Using the Internet to
Communicate with Talk

Abstract

In this lesson, students will learn to communicate via Internet.

Students will do so by chatting amongst each other in Terminal (on a Mac) or Putty (on a PC).

This lesson utilizes the Unix command "chat".

Objectives

Upon completion on this lesson, students should understand the basic concept of Internet messaging in a Unix-based operating system.

Student Prerequisites

• Students must be able to:
  • Perform basic Unix commands such as "ls" and "cd"

Teacher Preparation

Students will need:

• An pre-created e-mail account on a local server
• A connection to the Internet

Lesson Outline

The instructor should discuss different ways of Internet communication with the class. He or she should make sure the students understand basic Unix commands since they will be communicating through Terminal (a Unix-based system). The students will use their e-mail accounts to chat with one another.

From the terminal window students should:

• Type in chat followed by the username of the person desired they want to chat with
  • This will be in the form: chat username@servername
  • Example: chat svalentine@scan
• The student receiving the invitation to chat will get a message asking to confirm the chat procedure resembling
  • "connection requested by username@servername".
• Respond with: talk username@servername
  • This will look like: talk billybob@scan.shodor.org
• In order to quit the chat system, press ^c (hold down the control key and press c)

Alternate Outlines

This lesson can be rearranged in several ways.

• Allow the students to talk to interns in other rooms rather than talking to other students. Having students talk to each other may create a problem if they are already friends or if they have problems with each other.

Suggested Follow-Up

• If there is still time at the end of the day, you may discuss how the Internet is kind of like the PB&J activity and writing commands to talk and log in and out of scan through UNIX. There is a set of commands to tell the computer to make webpages, using a special type of protocol called HTML. You may want to show them some page sources, and see how much they can figure out. Find one with meta tags, and hint at search engine use that will be explained more tomorrow.