Organising, reorganising and comparing storage

This task is designed to get students to think about memory and storage.

1) Get the class to brainstorm as many secondary storage devices and primary memory as they can. Write the words all over the whiteboard in an unorganised fashion. You should produce a list that includes:

     SD card, micro SD card, CD, DVD, USB pen drive, hard drive, cloud storage, RAM, ROM and cache.

2) In small groups, get students to come up with as many different ways of organising / grouping / classifying / comparing them as possible. They might need some research time for this task. 

3) Bring the ideas together as a class. They should have ideas that include:

     secondary storage v primary memory, optical / magnetic / solid state, cost of item, storage capacity, read-write speeds, portability, physical size.

4) They now should work in a DTP program or word processor, or a presentation package. They have to divide up all of the hardware into the different criterai; they have to state the comparing criteria and then organise the devices according to it. E.g. The first area / page / slide might be secondary storage v primary memory and they therefore might draw two circles, one containing SD card, micro SD card, CD, DVD, USB pen drive, hard drive and cloud storage and one containing RAM, ROM and cache. The next area might be splitting up all the items by technology (magnetic, optical and solid state) so they would need three circles or columns (how would they deal with cloud storage?) and so on.

5) They should be encouraged to add colour and diagrams to their work.