> But there was one marked difference: computer use in Madagascar tended to be a collective rather than an individual practice. Children and their families would gather around one laptop to play educational games, take photos or make videos. Computers were being used to strengthen existing social relations among siblings, parents and peers.
I think it used to be like this for a lot of people in the developed world as well when computers were new and most people did not have computers and those that did had only one in the whole household.
Nowadays a lot of people including the children have a smartphone each and the household might have one or more iPads and up to several laptops. And of course a PlayStation or an XBOX.
I don’t have children yet, but when I get children I hope to show them programming and involve them in what I do with computers and to show interest in what they are doing and to encourage them to be creative.
> I don’t have children yet, but when I get children I hope to show them programming and involve them in what I do with computers and to show interest in what they are doing and to encourage them to be creative.
I had the same hope for my children (now 12 & 14), so I let them start using devices & playing games when they were 3 (even gave my older kid the first rev of the OLPC laptop). To a large degree, I regret the decision to start that early.
Nothing has gone the same way it did when I was a kid. I had a DOS machine with a couple of crappy games, and a BASIC interpreter. The only thing I could do is learn to program, it was the most exciting thing available.
Today, the absolute flood of high quality content in videos & games has basically prevented them from wanting to spend time figuring out low level details. They have options for spending their time that are so much better than I had that they basically can't choose to create. At least not yet.
My oldest has been talking about creating his own games for years, he's very curious, he's a super user of the OS's he has access too, his knowledge of game styles and history far exceeds mine (and I was a game dev for a decade). But when it comes down to spending time making things, he inevitably chooses to play an interesting game rather than learn coding. My younger son is almost as addicted to games, but has a simultaneous addiction to YouTube.
Recently I met a couple of extremely smart and creative kids whose parents (AI researchers) have completely and severely restricted their access to any devices at all. It got me wondering what the best way to encourage creativity is. Pushing too much will turn them off or make them resist, but a lack of any support can be even worse.
Making sure they have time where they're bored and don't have access to high quality and structured entertainment choices at all times currently seems like a good idea to me.
OTOH, they're growing out of some habits I was worried about, and maybe the best approach is just to set a good example and love and support them in whichever directions they want to go.
We did not restrict access, and when my youngest was 11, he said he wanted to be a game developer. (As he says, "everyone wants to be a game developer.") We agreed to support him, but only if he wanted to do it "for real". "For real" meant first learning C or Java. He agreed and we did something that seemed obvious after the fact: we hired a programming teacher the way other families hire a music teacher. Our son met with this college senior who had taken Java once a week for an hour and the guy took our son through the first 5 courses of UW's CS sequence. Sort of worked well: At 19, when my son applied for jobs, he could say 8 years experience in Java. By then, he also had C, C++, Lua, Unity, and 3D StudioMax. He made a stab at starting a game-development company, and wiped out on that first try. At 24, he is now coding backend for apps supporting farming and creates games now and then on weekends. (Some day, he might get his G.E.D.)
:) We did reach out to developers and got our list (Java or C/C++) from them. There's a serious parenting question in your joke. We presented the whole thing as if we were in control: it's an illusion. He could have screamed, "SCREW YOU!", and locked himself in his room. As it was, we said, "It has to be Java or C" and he believed us. Lucky!
As a kid that grew up addicted to video games, my greatest "wish" or "feedback" from my perspective is that my parents had significantly restricted my screen time, or reduced screen time competently. As it stood, they were young, broke, and relatively uneducated when I was born, and in their mind if I was quiet, not-dead, and had nothing lower than a B on a report card, job done.
But that came with a total addiction to World of Warcraft, Battlefield, and pirated anime, along with all the broken social interactivity that comes with a pale-skinned weaboo spending his summer vacations hiding in his room and worsening his nearsightedness.
I love my parents and because I don't have kids I won't claim to know the best way to raise them, but I will say I wish my dad had learned enough about computers to actually managed to restrict internet time rather that just throwing on a shitty parenting software his coworker gave him that I surpassed in about five minutes. Or, somehow rewarding me for exploring the pirated copy of 3D Studio Max and fostering creativity there. Or, just taking the damn computer away and forcing me to go hang out with people. I was a shitty kid and I know I was hard to manage, but I think that dealing with that is part of being a parent.
I have no idea if I would have turned out struggling less with the things I struggle with now if they had done things like that, but I suspect this is the case. So, you know, don't take my words at face value, just consider it as one perspective from someone who is now an adult and did grow up with nearly unlimited screen time. I managed to fill the social gaps somehow, get a job etc, not all of my old WoW buddies ever managed to.
Thank you for sharing this. I have a few college friends that seem to be in the same situation as your WoW buddies that haven't managed to fill in the social gaps. Is there anything that I can do to encourage them to be more social or do you think you had to find that motivation within yourself?
The "short" answer to your question is in the last paragraph of this tired and long post, sorry about that, when I reminisce, I wax.
I went from being an introvert with anxiety so bad I cried in front of everyone when giving an assigned speech to speech class, to an A-type with endless external confidence, marketable public speaking skills, no shame, and almost no inhibition. This change occurred sometime towards the end of highschool (with a fresh dose of "know-it-all-asshole") and matured throughout college. I regularly try to figure out just what the fuck happened. Who is responsible for this shift? I want to condense it so that others like me can change if they want to. Best I can do is point out a couple memories that I think were "turning point."
1. In middle school I was called "gay" all the time because I was quiet. Back then this was an unacceptable insult and socially ruinous for a 13 year old. I somehow made great friends with a guy who once said "Are you actually gay?" I said "no." He said "who fucking cares anyway?"
2. Freshman year I gave a speech and cried at the beginning from nervousness, the teacher quietly put his hand on my shoulder and made me finish the speech, quietly giving me encouragement, telling me I was doing a great job.
3. Sophomore year I was at my friends' place for an all-night LAN WoW binger. His bathroom's lock was broken downstairs so I'd been using the upstairs one. His older brother (A-type sure-of-himself guy that I admire to this day) went to use the bathroom, announcing he "had to take a dump." I said "oh, use the upstairs one, this one's lock is broken." He said "so?" I asked, "what if someone walks in on you?" He said "I'd say, 'get out of here, I'm taking a dump!'"
4. In highschool we read a book about a little girl that died and was allowed by... god or something... to view certain portions of her life again. She noticed that she wasn't "awake" in any of those memories - nobody was expressing their love for eachother, or appreciation of the moment, everyone was "sleepwalking." I'm sorry, I don't remember the title.
So to sum up my absurdly long post, I would say the things that helped me fill in the social gaps are having supportive people in my life that help me put things in perspective, and a very early introduction to the concept of "mindfulness," though I didn't call it by that name back then. Also, an early introduction to my mortality.
So I guess, support your friends, invite them out even if they don't come (they might eventually), and when they do come out, iron out their faults (I would lash out and be an asshole, and my friends would be so so patient with that, showing me "they right way." Think classic neckbeard arrogant ass.)
Oh, I do remember that, but it wasn't that book. Ours was a short story, and small enough to fit alongside other short stories inside our assigned English textbook.
There is an interesting alternative behind this story. Perhaps let them play, with some content and time checks in place, but also require them to be active in other things, like swimming, gymnastics, outdoor pursuits, things that require community engagement.
This is a hard problem. I have three kids, we let the oldest (7) play on an old laptop running Ubuntu, with no internet access. He goes through fits ant starts writing some basic python, learning how to navigate in the terminal, etc - but its hard for him to focus for too long on any one thing. We CONSTANTLY talk about new game ideas, but have not yet been able to channel that into making things.
We restrict access to screens to an hour a week otherwise - my kids will always choose a game on the iPad (of any quality) over unstructured time on the linux box. We have tried hard to follow the "set a good example and love and support them in whichever directions they want to go" philosophy.
Recommendation: Python might be too advanced of a start.
Seriously.
Check out some simler frameworks that are geared more strongly towards game development. Even as an experienced programmer, I still gravitate towards the Love2D framework for getting an idea on screen quickly, (for 2D stuff anyway) because it handily masks away all of the libraries and support hardware. So long as I can navigate the Lua programming language, I can have moving characters onscreen responding to keyboard input in about an hour.
Point being here, don't underestimate the value of instant gratification. As much as that sounds like what you're trying to avoid, since that's exactly what YouTube and social media feel like to an outside observer, that instant gratification loop of "change code, run game, see results" is crucial for the early developmental stages. Let your kid learn through experience how fun it can be to program the basics, and then stumble on something more complex that he wants to do organically, or bump into a limit of the framework, and at that point he'll know enough about the tools to be nudged towards tackling the harder stuff.
Funny you mention that! My first programming language was TI-BASIC, on an old TI-83 Plus. That language is wonderfully simple, slow enough to watch the execution happen almost in realtime, and tolerant enough that for the longest time, I didn't know what the "End" token did, and my programs would crash after a while, infinitely recursing into If blocks because I simply didn't know any better. Good times!
After a while, I figured out that all the best games were written in this mystical "Assembly" stuff, which ran a lot faster and could, with some wizardry, do greyscale! I taught myself z80 programming without ever stopping to think that it might be difficult. Later, I realized this is a Junior level college course in a great many degree programs. Who knew? For me, it was just another step on the path to making games instead of doing my math homework.
The kind of BASIC that did fit on 8-bit computers is a non-intimidating low-level programming language. All variables are global, you have jumps and subroutines, but no named (multi-line) functions and conditionals most of the time end in jumps that go over a segment of code.
Conceptually, it's incredibly simple and I think this is its most important contribution.
My son started with Scratch (stratch.mit.edu) and had tons of fun with that. He's kind of moving on to Python now. I had him play a little bit of Zork to show him that games could be fun with just text and then made him a very very simple text game engine in Python. It's been loads of fun to see the stuff he comes up with. (You start on a deserted island in the pacific ocean. You go east and find a boat and you're in New York!)
I think the best way to get kids interested in computers is to have them in the 1980s. Pre-internet, and the computers were simple enough to be completely understood by a single person. It also didn't hurt that they nearly all came with BASIC built in and available in under a second when the machine was turned on.
Also, it wasn't unheard of to have a 15 year old making a hit game.
So yes, if at all possible, have your kids in the 1980s.
Seven is young. Many children can't even read, let alone navigate a command-line interface and dabble at programming at seven. Give it time.
The whole cult among parents these days about limiting screen time is worrisome to me. The only way I ever got into programming seriously was through gaming, and eventually, modding. An hour a week would never have given me enough time to get into that, however.
My screen time was somewhat limited as a child, but to probably an hour or two a day (that is, by the time I was 9 or 10 and knew how to navigate DOS on my own). Games made me learn how to configure the computer. My first programming book was a book of late-70s BASIC games for microcomputers (which I used on my early 90s DOS machine).
I only ever did some light modding, but when I had a chance to take some programming classes in high school, you'd better believe that games were on my radar. Writing emulators is still a hobby of mine.
My parents monitored what I did, like I do with my kid now, and there are the "mysterious" times when the TV stops working (couple hours? OK. All day? No.) So I suppose that my wife and I are taking a kind of hybrid approach: Give kiddo the chance to be familiar with the technology around us, but regulate the time so that an obsession in the wrong direction never develops.
Have you considered "screen time" not being totally un-regulated? I.e. separating "ipad time" and "ubuntu time?"
Same philosophy as dessert choices - give a kid a choice between an apple and a chocolate for dessert, they're going to choose the chocolate every time. They'd eat pails of sugar by the spoonful if you let them. But if the choice is between apple and nothing, well...
I started playing video games at an early age with high quality titles (8/16-bit era), and didn't learn to program until my mid-teens.
Looking back, my introduction to computers came from (a) having a PC game I couldn't run a game, and (b) a Dad that was technical enough to replace components in said PC. We had a "pop the car hood" moment where he showed me what each component did, how to change a processor, check the BIOS was registering the changes, etc.
Leading up to programming I became deeply engrossed with game tools. Modding was all the rage, and I did a bunch of map making with Quake, Unreal, and Starcraft. Startcraft in particular, with it's scripted events system, were some of the first exploration I did in structuring statements to get a desired result.
At the same time, my parents had a pretty strict no-videogame policy on school nights, which effectively meant Fri-Sun were my game times. This did not translate in restrictions of general computer use though, so I could still use it as a power user. Game tools were my clever way to subverting that rule, because I wasn't "actually" playing a game.
> But when it comes down to spending time making things, he inevitably chooses to play an interesting game rather than learn coding.
Let's be very honest with ourselves, the Mean Time To Reward for video games is laughably small and non-competitive. This is powerfully true for beginners of programming. To cross that chasm, you need two things: reduce the MTTR and inspire a thirst for knowledge that video games can't quench. Two birds for one stone, use your own game development experience and build a small game in Unity yourself and ask their advice and bug testing. When they spy you working in Unity, and how quickly you are developing, I bet it will inspire that thirst for something more than video games (and structured content in general) can provide.
> he's very curious, he's a super user of the OS's he has access too...
Rather similar. When they where realy young we introduced them to First Lego League ( http://www.firstlegoleague.org/ ), created a team of 6-12 yo's, organized crafting and experimentation sessions teaching them about programming and engineering in general. But as they get older, the barrage of entertainment online, games, YouTube etc. just steamrolls across them.
Like many parents you start the endless grind of 'limiting computer time' to stop them turning into complete addicts (like most of their peers), but it is a relentless uphill battle.
At 11-13 or so I played a then popular Minecraft mod package from a collection called Feed the Beast [0] which included a mod called ComputerCraft [1] - That was my introduction to Lua and basic Unix concepts.
Now that I think about it that seems pretty similar to what you experienced with DOS&BASIC on a "real" computer.
Except the game mod also provides simple & powerful programmable robots called turtles that work similarly to scratch, but are way more fun and feel more useful. Using them was a really good introduction to computing for me.
The "interesting game" your son plays could well be one that integrates programming to advance in it, there are a lot nowadays.
My oldest is mildly autistic and current best practices suggest limiting "screen usage", so we have. We've followed up with the youngest as well, both to keep the inevitable "fairness" arguments down, and because I've really come to believe it's a good idea. There's been a lot of articles lately about how some of the people most likely to limit "screen time" are people in tech, and I fit that trend.
That said, I scare-quote "screen time" because I believe it promotes weak thinking about the problem. The problem, in my somewhat considered opinion, is not simply the screen. My concerns have been more about effort expended and the real vs. perceived (by the brain) results that are received. Video games, movies, and a lot of apps (even putatively educational ones!) have the problem that you exert little to no effort and you get these superficially amazing results. You click a few buttons and holy cow, you're playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony! My objection to this is that it trains your brain at a very deep level, very early, to the idea that such results come from very little expended effort of any kind, not cognitive, not physical, not any effort. This is basically a lie. That is not how the world works. In the real world, you need to work. (Put aside the details of how much for a moment; there is no forseeable future in which life is as easy as these "screens" present.)
I think "addiction" is not the core problem, but a secondary effect of the above; you get addicted to the "screen time" because your brain very rationally decides that the best way to get rewarded in a given period of time is to put its effort into the "screen". And it's really hard to override the lower parts of your brain when they make what is, from their perspective, such a rational decision. I'm not even convinced it's a good idea in general.
(As the conscious "part" of me, I find there's much more mileage in learning how my foundational brain systems are making their decisions, and arranging it so that they receive the input that will produce the output I want, rather than berating them for producing the wrong output.)
My oldest is now 9. At that age, yes, I did get a lot of "screen time", but it wasn't on the internet, and playing games on the Commodore 64 has its own lessons to teach about patience, and even if it did reward my brain, it couldn't keep up with modern video games and often lost out even to just reading a book, so it's not like it is today. So I have, without shame, limited my children's "screen time" even beyond what limits I had as a kid, because of those differences. Also they have zero access to the internet, again without shame. (There's plenty of adults who frankly can't handle the modern Internet, to be honest.)
Now, I'm still in the early days of this, but recently my oldest has been getting into Scratch. I picked up the Humble Bundle Makerspace bundle [1] (4 more days!) and he's been working his way through the "Super Scratch Programming Adventure" at a decent pace, without much prodding from me. And now the payload of what I'm setting up here: When he's doing that, as long as he's making reasonable effort and progress (as opposed to just screwing around endlessly in the paint editor; there is a difference between exploring and trying to make pictures and trying out the tools, and just aimlessly scribbling, etc.), I don't count it as "screen time", because I don't think it has the characteristics of "screen time" that harm children.
Our kids are 9 and 7 right now, and the message I've been giving them lately is "I want you to have something you're doing, unrelated to school. It can be soccer. It can be piano. It can be learning about programming or learning to draw or anything else. You don't have to stick with it forever, in fact I want you to try lots of things out over time, but you have to be doing something not related to school." Early results are promising. This week they're learning about the pets they are about to get from library books.
Of course other parents with other kids may have other problems; perhaps your kid needs to be encourage to stick with things a little longer, perhaps you need to remind your kid after 3 years of the same thing that they should probably spread their wings a bit. But that's my experiences, I don't have any others. :)
I do plan on loosening up over time. I do expect that there will be troubles in the future with too much access. I'm hoping the foundation I'm laying now will help me point out to them the consequences of what is happening. Ask me again in 10 years. I'm sure it won't go swimmingly, but who knows how it will actually go.
> Making sure they have time where they're bored and don't have access to high quality and structured entertainment choices at all times currently seems like a good idea to me.
Absolutely. And this doesn't just apply to kids :)
Even before something like Scratch, Scottie Go is a great way to teach kinds algorithmic thinking. The game on a mobile device gives an assignment and the player programs it by arranging cardboard instructions and then takes a photo of the cardboard pieces. The software recognizes the instructions using OpenCV and interprets the program.
Unfortunately, the home edition is hard to buy outside Poland and the U.K. but the version meant for schools ships more widely from Germany (in English).
This was also the case with TV's. Where one family in the street would own a TV and all the neighbourhood kids would come and gather to watch. Well before my time though :)
> This was also the case with TV's. Where one family in the street would own a TV and all the neighbourhood kids would come and gather to watch.
I'm old enough to have experienced something similar. When I was young my dad won a color TV in a sales contest. I think it was the first in our neighborhood and was the first in our extended family. Every Sunday evening my grandfather would come over and bring desert and we would gather as a family and watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. As we got older, my siblings and I would beg to be permitted to stay up and watch Bonanza. Good times!
That can still be the case in the developing world.
I passed through a border crossing in West Africa last year. The border guard was struggling a bit copying the English names into his ledger, but after copying my hometown, he realised he knew that word — there's a famous British football team.
He got really excited, and pointed out the TV in the corner, and said how everyone in the area had come to the customs post to watch the big final, since it was the only TV.
(Perhaps it was the only TV that could receive a Satellite broadcast of the foreign match, or maybe it really was the only TV — the border crossing was remote.)
>This was also the case with TV's. Where one family in the street would own a TV and all the neighbourhood kids would come and gather to watch. Well before my time though :)
I am old enough to remember as a child (my grandmother had the only TV in the building, 4 apartments) how every thursday evening all the people from the other apartments came to watch TV (there was a very, very popular quiz show on thursdays in Italy), and after the show we all had some biscuits/cakes (and the adults a glass of wine) together.
My father used to tell me how when he was a kid his father was often asked by the neighbours to put his radio (the only device in several buildings) on the window sill in the evening so that people assembled in the common court could hear the news during the WWII.
Game consoles as well, most kids may get one (not one per generation, mind), so depending on the latest game or console you'd go to one or the other of your friends.
That was my experience back in the 2000's; best friend's house was Halo house and mine was Smash Bros house.
But those were the days of splitscreen local multiplayer games. I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.
Some of my fondest memories involve sitting around a gameboy with a friend and a sibling, trying to beat Super Mario Land. It had no saves, and in the past we had been thwarted by the daily power outages and the fiddly power connector kept in place with a match (no batteries). We also did this with various NES games, which at least made it easier for everyone else to see the screen.
And then there were the arcades. My friend was a local celebrity and so good that some arcades had banned him, or set his favorite games to 'super difficult'. When he played, a crowd would watch, whether it was Dinosaurs VS Cadillacs, TMNT: Manhattan Project, or Street Fighter. Sometimes some clueless new guy would challenge him in the latter, and a significant portion of the arcade users would notice and come see the beatdown.
Sometimes we'd go to a new part of town because they had fancy new games, or because they hadn't banned him yet. We'd play co-op games, and he'd help me stay alive as long as possible.
I haven't thought about this in a long time, but this kind of social gaming was central to my youth, now that I think about it.
(and that's not even getting into the 90s/00s LAN parties!)
> But those were the days of splitscreen local multiplayer games.
Yup. I have fond memories of multiplayer mario kart or goldeneye, or cooperative games e.g. coop Secret of Mana / Seiken Densetsu 2.
> I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.
So do I, but Nintendo seems to have kept the flame alive, local multiplayer mario kart works fine on the Switch, and the game is playable with solo joy-cons, so a pair of full-size controllers is enough for 4 players (once you find out how to configure the bloody thing).
> local multiplayer mario kart works fine on the Switch
I got Mario Kart 8 for Switch and we tried playing it on one large shared TV screen.
We immediately ran into the problem that it's incredibly difficult to see the track on the split screen. Seems like local multiplayer only works well when everyone involved has memorized all the tracks.
In poor areas, this was true for games on top of consoles. I might have gotten a game a year or something like that. So, a friend with a newer game got to show out in front of other friends like I did with mine. Then, there were the rare people who had really different consoles. They got to show us a whole, different experience.
Neighborhood I grew up in was like that. I had an Atari 2600, a friend had an Intellivision (with the speech synth module thing), and another had a ColecoVision. I don't remember why, but getting to play on the ColecoVision was a big deal. Parents didn't like him having people over or something.
When TV's became more popular there was a pretty low number of channels for a long time limited to the three networks in the USA, then even after cable came out - adoption was slower in more rural parts of the country. I can remember wanting to do almost anything else and not wanting to watch much TV because the selection of shows appealing to me and not a repeat was so low.
It's harder than you think (2 kids, another on the way). My eldest is now 6 so she's getting a handle on logic thinking and pattern matching — but it takes a while for them to get there. Also, while they can't read, that's a large barrier to entry.
She (and my 3yo) absolutely loved Google's 50 years of Kids Coding doodle [1].
As you've pointed out, finding excitement in the world to share together is the most important thing. The HN crowd tend to be a pretty inquisitive bunch, so there's no shortage of things to look into :-)
For any kids who enjoyed that Google Doodle I’d recommend taking a look at Lightbot[0] and Spritebox[1]; similar experiences for playing with programming logic.
Full disclosure: I’m the developer on these, but believe they’re relevant here.
Yes! My girls already love Lightbot, we found it after they had played the Google Bunny doodle to death. They'll be super excited tomorrow when I tell them I spoke to the person that made it :-)
Will definitely download Spritebox and give it a try. Would you say it's more aimed at older kids and adults?
> I think it used to be like this for a lot of people in the developed world as well when computers were new and most people did not have computers and those that did had only one in the whole household.
Heck, I'm not that old and I remember playing plenty of games with my dad and brother on the family PC.
I think blizzard missed a trick by not consulting with their WoW scripting team to develop an acceptable level of automation of the micromanagement aspects.
It would provide another dimension to the game play.
There were games that went all or mostly in on not being a clickfest for resource management - Myth, Ground Control off the top of my head, Total Annihiliation had a different model for resources. My personal preference was for these over Starcraft/Warcraft in multiplayer, but it was nice to have so many options.
I always felt like I was cheating when I cheesed the AI to defeat it. But then I realized that this in many games they hit you with a large number of dumb mobs because one isn’t a challenge.
You could do the same thing to a human opponent in some of those games, or they to you, so in practice you had to micromanage some things like fights in order to kite or retreat effectively.
When I got out of college I had a brief fantasy of trying to consult doing game AI but the whole field cratered and I had no idea if I actually had an aptitude for it, and I got busy doing other kinds of “serious” work.
Hah, same in my household but with Age of Empires II and Caesar 3. Strategy games are particularly fun/engaging when played cooperatively as a single player.
There's a process in extreme programming that works in exactly the same way - "mob programming". Everyone in the team gathers around a single computer and works on the same task together. With the right team it can work really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming
Before programming, you can start them as young as 4-5 on touch typing, depending upon the individual child’s manual dexterity development. Then the programming is not so obscured by the mechanics of typing.
Plain old browser free of any cookies (I use either a dedicated account, or switch to a child's Firefox container tab), and a free account on typing.com works. The free account has advertisements. Hence the generic blank browser so ads don't reflect your own browsing history, and will start to reflect the child's instead. I prefer the advertisements, because it trains the children to deal with mild distractions while typing, as they will grow up in a world where they will have an advantage if they acquire the skill to type under heavy distraction.
But YMMV depending upon the child's level of focus; spring for the paid account if the advertisements are too distracting. "Too" in this context for me means the child stops the lesson altogether to watch the ads.
I start out by setting expectations that I don't care about speed, I only care about accuracy and correct finger placement, and the speed will come later with more time and practice. Inevitably, they want to see you typing as fast as you can and will want to emulate that, so I discourage any emphasis upon speed while learning. The lessons have an accuracy ranking represented as 1-3 stars, and the rule I enforce is they must achieve all three stars (95% accuracy) before advancing to the next lesson.
Finger placement on the keys is difficult for children this young when starting, but a 5 yo will generally catch on reasonably well after about 5-10 lessons. Usually they lack the fine motor control to prevent stray key strikes when that young, so when first starting out, I limit the lessons to 4 attempts at a single lesson to reach 3 stars, then praise them for sticking with it even if they don't get it, and move on to another activity.
After passing the second lesson, I show them how to restart a lesson so if they feel like they are making too many mistakes they can try again without having to go through the system's feedback and feeling dejected by it. I always effusively praise steady persistence performed without undue emotional drama, and if that day's lesson proves too tumultuous, we gently disengage.
Depending upon the individual child, you will have to sit with them to enforce correct finger placement anywhere from 3-10 lessons. There is an enormous temptation at first when there are only a couple keys to learn for a child to use their index finger in a pointing fashion like they are used to their entire lives up to this juncture, instead of properly splaying their fingers out on the keyboard, which is a highly unaccustomed position for them. The dots on most computer keyboard home rows definitely helps center them.
You feel your way through with each individual child, but generally you can ramp up to four lessons per day at 6 yo, and by then it goes fairly quickly. This is already a wall of text, so I omitted how I calibrate ramping up and other starting out guidelines I created as I went along, feel free to respond here if you want more details, but this should get you started.
> I think it used to be like this for a lot of people in the developed world as well when computers were new and most people did not have computers and those that did had only one in the whole household.
I remember playing games with family members using only a single keyboard. I have vague memories of even somehow managing four player games somehow, right up until keyboards stopped responding to that many simultaneous inputs.
This makes me wonder if part of the appeal the Nintendo Switch seems to have with, in particular, the 30-something crowd, is to do with how easy it is to play two-player games (or more) by just propping up the device and detaching the joycons. Nostalgia seems to really play a role in the popularity of that thing.
The important thing here is passion. It is easy enough to teach the basics of programming like it is easy to teach the basics of math, but without passion for the actual subject people tend to disregard even their own knowledge and expertise.
tl;dr: It is important to share with your children the things you are passionate about, but equally important is to watch for things your children are passionate about.
> It is important to share with your children the things you are passionate about, but equally important is to watch for things your children are passionate about.
Absolutely, it is very important to me that we do things they enjoy. Otherwise I might end up doing the exact opposite of what I intended — and end up with them having an impression that working with technology is plain boring and a chore. Now of course in any creative endeavors there are times of pain and struggle, but I want my kids to experience the joy and satisfaction that can come from it too.
We got the first pc in the household when I was 11 and we never sat there with 2 or more people apart from the occasional "trying to figure something out" or A helping B or vice versa. But maybe that's also because my parents were never interested in games.
Thinking about it, it wasn't much different at all of my school buddies' places - often the computer was cramped into a corner that it was already hard to sit 2 kids in front of it and I've also hardly of anyone doing this with their parents or siblings, but that's of course not a proof.
I was thinking the same thing. The public library had a few Apple IIs that you could load games on and play. There would typically be a few kids gathered around one computer taking turns.
Spot on. Cloud computing is the return of the dependent client/server architecture we had with thin clients and mainframes. But not everything is cloud-only nowadays. You can argue even ChromeOS isn't. But it resembles thin clients. Same with massive clouds such as AWS/Azure; they resemble mainframes.
I'd say it was Intel more than Microsoft; the Classmate PC was a shitty clone that they marketed like crazy to target the OLPC, which ran an AMD chipset. Running full-blown Windows, no screen visible in sunlight, no easy mesh networking, etc.
My brother got one of them as part of a subsidized program, and man, it sucked. Slow, barely any free disk space, it was a waste of money even at 50€.
I seem to recall that MS managed to "convince" whoever was in charge to offer a OLPC variant with Windows on it, effectively watering down the core concept.
Yep, I was part of the open-source dev community back in the day. The push by Microsoft and subsequent deal with Negroponte to have the XO laptops also run Windows really disappointed a lot of the open source developers. Back then it felt a little like the last nail in the coffin, for me at least.
I'm glad to see the OLPC actually being used somewhere and researched. I think part of the reason the project never got that far was because when it was introduced the developing world were convinced 'computers' were synonymous with desktops and laptops running Microsoft operating systems and software. Now with smartphones, tablets, chromebooks etc. that perception has shifted somewhat. Hopefully with this along with the studies into the successes and failures of the millions of OLPCs that were deployed there will be another revival of these efforts. I really like the idea of a kind of standard, open, cheap laptop designed for children around the world.
I used to help for the OLPC project. They even gave my an XO laptop (the one pictured in the article). It feel good to see it in use. I didn't keep myself updated about the progression of the project. Good thing it isnt dead :)
"We examined logs that showed which applications the children had used on their laptops during the previous 12 months; we analysed what they’d produced – for instance, recorded files."
I'm curious whether users knew that everything they'd be doing was logged and would be examined later.
It's interesting that the article didn't mention anything about connectivity in Madagascar/Nosy Komba. I understand from another comment that these OLPC laptops have built-in mesh networking, but how do they update content on the laptops when new lessons are created? How do the kids get the music the article mentions onto their laptops? I briefly worked in this space and connectivity/updates to content, beyond price, was the main concern schools had when considering purchasing laptops for classroom use.
They didn't talk about learning programming at all. I assume that's rare, but I'm wondering if there are any kids who learned programming on these machines?
Yet another HN article leading to an evening of reading wikipedia articles, etc.
I see a lot of "developing country" comments.
Trying to reconcile Madagascar with Iceland, another island nation. Iceland has 300K people in 100K sq km. Madagascar is 25M in 600K sq km. Nobody thinks of Iceland as a low-income country. How do you explain it? Madagascar seems to boil down to a dictatorship supported by France and the IMF supported by the USA? Basically the world needs to figure out how to stop these nations from destroying others, then we don't need these so-called "lessons".
I have three children and they all have a OLPC laptop. They are designed for children 6-15 it is easy to forget how physically small people in this age group can be. I think a larger screen would make it more difficult to carry and would result in more broken (dropped) laptops.
The $100 price and and the effect on battery usage are the limiting factors. These things have to be rechargeable with cheap solar arrays and/or a hand crank.
You make do with what you have :).... However, instead of teaching word processing and such (office s/w)... how about teaching kids that it's just a machine and you can make it do your bidding..
I remember starting with GW BASIC when I was 10 or so and the first 'graphic' program was an analog clock on a 80x40 CRT console, felt like I could build anything with it..
The authors agree! Sugar (the environment of these laptops) comes with an easy-to-learn multimedia programming environment (Scratch), a simple Python IDE (Pippy), a graphical editor for acustic and electric circuits (TamTam SynthLab) and an authoring tool with programmable behaviours (EToys).
Those are OLPC "laptops", very cheap hardware and open source software (Sugar interface). They have a large resolution, and I think are resistive touch screens as well. Is it as productive as a full-blown MBP? Of course not. But when I was a kid, we didn't have portable computers like these at all. We didn't even have cellphones. I had a Super Mario Watch with Tetris on it. That was mindblowing. And "nerdy". And small. And awkward to use while on wrist.
I learned to program on a 48K Apple II clone with a 40x24 text display (and 192x280 graphics). The important point is the UI is dictated by the physical device. We are used to multiple humongous monitors now, but we are not restricted to that. 900x1200 is more than my first Sun SPARCStation...
It's amazing how little space you need when banner ads, pop-overs, Amazon/Ask Jeeves/Yahoo/RealPlayer/Norton/McAfee/Bing toolbars, and an oversized mobile-inspired UI aren't in the way.
XO-1 uses a 7.5" 1200x900 display. That's about the size of a small-ish tablet (e.g. the iPad Mini has a 7.9" screen) or the "old" netbooks (EEEPC 700 had a 7" display).
Adults can work fine with that, and the XO-1 is targeted towards late kids and young teens.
I remember my dad's first company computer. It had a smaller screen with green text on black background. The screen was integrated into this desktop computer to make it somewhat portable I guess.
I think it used to be like this for a lot of people in the developed world as well when computers were new and most people did not have computers and those that did had only one in the whole household.
Nowadays a lot of people including the children have a smartphone each and the household might have one or more iPads and up to several laptops. And of course a PlayStation or an XBOX.
I don’t have children yet, but when I get children I hope to show them programming and involve them in what I do with computers and to show interest in what they are doing and to encourage them to be creative.