shoebox computer

[kderemer1969]

My daughter has to make a mock computer using a shoebox? any suggestions?

[theborg]

kderemer1969,

Welcome to the forum. Interesting project. Without knowing the teachers exact goal for assigning the project, i'll take a guess that it is to show how the idea of the form of computers these days is different from person to person. In the past it was only a relatively heavy device with a large monitor connected to a CPU "tower" of some sort with various input devices, i.e. keyboards, trackballs, a mouse, etc... But now, we have laptops which integrate everything into a carriable device, tablet devices with a flat screen that optically displays input icons and keys that then are selected via touching the screen itself.

If it was my daughter, i'd either suggest mimiking the wave of the future by making a flat tablet device out of two shoebox "tops" and then draw a "touchscreen" on the front...or go completely the opposite direction and recreate an early personnal computer and use the largest shoeboxes I could find to replicate something like the Commodore PET, the first mass marketed PC (circa 1977).

Sounds like fun, I think I'll suggest something like this to my daughters art teacher as a project. Let us know how it goes.