Internet & Cloud

Children grow up entirely dependent on infrastructure they cannot see. The internet is a wire they never think about; the cloud is a word that means “somewhere else”. This course opens both up.

It starts lower than most children expect — at logic gates and truth tables, the actual switches a computer is built from — then works upward through troubleshooting software and hardware, configuring a network, and finally into cloud computing and its everyday applications.

It is the most technical of the Foundation courses and the one that most often decides whether a child later takes to engineering. Children who enjoy taking things apart tend to find it the most satisfying course in the set.

1 Digital Electronics View

•Logic gates and what each one does

•Graphical symbols and truth tables of logic gates

•Designing logic circuits from requirements

2 Troubleshooting Software, Applications and Operating Systems View

•Diagnosing application faults and install failures

•Operating system errors, updates and recovery

•A systematic method for isolating a fault rather than guessing

3 Troubleshooting Hardware, Networking and Configuration View

•Identifying hardware faults and safe handling

•Peripheral, driver and connection problems

•Network hardware and configuration issues

4 Networking Practices View

•How data moves across a network

•Setting up and configuring a small network

•Sharing, permissions and basic network security

5 Cloud Computing View

•What the cloud actually is, and what it replaced

•Service models and deployment models

•Cost, dependency and privacy trade-offs

6 Practices of Cloud Applications View

•Cloud storage, sync and backup in practice

•Collaboration tools and shared workspaces

•Account security, two-factor authentication and safe sharing

Logic gate simulatorsWindows and LinuxNetwork configuration toolsGoogle Drive and OneDriveCloud console demos