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Introducing a Child to Constructive Computer Use?
trevorgensch asks: "I have a young boy, about 6 years old, who is starting to take an interest in the computer I seem to spend too much time at lately. Lots of Slashdot readers out there must have had experiences with their young child wanting to learn more. I am all for it! But where to start? He has had a bit of experience with the Internet and children's sites and official sites of Pixar and Disney movies, but he wants more. Any pointers?"
Get an old PC(C64, Apple 2xx, IBM PCjr, etc) with basic built in, teach him the basic coding/programming rules as he learns to read and write.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
HI
Start with Logo. It's a simple language, plus some very basic graphics built into it. Kids like graphics and stuff, so if "something is happening on screen" it feels good.
Then move to Basic in a few weeks/months. Teaches fundamental procedural programming easily.
Then later in a few years or so, depending on your kid's intelligence, C, Lisp , Perl etc.
Try a text-adventure game, such as one of the classic Infocom games or one of the many text games that others have made since then. That will exercise the important skills of reading, typing, and the imagination, and will be pretty fun too.
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
I have a daughter about that age. I say don't let them watch tv or use the computer. Kick their little butts outside and let them play, explore the world, use their imagination. Get them books, legos an erector set or anything let will let them build and use their imagination.
Maybe he just wants more attention from his dad. You said you've been spending a lot of time on the computer lately so maybe he's just showing interest so that you give him more attention.
I don't know if 6 is a little too young, but let him play some games on the computer. Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Civilization, Colonization, maybe Age of Empires. All of those (excluding AoE) were games that I played when I was younger, and I am certain that because of those games I have very good knowledge of ancient history (civilization), the pioneers (oregon trail), and geography / culture of the world (carmen sandiego).
or "everything else being the same", I'm all for kids learning about computers too. The only thing to keep in mind is that things taken to an extreme don't remain the same.
I have nothing against kids watching televion -- so long as they still play with their friends, get outside get excercise, read, build things, draw etc.. But it's pretty easy for them to spend every waking moment watching TV to the exclusion of these things. All things being equal, I'd rather they play computer games all the time than watch TV, and rather they read books all the time than play computer games all the time. But I don't even want them to read all the time either.
Maybe being computer geeks is in my kids future. But my rule is it shouldn't be the path of least resistance. They don't know what other things they might love unless they've experienced them. So, we limit the kids screen time. We're actually pretty generous, but they can't go over their limit unless they earn additional time by physical activity.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is important. My 5-year old loves her computer and the ability to just go to the browser and type in "animal planet" and have the right page come up. What's scary is all the ads she sees. She ignores ads on TV most of the time, but a simple banner ad draws her in. She's been one mistake away from getting NetNanny installed for a while. (I just wish there was a good open-source solution for this that didn't mean going back to a Linux/BSD firewall/proxy).
Then we just caught her looking around the house for a credit card to complete her order on an online candy store. We'd noticed her filling up a shopping cart there but thought it was cute. A $500 candy order wouldn't have been so cute.