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Is Early Exposure To Computers Good For Kids?
dmatos asks: "I share a house with a family. One son is 13 years old, and has been playing with computers for his entire life. However, that's all he's been doing, is playing computer games. Recently he was given the chance of getting a new computer, and the family asked for my help in choosing it. While talking with this boy, I found out that he didn't even know the difference between RAM and HDD, despite over 5 years exposure to computers and being in grade 8. Later, he had trouble installing his favourite games because the GUI installation programs started talking about things like drivers etc. and he was worried about continuing. How beneficial is early exposure to computers for today's youth, considering what most of them use it for? Are there any programs/books that you can recommend for someone who spends a lot of time playing on them, but hasn't the slightest clue as to how they work? And do you think that early exposure is overrated?" While I'm all for getting kids to use computers at an early age, even if it's just to play games or write a paper, I wonder if it's necessary for a child in the 8th grade to know the difference between RAM and a hard drive. Wouldn't it be better to train them on the basic use of the machines and have them get the details later in their education?
The way I see it is that if I would have had a computer of my own while growing up I wouldn't have wasted as much of my time with the console machines (I never even had a C-64 for crying out loud!).
Kids will be kids, and although there are the exceptional few who will inquire as to how the thing really works, most are just there for the bells and whistles. At least if they use a computer then they will get some exposure, even if it's just being familiar with the thing. If they are inclined to actually get into computers at a deeper level then that will come on it's own - if the boy you are talking about doesn't like installation now, he'll figure it out when he realizes that it's something he'll have to learn to keep playing new games, and if he doesn't want to learn, then maybe computers just aren't his thing *gasp*! The only one who will lose in that case are the parents who bought him the $3000 gaming machine that he lost interest in.
So in the end, I'd have to say that the exposure is the main thing, even if they don't pick up on it for whatever reasons, at least they're still having fun and the opportunity exists for them to go further into computing.
UBU
My neighbor reciently needed a new lawn mower. Despite that fact that he has been mowing lawns since he was 12, he had no idea what the difference between a 2 cycle and 4 cycle engine is. Latter I was surprized to discover that he has no idea how to tell if the engine is flooded, much less what to do about it. Yet he has been using lawn mowers for 30 years!
When I lived in an apartment I found that some of my neighbors have no idea corn grows much like thos trees in the part. He was against hunting because it was killing, but he didn't consider it a meal unless there was beef, pork or chicken included.
Okay, the wording is changed a little bit to make the situations work, but look again and try to convince me that the above situations are any different. I could be entirely self sufficant, growing and cooking my own food, refining my own crude into gas, building my own car from ore, typing on a commptuer I designed and built myself in my own fab. the only problem is I wouldn't. after taking the time to grown my own food and mine my own ore I wouldn't have time left in my life to design the car, much less build it, find crude, refine it, build a comptuer fab plant. So humans specialize. I don't do medican, I go to a doctor. I might have a small garden, but it doesn't come close to providing all the food I eat. Even if materials are provided, building a chip fab plant alone takes longer then I'm likely to live.
This kid will grow up calling a tech every time he needs comptuer help. So long as overall he is contributing to socity in some way I'm not worried. If he tries to make a life of crime, or live entirly on welfare (assuming ability to not) I'm worried. Convince me that this kid is an idiot who can never be a productive member of socity and there is a problem. If this kids interests call a comptuer a tool and he isn't interested in how his tools work, who cares.
My professors in computer science all were on research projects, and it turned out most were working with the medical school across the street. Sure a medical doctor/student could program a comptuer, but everyone is better off if they work togather, the comptuer people writing programs to orginize data usefully while the MDs interoret what it means. (In the case I recall the computer orginized brain slices, but there are many possibilities)
The world may need more engineers, but we need the majroity of people to not be engineers.
Some people want to drive it, and some want to work on it. Mechanics may not be great drivers, and great drivers may not be able to change their own oil.
Being involved in one doesn't mean being involved in everything.
And if you think you want to be self-sufficient, dig up an old copy of "Spacehounds of IPC", where the hero has to do things such as build a generator by smelting copper, building a wire-pulling machine, manufacture electrical insulation, making bearings, inventing a lubricant, building a coil-winding machine, then building the generator... [Thanks to the Web, I see that this book is Reference 21 in "Interprocess Communication in the Ninth Edition Unix System"]
That said, my younger brother (who IS interested in computers), at about the same age, got a lot out of the "How the *fill-in-the-blank* Work" series of books. They're paperbacks about 1/2" thick including "How Networks Work" "How Computers Work" and "How the Internet Works". Used to be published by Macmillan, now by Que. Includes helpful diagrams.
So anyway, if you do find a kid who shows an interest and needs some somewhat-technical information, you might suggest this. Sounds like this isn't the right kid tho. Ease off.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
I've got two little boys asleep upstairs. They both like watching daddy taking computers apart and rebuilding them, want to play games and edutainment CD-Roms (Dorling Kindersley: one of the few reasons to maintain a Windows box in the house!) and generally regard the fact that they've got their own boxes (office surplus boxes, fairly low-spec) in their rooms as a real bonus.
The interesting thing is the difference between them. James, at 5, is just starting to explore the stuff that the OS does. I frequently have to reinstall the whole shebang for him after he's tinkered it into blue-screened oblivion, and we have to ration his access to the power cable (windows security being something he learned to bypass shortly before his third birthday) to make sure he doesn't spend his entire life in front of the screen. The challenge is to teach him some social skills before he enters that teenage pupation that will see him emerge as a fully-transformed geek. This is a kid who sits on Santa's knee and asks for a Linux distro just like daddy's...
Paddy (3), on the other hand, cares about his computer only in so far as it's been set running to do something he wants to be involved in. He'll sit and run through something that he feels he's learning from or having fun with, and when it's over he's off to play dinosaurs or just go tear round the garden at about .9c.
Paddy might well learn how to take a kernel apart and put it back together, but it'll be a chore to him in a way that it won't be to James.
Me, I'm somewhere in between. About forty per cent of my job is sysadmin/IT manager: I can start with a pile of components and a few discs and have a running box in a couple of hours, I can handle small programming tasks and could tool up to do something ambitious, but frankly it's work to me: I learned it because I needed the skillset and I learned not a whit more than I needed to understand how and why it worked and how to do basic field repairs when it buggered up.
The issue is that it's a personality issue what you get out of IT. The kid in the example used his computer as a means to doing something else, I would imagine, and never needed to go further.
It says nothing about the issue of what use computing is in little hands, and my answer to that is: the same as any other tool. I teach things to my kids using computers, plastic dinosaurs, the TV, fishing tackle, and a whole pile of other stuff. None of them is a sine qua non: all are of varying utility depending on circumstance.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
I first got my hands on a PC back in 1981, when Ellsworth College got their first PCs and my elementary school (I was in first grade) took a tour of the facilities. Right then and there, I was hooked.
;) That's what kids need the most, I think.
I spent summers coding on a Commodore PET during '81 and '82. During the school year I got my grubby hands on an Apple II+ and delved into BASIC. In '84 my parents bought me a Commodore 64, and a couple years later bought a Commodore 128. I was in paradise.
In 1990 I got an IBM 386DX/20 (*hot shit* hardware for 1990, lemme tell you) and I discovered Pascal and C++. And from there things have only ballooned.
Today, I'm an engineer with a good job. Playing games on the machines didn't hurt my technical skills one bit, although it didn't really help, either.
What helped the most, without question, was when I first got on the Net (BBS and Internet) in '88. Suddenly, there were entire worlds available to me. I met other kids who were into tech, I found a couple of helpful mentors who helped change the way I thought about programming (thanks, Chris, wherever you are)... I'd spend a couple of hours each day on BBSes and the Net, talking about things that interested me--you know, geek stuff.
That was the most helpful thing, insofar as learning about tech: finding mentors and fellow geeks. In my case, the computer was a medium by which to find them. But if a kid is just using a computer as a glorified Nintendo, the kid's going to wind up thinking of it as a glorified Nintendo. They're not going to talk about 3D performance and why antialiasing is so important to clear graphics, they're going to talk about "d00d! did u know that there's a naked mod for Drakkan?"
(Not that I think there's anything wrong with teenage boys talking about naked mods for Drakkan. If they weren't talking about sex at least part of the time, I'd wonder what was wrong with them... But I think if they never think about anything other than mods and warez, they're missing out.)
Find a mentor for your kid, someone who can show your kid that there's an entire world out there that's just ripe for the taking. And, by all means, keep on doing what you're doing--paying attention and worrying.
Mind you, I can't stand it when proud parents beam "My boy knows everything about the computer! He's on it all the time!" and what they really mean is he knows nothing but games, as you said. But, whadyyagonnado.
d
"Oh, Jean's grandson is into computers like you were."
"Ok, Ma? He moves the mouse and clicks a button. I hacked assembly code. Kids these days don't even know what assembly code is."
--actual conversation with my mother
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Is this kid's lack of curiosity.
Today's kids have a deep lack of curiosity (not all of them - but a large percentage). When I was younger, kids seemed to be more curious about the world - about how it works. They also seemed to have a greater imagination, able to construct new "worlds" in the minds.
Maybe in this particular case the kid never got curious because the computer made it seem easy. He got complacent, because he got everything "handed" to him by the machine. When the machine asked for something - he got scared.
You see this in adults today - if things are going the way they expect, as soon as the system breaks down a little, they go nuts. If the system breaks down a lot (think natural disaster), more often than not, chaos rules.
Adults and children alike - don't know where to turn to many times. In the computer realm, there is no middle ground for help when it is really needed. Most people are unaware of user groups, magazines are filled with more advertisements than anything else, books are too wordy for most people (you can tell how "curious" a family is by seeing if they have a book selection - if they have at least a small one, with maybe an encyclopedia set - then they are probably real curious - though this generalisation may go away in time due to the Net), and they can't get to a good website, because it isn't listed on the portal yet...
I don't think you should force the kid - but it might be good to find out if this is the only thing he isn't curious about - or if it is a general problem (I was alway asking "why","what","how" questions on everything when I was a kid). If it is a general problem, maybe talking with the parents and the kid would be in order.
People should be curious about their world, as well as have wonderment about things (many people have said they wouldn't care how their TV works, just as long as a picture comes up - but I am always amazed that the thing actually works, and I am continually filled with amazement and awe at the number of people and minds that worked to create such a device over the years, the advancements, etc). By having this curiosity and wonderment - people can acheive great things, or at least have the potential to acheive great things.
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I never had a computer as a kid. I did have legos and encyclopedias that I made extensive use of. (Following the cross-references in the encyclopedia 16 years ago when I was 7 was my first experience with surfing!)
I had some friends that had computers, so I got an idea of how they worked and how to use them from that casual contact.
We got a computer somepoint when I was in HS (a 486sx25, 4 megs ram, no modem or sound card). I found it uninspiring. For the first year or so I never did anything other than word process on it for my HS papers (I think this was in 11th grade).
I'm not sure why, but my senior year in HS I thought I'd take the AP Compsci course. DAMN I fell in love. I embarked on a year that changed my life, I dived head first into programming. Here was something I could learn at my own pace. I owe a good deal of my education to the PCGPE, put together by Mark Feldman I think. Mark, if you're out there, THANKS!
I've noticed that people that have been programming their whole lives have a background that helps them, but the longer I've been around the less difference that makes, strong problem solving skills are more important that having played with BBS's back in the day.
Not playing with computers as a kid didn't hurt me at all, I knew it was right for me when I found it. I think it's more important to expose kids to lots of ideas than it is to make them learn much about one topic. Once that kid finds the right thing nothing will stop him or her from learning all they can about it.
If I'd gotten hooked on computers as a kid I don't think that I'd ever have gotten into music the way that I did, the study of the occult, the study of chess, or many other areas that I reap enjoyment from these days. I certainly wouldn't have gotten as into sports. While I'm not athletically active anymore, I'm glad that I spent a few years playing competitive soccer. It gives me experience in something completely different.
I don't think that computers are good or bad for kids, just make sure that the kid gets the chance to be exposed to a wide variety of experiences. They'll bite at something!
Jon