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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?
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.
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.