Everything you need to understand or teach A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.
A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge tells a tale of human scientists inadvertently releasing an ancient Blight on the universe, and the Blight racing an expedition to find what mystery has escaped their control: a secret that can make the Blight even more powerful or a Countermeasure that can once again defeat it. The world on which the starship carrying the mystery has landed has a medieval social order and dog-like sentient creatures are the dominant species. Two warring factions adopt human siblings who survive the landing, learning from them technology to bring about military victory.
Human scientists, lured by profit, develop a lost, inadvertently releasing the "Straumli Perversion," also known as "the Blight," on computers and sentient beings throughout the High Beyond. The Olsndot family escapes with the colonists' children in suspended animation and a "Countermeasure" that has successfully defeated the Blight aeons earlier. The parents are... View more of the A Fire upon the Deep Summary
A Fire upon the Deep Lesson Plans contain 134 pages of teaching material, including:
Vernor Vinge