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What To Load On a 4-Year-Old's Netbook?
nostrodecus writes "I have a nephew who is very young, but who has the techie gene — he found the Gruffalo on YouTube before anyone knew he could spell. Now he's almost 4, and I was thinking of giving him my netbook (Acer running XP), which I hardly use any more. So, of course, I will be deleting all the porn, but what should I load up on it? Are there tools/apps that I can load up on it to protect it and him from things he shouldn't see until college? Also, what apps or games could I load on it that a 4-year-old will get some use out of?"
Regardless of what you install there's no guaranteed way to stop your kid from stumbling upon boobs on the internet. Plus who's to say it's something to worry about at all. They certainly didn't traumatize me.
Why in God's name would you give a computer to a 4-year-old? Give him a damn baseball or something, the last thing he needs in his formative years is to vegetate in front of a screen.
Brett
my kids ( 5 and 3 ) love using zoodles, its a web browser for kids that gives them age appropriate content, I set my kids up with an older computer that was just laying around and stuck ubuntu on it. they use it for a couple hours a day and my son is the top reader in his kindergarten class.
Whether you keep him using Windows or load up a flavor of Linux I'd put a good hosts file on there to block adware and other known sources of crapware. Beyond that, you could setup something like Dans Guardian or set the machine to use filtered DNS services, such as OpenDNS. If you are gonna keep Windows on there then there are tons of commercial filtering products out there, all the stuff I mentioned is free.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
LOGO
If he really has the techie gene, he will seriously best his sister's crappy pen-and-paper Spirograph!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
A way to turn it off and go outside to play.
If you're really going to give a young kid a netbook... with an internet connection then block ALL websites and connections, except ones which you trust them seeing. Or don't give them internet access at all. I wouldn't, not at that age.
When I was 4 I used to love playing around with a computer, I didn't have educational games or anything, I just to just play lemmings, or mess around with a word processor or something. Try to let the kid get used to using a computer at a young age for normal tasks.
If you really feel adventurous, give him a Pascal IDE or something.
Between PBS Kids, Club Penguin, et al, there is really no need to install or buy anything except for Flash. By the time he outgrows these games, it will be years down the road and he'll be able to figure out what to do next.
Say what you will about Flash, but there is a lot of pretty good content for kids out there.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
http://edubuntu.org/
You could just as easily load up Linux instead for a copy costing $0.
If your kid is visiting websites which could give him viruses, then you really need to keep an eye on him.
My 4 year old loves to get on WoW and kill things. I set up some toolbars and show him what numbers to press or buttons to press and he's off and away. Though I had to make him his own character because he has a habit of drowning my characters, and I didn't like the repair bills. He's up to lvl 20 almost completely by himself.
Load up what he sees you play with, whether word processors, or games, or the Internet. Give him some shortcuts to get to the things you think will interest him. And let him go. He'll tell you when he wants something different and if he's having trouble with something. Oh, and for age appropriate things, he also likes Fisher-Price's Cool School.
Learn to love Alaska
One Laptop per child has emulators for regular PCs and their software is ideally suited to a small child: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components They even have a "live boot" based on Fedora Linux
Any child under 10 using any internet capable device should have eyes-on supervision while using it, all the time.
I'm going to agree.
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It keeps him occupied for hours at a stretch. It really frees me up to go shopping and other things that would have been tough with him along.
I sincerely hope you're fucking joking.
Format it, and then install FreeDOS and nothing else. Let him figure out the rest on his own. It should keep him out of trouble for quite a while. If you're feeling generous, install some sound card drivers for him (though not necessarily the best ones, or even the right ones).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Get your 4 year old outside and away from computers for at least a little while longer, my kids cannot even contemplate getting on a bicycle and riding all over town like we did as kids, most of the time on a beautiful day in Florida they are inside surfing the web, playing computer games or texting on their cell phones. Just saying...
I teach Technology in an elementary school and the only 3 programs I install on computers (besides my enforced MS Office Install) are Tux Paint [http://www.tuxpaint.org/download/] (don't forget the stamps!), Scratch [http://scratch.mit.edu/], and Google Earth. Just make sure you have tolerance for sound with Tux Paint and Scratch. Tux Paint will end up with a never ending cacaphony of flushing toilets and frogs, and Scratch couldleave someone wondering why you hear a looped cat meowing with drums in the background. Google Earth needs no explanation.
People here are all talk. Keyboard warriors.
In real life, they are pussies and won't do a goddamned thing about it.
Google "Vice President of the United States residence"
While Scratch is geared towards 6 - 16 year olds, it may be worth a look.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
Disclosure: I have 3 kids: a 7, 4 and 1-year-old. The first is a confirmed geek, second one is pending. The 1yo will, 10 times out of 10, find an IT device in a pile of non-devices and chew it.
Boobs don't mean squat to a 4YO (other than vague memories of food). More serious stuff does. Top things I am incredibly concerned with re early age kids and computer:
1. Teaching them to control and ward off gaming addiction. Yes, there is such a thing as gaming addiction, and it is completely not trivial to (teach them to) keep it at bay while having a life.
This is not a no-brainer when you're a gamer dad - they see me dump 300 game hours into a large-scale RPG, despite it being after their bedtime etc.
I need to minimize their exposure to ultra-violent games (Fallout, Borderlands), while focusing on games that have SOME developmental value. Spore and Civ are awesome from the moment they can read (they figure it out way faster than you'd think). Before that... I'll let other people answer.
I'm not against "non-realistic" 3D shooters and getting their competitive shooter skills up to scratch, even from 4yo, despite what my wife says, so long as it doesn't emphasize the violence too much (Unreal Tournament is marginally ok in my books, as is "Prince of Persia") (sidenote: they both do Karate and Parkour classes, so anything Parkour-related is generally liked).
The real problem comes in the form of MMOs, which, in year/grade 2 in school, everyone plays. It's lame dumb-ass web-based MMOs (Penguins and Mushy Monsters) with a multitude of flash games, but all their friends hang there, and the BIG problem is that the games are built around them NEEDING to be there to maintain their avatars more often than not, which undermines (read: DESTROYS) my ability to teach them to have a life alongside a game. So I passionately despise them and do my best to entice the kids with real games or non-gaming activities.
2. YOUTUBE. When they find the badger song, you're DONE. You can seek a good asylum at that point, and plan to come back when they're 35.
(ask me how I know).
3. Internet - I'm a believer in monitoring their usage rather than filtering it. Yes, there's a lot of nasty shit out there, and they're growing into a world where it's part of the backdrop they need to be able to contend with. From 4yo? You make that call with your own kids. I say might as well. If not at your place, they'll do it at their best mate's on a sleepover. It's not hard to find an unrestricted device nowadays. Any stuff I forbid will pull attention to itself, entice and pull them. If I don't, it'll just be "Yes, it's there, not a big deal, now where's the interesting stuff". .
Another thing that I found incredibly helpful (this was for the 7yo tho) - he got his computer in parts. He also got a paper with an OS matrix (with WinXP, Win7 and Linux), against their RAM requirements and gaming capabilities. And the CD/DVD for each. And I let them choose. Next project is to cut his wifi access on his PC, give him and old box and, if he wants networking, build his own linux wifi router.
As I share time on the first two kids with my ex-wife, they only live with me some of the time. I routinely pull bits (and break stuff) on my older son's computer, to train up his troubleshooting skills.
My 2 cents.
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(as a teenager form today and seeing how much worst even my little brother has it) the outside world for my age 40% drugs, sex, ect and 50% a cleaned up version of 4chan and 10% outcasts with all sorts of different issues and i sure it will get even worst. teaching a child about an outside world were some people dont suck, you can have a different opinion other then the 2 extremes on either end as soon as possible
warning pointless sig
Give him some toys and send him outside where he belongs! Kids these days have no imagination because they have technology shoved in their face from the time they can grab it.
Maybe buy him a baseball glove or a frisbee- something to spur activity and interaction with others. If he's a tech genius, the last thing he needs is a computer- he's already mastered that.
Call your local homeless shelter or charity. Maybe they could use your netbook to get someone on their feet again.
Never trust anyone who takes pride in being called a 'geek'....
Try this: http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/
Should be OK for a 4-years-old. Two things:
Yes, that's actual real-life experience ;-)
I was left uncountable times alone with my siblings (me being the oldest) from the age of 10.
Who were my evil parents?
A couple that had to break their backs working in order to see us through school and provide for us by means of their lowly paid jobs, one of them made a Masters degree on evening and weekend school, with the only purpose of getting a better paid job because it happened we were studying music, we were applying ourselves to it, and it was a bit expensive (my sister is now a professional musician, music kept my brother out of trouble, I can play one or two tunes and know more about Opera, the music genre, not the browser, that most of you will ever care to know).
We certainly had often an uncle caring for us, but it wasn't always possible, and neighbours around us had enough problems of their own so it was unlikely that they would agree to take care of us, as for paid childcare, go on , tell me that poor people can afford it so I can laugh in your face.
And why would they risk it? Simple: they knew us well and made a careful assessment of the risks and rewards.
Did anything happen to us? Yeah, one day we were watching a Japanese TV program, and it scared the shit out of us (Ultraman, old version, for some reason one of the monsters really sacred the heck out of us :-) ).
It is a real shame that nowadays people in rich countries consider evil to allow parents to decide how they raise their children, and how people jump in the the "child abuse" bandwagon with such abandon, like in the case that generated this thread, in which there is not the slightest bit of evidence that the original poster is leaving children alone, bar for the panicky reading of one of the many "do gooders" that limit their dogooding to enraged typing after a biased interpretation of a post.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My daughter is four and a half and I have an old work laptop built up for her. She's got some good mousing skills and scored an OCD ranking in one World of Goo level while I was doing the washing up.
Anyway....I've scoured around trying to find good content and have a good list. Steer clear of all the Disney and other commerical stuff, that stuff will rot their brains. It's also badly coded and mainly a vehicle to advertise to the kids.
This is what I have installed on her laptop. They are all links to flash sites as almost all good kids stuff is on-line now. Anything that you have to install probably lists Windows ME as the system requirement on the box:
1) Poisson Rouge (http://www.poissonrouge.com/) - This is a French/English flash site with has no instructions and just encourages the child to explore the pages and work out what to do. It's probably the best site on-line for the 3-5 age group.
2) Boowah & Kwala (http://boowakwala.uptoten.com/) - This is another French/English site originally made by a husband and wife for their daughter and has grown from there. It's more instructional in its activities, but has an enormous amount of content delivered in a great way. The two main characters (see the names) are voiced by the parents and are very funny.
3) Sesame Street (http://www.sesamestreet.org/) - This one is a no-brainer...they have a great variety of games for different ages.
4) StarFall (http://www.starfall.com/) – A reading site that runs from letter recognition all the way to full reading. It’s got some very fun stuff in it.
5) WordWorld (http://pbskids.org/wordworld/index_flash.html) – A very rich and interactive reading site with lots of fun characters made out of letters.
Enjoy!