I have a girl 10 and a boy 8. They both started out, at 18 months or so, sitting on my lap playing things like the Fisher-Price games for toddlers. No particular skill with mouse or keyboard required.
They gradually moved on to the Reader Rabbit and Jumpstart educational titles, KidPix (huge for years, mostly because of the music and text-to-speech), and the Humongous adventures (my personal favorites). Now, a lot of their computer time is spent on-line (we do some in-house content filtering), youtube, webkinz, highlightskids.
For hardware, I always went for old and cheap-to-free windows boxes, and I think that was a good way to go: the keyboard gets full of cracker crumbs and apple juice, cds get scratched, and any non-optical mouse will get gummed up in a hurry. The best cd based games ran on old pentiums just fine anyway, and flash based games and videos seem to do ok on not much more.
They are both social, physically active, and good students.
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I have a girl 10 and a boy 8. They both started out, at 18 months or so, sitting on my lap playing things like the Fisher-Price games for toddlers. No particular skill with mouse or keyboard required.
They gradually moved on to the Reader Rabbit and Jumpstart educational titles, KidPix (huge for years, mostly because of the music and text-to-speech), and the Humongous adventures (my personal favorites). Now, a lot of their computer time is spent on-line (we do some in-house content filtering), youtube, webkinz, highlightskids.
For hardware, I always went for old and cheap-to-free windows boxes, and I think that was a good way to go: the keyboard gets full of cracker crumbs and apple juice, cds get scratched, and any non-optical mouse will get gummed up in a hurry. The best cd based games ran on old pentiums just fine anyway, and flash based games and videos seem to do ok on not much more.
They are both social, physically active, and good students.