Eposode 144: Hacked school bus

Comic Transcript

Panel 1.
Alkina: Give us a few minutes to dock with your ship.

Panel 2.
[Inside the alien ship, which looks like a futuristic school bus.]
Alkina: What happened here?
Laby: Kodu hacked into the school bus and disabled its navigation system!

Kodu: No, I didn’t!
Laby: Yes, you did! Look, the cable from your personal computer is still attached to your seat dashboard!

Panel 3.
Kodu: I didn’t mean to disable the navigation system. I was just practicing what I learned in my programming class.
Ludd: You know programming? That is so cool!

Laby: It isn’t cool that we are stuck here, goodness knows where, without a way to get home.
Alkina: Everyone, please calm down.

Alkina: Kodu, can you fix the ship’s navigation system?
Kodu: I don’t know how.

What does it mean?

Hack – In computer science, hacking means to take advantage of a weakness in a computer system to bypass its normal operations. Sometimes hacking can be beneficial by making the system do more than it was designed to or it can be harmful if it stops the system from doing what it was meant to do.

Programming – is the process by which computers are given instructions to perform a particular task.

Is that all?

Making computers do your bidding – Why learning computer programming is important and fun!

Why kids should learn to program computers – Another compelling webpage about why it’s important to learn computer programming.

Hey, where’s my science?

Many modern devices, like phones, cameras, microwave ovens, traffic lights, even cars, and planes rely on computers to perform the functions for which they were designed. There are two essential components of a functional computer, hardware and software. The most sophisticated software is nothing if it does not have the hardware to run it. And, the fastest, more powerful computer hardware is useless without the software to make use of that speed and power. In the next several episodes of Epo’s Chronicles, we will be talking about the basics of programming computers.