When Should You Buy Your Kid A Laptop?

GuitarNeophyte writes "Marketwatch News reports that some people say that we should be buying our kids laptop computers well before they get into the higher education realm. Even as early as middle school. From the article: 'These days, it's almost unquestioned that college-bound students will tote laptops back to school. For parents of high school and middle school kids, the decision to invest in a laptop is far from given.'"

Comments

Hmm..

[epiphani]

My sister is 12. She can type nearly as fast as I can - and while she does make use of that internet shorthand that I hate so much, I think a laptop would probably be a good thing for her to have. What kind of laptop is a little harder to call. I would probably suggest something limited enough that it would almost work out as an appliance though. Perhaps a linux system designed specifically for school type applications.

A really good idea would be for school boards to develope a little knoppix type system that could be provided to kids as nessecary - on a DVD-RW perhaps, to allow for saving their projects.

I'm only six years out of school, but I swear, kids these days are amazing. At 12, most can type quite quickly. When I was in school, at 15 I was one of three students that could type with any speed.

Re:Worked for me

[kannibal_klown]

as far as laptops for college? Unnecessary. I hated it when people were play solitaire in front of me while the prof was attempting to teach.

If you commute to school, a laptop can help out a lot. If you live on campus, it helps but not as much.

I was never was that big of a jerk to play a game during class, though once or twice I browsed in Internet wirelessly or did a project for another course. But those times were rare.

What came in handy for me was being able to get certain work done. Yes, we had PC labs scattered around but only a small handful of them had the tools I used to make my life easier (ie, something more than MS Word and a telnet connection). Also, you usually had to wait around for some jerk to finish checking their hotmail account and using the Java AOL IM to talk to their pals in the next building.

With a laptop I could just sit in the library or on the Green and work on whatever project I needed to, knowing I had all of my tools and data at my disposal.

If you live on campus, the benefit is not as great since you could always walk back to your room and use a desktop. But even then, on busy days or when doing a project with a group in the library a laptop can be pretty helpful.

Now that you can get a Celeron laptop for like 600 or 700 USD on sale from Dell, the expense isn't that high (plus you make sure the kid can't play too many games since his rig can't handle them).

Re:Worked for me

[ShadyG]

This is funny, but it's not too far off the mark. I had a tough time keeping up with my daughter's mental development when she was very young. She could identify letters and knew the phonics of each well before she had the manual strength and dexterity to reproduce them on paper. She was frustrated trying to write the things she could read. It was the same problem she had at 5 months when she could sit up just enough to see something she wanted but could not walk over and get it.

By opening up a text editor on my laptop and allowing her to type, she was able to start "writing" more than a year before she could have otherwise. Look at the keyboard, find the letter you want, press it, and it draws itself. It's like magic!