout with some I don't want to call them "problems" but let's say exercises that the kids can do involving using some of the fundamentals that you cover with the cutting exercise to maybe then identifying why (and most importantly how) the search engine can begin to figure out if you were looking for a Kobe steak, versus Kobe the NBA star. Just my 2 cents... Cheers, Chris On 3/24/10 7:40 AM, "Erik Hatcher" <erik.hatc...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've got a couple of questions for the community... > > * what's the simplest way to get Solr up and running with a > relatively richly schema'd index of a Wikipedia dump? > > What I'm looking for is something as easy as something along these > lines: > > java -Dsolr.solr.home=./wikipedia_solr_home -jar start.jar > > cat wikipedia.bz2 | wikipedia_solr_indexer > > My goal is to index wikipedia in order to demonstrate search to a > class of middle school kids that I've volunteered to teach for a > couple of hours. Which brings me to my next question... > > * anyone have ideas on some basic hands-on ways of teaching search > engine fundamentals? > > One idea I have is to bring some actual "documents", say a poster > board with a sentence written largely on it, have the students > physically *tokenize* the document by cutting it up and > lexicographically building the term dictionary. Thoughts on taking it > further welcome! > > Thanks all. > > Erik > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: chris.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
