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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?"
My son has been fluent with a mouse for about a year, since he was 3 1/2. He has graduated to GameCube (yes, he blazes on Mario Kart). I brought him to Nick Jr sites, played Bob the Builder, went to Shockwave and let him play some puzzle games, and his favorite PC game is Snail Mail (sorry, don't have the link). I think its a great thing, he has his own computer (PIII 550) and he goes at his pace.
Check my link to see more of what we do as father and son =)
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
A gentoo Linux command prompt livecd (not the graphical new one) and a FreeBSD (or netbsd if you like)
:)
Teach him to work it at first. Teach him how to look up data online, how to use links at that command prompt. He will respect that machine and what it can do FAR more once he spends time building it
Get him reading Linux Kernel Internals and other things.
He'll come away with understanding but without becoming too embroiled in the corporate wars. (let him form his own decisions about it later, I may hate Microsoft, and always have, but at one time I did quite a bit of gaming on the sole windows machine I used to have, now I no longer need them and can use Wine and Cedega to do so if gaming becomes a necessity)
All in all you will get a technically aware child who will understand (hopefully) that something is far more precious if you build it yourself and put your own blood sweat and code than if you just throw away 299.99 bucks on it and expect to learn nothing and have it still work.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
I showed my (now 7 year old) brother to Lego's website. It has a lot of games there, but many of them are of an educational type too. It is, howver, rather flash intensive, but my brother enjoys it.
Introduce him to GTA as soon as possible. That way he'll be nicely inured to all the violence and sex, so by the time he sees it outside the house, it won't be a big deal.
By the way, when he starts having nightmares, DON'T coddle him...nightmares never killed anyone (although I'm not sure about night terrors), and what does not kill you makes you stronger.
Trust me, one day he'll thank you.
Probably while you're asleep...you won't feel a thing.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I introduced both of my kids (now ages 6 and 8) to computers at an early age. We started with games that taught them something, like math, reading, or memory skills. The Reader Rabbit series is pretty good for this.
I try to steer them away from surfing the web, because most sites that are oriented toward kids their ages tend to be pure entertainment (usually tied to a brand of toy). But it gets hard when their friends start telling them about the latest update to barbie.com.
Unfortunately, there is little (if any) open source or Linux software aimed towards young children.
Good Luck!
That's what I did with my daughter when she was 4-5. She's 18 now and, in her second year of college with a 4.0 majoring in botany. Ok, don't get him a PCjr. I just wanted a little geek-parent-brag. The point is to get him something he can play with, hammer on, and call his own. Something where he can play games and learn the keyboard layout, later doing typing games and then writing documents. Make sure the machine also has a printer somewhere.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
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
There were similar articles in slashdot:
5 9230&tid=95&tid=146&tid=126&tid=4 6 41207&tid=156&tid=185&tid=4
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/0
"When Should Children Be Introduced to Computers?" and
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/1
"Introducing Children to Computers?"
for example
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
Why not think back to how you started and go from there? Did you have someone holding your hand or did you explore yourself from first principals on up?
The reason I suggest this is that back when I was that age, I did all the computer learning myself. My parents had no clue and never used the thing so that left it entirely in my hands. I wasn't monitored on the net or while playing games, typing in BASIC programs, etc. (Of course things were different back then as I didn't even get online with BBSes until I was around 14 or 15 with the net following soon after.)
All my parents did was buy the computer equipment (up until I got a job working for the first local ISP), take me to the library to get computer books now and then, and paid for the subscription to a couple magazines over my time growing up, and take me to swap meets (hamfests were awesome). The rest of the time I was typing in BASIC programs, playing games, hacking games, taking the machines apart and putting them back together, understanding IRQs, etc. by myself as I didn't have anyone around to ask. I think if I had had someone to ask all of the time, I'd not be nearly so into computers as I am. (For better or worse...)
If your kid is showing an interest in digging in and understand the machines as opposed to just using them, give them tools, books, magazines, and old hardware and just stand back and see what happens. Something interesting to try might be to not allow access to the web until the kid is able to build a computer from a pile of parts complete with working ethernet to connect it to the network. That might not be entirely reasonable, but it is certainly one way to go. If your kid is showing that kind of desire to understand the internals, you probably want to keep him challenged. Giving him a state of the art computer complete with broadband which you might feel you have to monitor right from the start is like handing him the keys to the Ferrari and telling him to keep it under 45. If he has to build his computer and figure out how to get connected himself, it might go a long ways towards building not only self esteem and pride, but useful skills that many of his peers are going to lack.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
My daughter has been pushing a mouse around since she was 2, and here are the top hits in our house...
There were some decent kid-appropriate cartoons in the wired.com/animation section, which was a nice break from the DisneyWarner machine. They are gone, which is sad, since they still have that three-legged dog called Webmonkey limping around.
Goof ball is a shareware, non-violent, dexterity building game, and it teaches some simple rules about gravity and colliding spheres that are probably good to have ingrained at a young age. It's actually a set of 6-8 ball games, so there's a lot to learn, ever for a grown up kid.
I found that Mame is an excellent source, since a lot of the games are easy, non-violent, non-indoctrinating into the DisneyWarner ad machine, and, uh, free.
That being said, my kids also go to a couple games on the Disney.crap site, though only under strict supervision, and only to a fraction of the offerings. I try to minimize their exposure to it, but some of the games/puzzles/activities are ok.
Shockwave games are usually better, but you have to sort of pre-screen the pages to make sure you have all of the inappropriate ad servers blocked.
Outside of games, NASA has an excellent kids' section, with models to build, pictures, projects, etc.
Zoo and aquarium sites are ok too, plenty of educational material with enough pictures to keep them entertained.
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 have a daughter about that age. I say don't let them watch tv or use the computer. ...and when your daughter gets a BSOD, my daughter will fix it for her.
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.
It's important to teach him those life skills of "trolling" and "flaming" at an early age!
That's about the same age my younger son Jonatan started using the computer intensively. The older one (Daniel) started a bit later (about 4 1/2). But we had a laptop with only a touchpad back then so it was more difficult for him. Last year the children's demand for the computer became so high that I set them up with their own computers (photo of their room, that my wife would never have allowed me to publish if she could prevent it...).
Whatever they play, on the computer or not on the computer, the most important thing is that it should be a tool to aid their creativity, not to limit it. In "Hardware toys" it means things like Lego basic constrution sets (and other manufacturers. Both quality and quantity are mportant factors here: lack of each limits the child's creativity).
With Daniel we started with some cheap commercial games from Office Depot clearance. I don't think it's the right way. These quite limit the child to following instructions.
With Jonatan, we didn't make the effort to look for things to buy. He's a second child... So it was more like finding whatever we have that can occupy him so he doesn't bother us, and it worked better. M$ Paint turned out to be really great for him. It was simple enough to use, and he was very creative with it. Then he discovered Google: he uses Google images to look for pictures, then he cpopies and pastes them into his own works (He got a bit addicted to Google, and when we went on a 3 weeks vacation and he didn't have acess to the computer he was drawing pictures of the Google logo with his crayons... A few months ago when he wanted to find something his granfather told him it cannot be found on Google. So he said to his Grandpa: "Grandpa, anything can be found on Google if you know how to look for it!". Even searching Google requires creativity).
Another good piece of Children's software that encourages creativity is Drape (Drawing Programming Environment). It is a sort of programming environment similar to to Logo in some respect, but not exactly the same. One advantage is that it allows for very easy mouse interaction, so a child can create things that "work" quite easily (i.e., with just a bit of adult intervention). Form the same source, Game Maker is more suitable for older children. It is a programming environment to create games, either by using drag and drop or a builtin programming language. I've seen nice cooperation between the younger and older brother here: the young one chooses the objects and graphics, and drwas the levels of the games. The older one completes the game by adding the more abstract parts: actions and interactions. Logo is of course a very good thing for children. For the smaller ones the online r-logo is very easy and fun to use. For more serious Logo programming MSWlogo is a much more powerful implementation (including 3-dimensionality and multi-tasking). There's no need to "choose one". My son Daniel first thinks of an idea he wants to implement, then chooses the most appropriate tool, just like a programmer choosing the most appropriate programming languge for the job (he has several flavors of Logo and choses the one that has what he needs for a project. He also uses Visual Basic that he learned at school).
What else?
For several months my kids were addicted to Enigma. It's "just a game", but actually it involved loads of creativity in solving an entirely different puzzle in each level, and has the right balance between sing the brain and coordinating mo