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Education Technology

Introducing a Child to Constructive Computer Use? 131

Posted by Cliff from the educating-while-they're-young dept.
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?"
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Introducing a Child to Constructive Computer Use? More

Introducing a Child to Constructive Computer Use?

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  • NickJr (Score:3, Informative)

    by turtled ( 845180 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @12:39PM (#13331231)
    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 =)
  • 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 hat
    • I learned Basic at the age of 8 on an apple. I moved onto DOS around 10 because I had to (every pc shipped with it). I jumped onto linux and bsd at the age of 14 and at 17 and 18 moved completely into *nix. I haven't looked back. I left IT, but friends and family know that I'll outperform, outfix and undercharge every IT shop in town. I will not, however compromise my passion for *nix by working at any computer shop ever again.

      Hope that helps... I wasn't 6 like your son, but I was 8, and it was the fir
    • Linux Kernel Internals? A bit too much for a child...

      I'd rather teach him BASIC, or LOGO.

    • Re:Get him a PC, and : (Score:5, Funny)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @01:02PM (#13331428) Journal
      Get him reading Linux Kernel Internals and other things.

      I don't see how coddling the child does him any good in the long run. Give the 6-year-old a copy of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and have him write his own damn OS.

    • I was going to suggest a combination of a few fun games, (not necessarily "educational"), and a command line interface.

      When my son was quite young he watched me play some old LucasArts games, among others, and one day he insisted on being allowed to play too. Most of the ones that he was interested in were old DOS games, so I showed him how to fire them up. At the age of four he learned how to boot straight to DOS and change directories until he found the executable for the game he wanted to play, which

  • Lego (Score:5, Informative)

    by brilinux ( 255400 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @12:42PM (#13331254) Journal
    I showed my (now 7 year old) brother to Lego's website [lego.com]. 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.

  • I suggest you show him the World Wide Web and explain somethings about it. Show him some programs (by the way, what OS do you have?) Let him go on the computer by himself someday, maybe with or without supervision.

    Let him become a guru by12!

  • The Jump Start series. Sam's Club has a 6CD pak I think for $60. Animals, numbers, etc.

    And here is Snail Mail http://www.shockwave.com/sw/content/snailmail [shockwave.com]

  • Disclaimer: the following is a JOKE (Score:3, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @12:45PM (#13331283)

    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.

  • Learning Through Games (Score:3, Informative)

    by north.coaster ( 136450 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @12:50PM (#13331324) Homepage

    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 [broderbund.com] 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 [barbie.com].

    Unfortunately, there is little (if any) open source or Linux software aimed towards young children.

    Good Luck!

    • Unfortunately, there is little (if any) open source or Linux software aimed towards young children.


      This not true. As a matter of fact, letting him play with TuxTyping or TuxPaint might be a good way to start...

      • Are there any others besides TuxTyping and TuxPaint? Is there anything that compares with the ReaderRabbit series?

        • TuxMath [newbreedsoftware.com]. It is still under development, but it does work (the splash screen calls it "Alpha version", but it seems stable).

          I was messing with it last night, and I (as the parent) want the option to slow it down a bit. It'll be good for older kids once it's got a few more Revs behind it.
        • No native programs that I know of. Of course you could use WINE or a similar emulator (I know, I know, it's technically not an emulator, but that's beside the point). I think the reason behind this is that GNU/Linux is mainly used by people who don't need to play educational kids' games.

          • I think the reason behind this is that GNU/Linux is mainly used by people who don't need to play educational kids' games.

            I have made this point before. There are probably a lot of parents who would love to have a low cost, non-Windows, PC for their kids if it ran the software thet they want their kids to use. Linux would be a great platform for kids, except that there is very little native educational software available.

            WINE might be helpful, but most parents don't have the time (or the knowledge) to s

        • as a matter of fact yes [ofset.org] Not quite as complete a selection what you might find with the ReaderRabbit series but it's getting there.
    • I was introduced with those games, and Reader Rabbit is a very good series. Same with Operation Neptune, an old DOS game where you would pilot a submarine and 'shoot' sea creatures with ink pellets which would make them possible to pass momentarily. At predefined areas in each level, you had to answer questions that had something to do with your mission - if fractions math was turned on, then you could get something like "If you use 15 1/2 gallons of water per day, and have 220 gallons, how many days until

  • Get him an old PCjr (Score:3, Informative)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @12:50PM (#13331332)
    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.

  • Programming (Score:2, Insightful)

    by stanmann ( 602645 )
    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.
    • My grandfather tried to teach me basic when I was 2 and again when I was 8. I don't remmeber the first attempt, but I definately remember the second. He wanted to show me how to draw a circle, but I didn't understand why typing random characters made anything, and why I would want to do that over using the really cool paint program that he had on DOS instead. :P

      If you want to introduce a child to programming, I STRONGLY suggest using Logo [wikipedia.org].

    • The average child simply doesn't have sufficiently well developed abstract thinking for most programming languages. You're talking about an age at which most children are still struggling to understand monetary equivalences, forget about fractions. They MAY be able to understand something like Logo up to a point, but even that has a pretty substantial disconnect between cause and action.

    • Get an old PC(C64, Apple 2xx, IBM PCjr, etc) with basic built in,

      No - there's almost no way to store what you want to work with. While it is true that you could use Floppy disks, don't count on being able to find or keep them for a long time. In addition, most old PCs have minimal similarities to modern operating systems.

      Get a copy of QBasic, QuickBasic, GW-Basic, or FreeBasic [freebasic.net]. While still marginally related to current computers, it's much better than just using a random old PC. As a last resort, y

    • Damn right. When I was 6, I had a ZX81 and a book full of code. Only way to learn.

      No one ever learned anything by clicking on pictures!
    • Logo, like some of the others have said.
      Then, when he gets older, something like python (just as easy as basic but without the bad habits).
  • Do you know about the book Mindstorms by Seymour Papert? His book is about young children learning computers, and I very highly recommend it.

  • Related articles (Score:3, Informative)

    by Brahgam ( 774597 ) <amoyano@iu[ ]du.ar ['a.e' in gap]> on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @12:59PM (#13331404)
    There were similar articles in slashdot:

    http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/05 9230&tid=95&tid=146&tid=126&tid=4 [slashdot.org]
    "When Should Children Be Introduced to Computers?" and
    http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/16 41207&tid=156&tid=185&tid=4 [slashdot.org]
    "Introducing Children to Computers?"
    for example

  • start with... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by middlemen ( 765373 )
    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.

    • Re:start with... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Introducing a small child to perl, you're sick. Think about all the ways it could scar the kid's mind. WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

      Posted AC because the mod's have no sense of humor, it's funny, laugh.
    • Go straight to Lisp or another recursive language. If the kid learns to grok Lisp at age 7, he'll be able to understand anything that comes down the pipes after that. There's nothing more difficult than trying to learn Lisp after years and years of imperative programming.

      Also, don't just sit the kid in front of the monitor and leave a sign that says, "Before you ask daddy, RTFM!" Program with the kid. Let him watch how you approach problems, help him solve some of his own. Something like BASIC or Pas

  • Text adventures (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RuneB ( 170521 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @01:01PM (#13331420)
    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.
    • 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.

      Exactly. My son (now 7.5yo) has been playing xnethack (a GUIfied version of nethack) for about a year. Since he's studying Tae Kwon Do, he likes to play the monk character (based on Caine).

      There's no sound, lots of reading, and it's turn based, so he can think about wha
  • You don't mention having any software for kids around. There are lots of edutainment titles out there. One company that produces some very high-quality software with characters is Kutoka [kutoka.com]. They do some great software for both language and math skills. Even my daughter, who is almost five years old now, benefits a lot from their titles.

    On another note, you can also find several large investment companies that have a fair amount of online resources available for helping your children learn amount money and

  • I have no kids, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @01:11PM (#13331504) Homepage
    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.
    • Yes WE learned at a BASIC command prompt. But that was then... perhaps the natural stepping stone today is HTML, JavaScript, then on to bigger stuff. A text editor and a web browser is an interactive, instant gratification environment. Easy to place text and graphics and he/she can instantly show his friends and parents what they've done by putting it on a personal web site. -- John.
      • Yes, true, that is how we learned and some things are different now, but I don't think modern systems lend themselves very well to learning about the internals. If you want your kid to grow up actually understanding how it works instead of just how to use it, he has to eventually dig in under the hood at some point. There's only a few years where a kid can safely experiment on things that society considers outdated or old fashioned before he learns via his peers and television that he should be using the
    • Why not think back to how you started and go from there?

      Let him take a course in TRS-80 BASIC when he's a senior in high school?

      And then drift away until he has to take a COBOL For Business Majors, and realilzes that even though mainframe COBOL-74 really, really sucks, that computer programming is his great passion?

      Seriously, though, I think that putting so many computers in schools is a big waste of time, money and learning.

      My children (most probably) won't have to go to a dead tree Encyclopedia Brittanic
      • My children (most probably) won't have to go to a dead tree Encyclopedia Brittanica to do term paper research and thus have the opportnity (like I did) to find interesting articles while flipping thru the pages trying to find the proper article.

        Instead they'll have the opportunity to find interesting articles while trying to get the search terms right to find the proper article.
      • My children (most probably) won't have to go to a dead tree Encyclopedia Brittanica to do term paper research and thus have the opportnity (like I did) to find interesting articles while flipping thru the pages trying to find the proper article

        Maybe not, however even now at the age of 22 I regularly find myself on Wikipedia hours after I've read the initial article I was looking for in the first place.

  • And broken games. He will have to get into the BASIC code to fix things.

    More seriously, he wont be digging into wikipedia data yet, and cant program that early. Beside browsing websites and drawing pictures, its all games for him.

    Do get him hooked up to games on the PC instead of consoles. In a console you just insert the disc and there you go. In the PC you have to install the game, and configure things like the resolution. Dont underestimate the power of broken games to teach alot about how the computers
    • Dont underestimate the power of broken games to teach alot about how the computers work.

      Related to that, you could give him an old DOS box and make him fight with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get enough memory allocated to play his games. I learned quite a bit just having to do that and other arcanery to get my games working as a kid.

  • I say don't (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

    • Re:I say don't (Score:4, Funny)

      by avi33 ( 116048 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @01:25PM (#13331619) Homepage
      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 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.

      And while you're at it, don't waste their precious time teaching them how to eat with a fork, dress themselves, or brush their teeth. We mustn't take away that important time for fucking around.

      I'll all for letting kids explore, c

      • How do you make the mental jump from

        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.

        to

        And while you're at it, don't waste their precious time teaching them how to eat with a fork, dress themselves, or brush their teeth. We mustn't take away that important time for fucking around

        That's about as logical as W trying to claim

  • Whatever you do, do not introduce him to IRC. That's just child abuse.

    I got my programming/computer skills with DOS 5.0/6.2 upgrade..introducing someone to linux would be great though. Let them get an early use and learning of the shell.. I was del *.*'ing in DOS when I was around that age _
  • I see a few comments suggesting simple games to teach basic concepts a la Mathblaster. A key thing to note is that such games do not teach computer literacy any more than the "burger" icon on a McDonald's cash register teaches English literacy. In such cases, you could be using a book or Cuisenaire rods and get the same or better results. (Actually, the rods may be a good idea to help encourage abstract thinking.) Drills encourage memorization, not thinking. You'll want his abstract thinking abilities

  • mostly games, but some cartoons and science... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by avi33 ( 116048 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @01:15PM (#13331541) Homepage
    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 [freedownloadscenter.com] 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.

    • Re:mostly games, but some cartoons and science... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @03:10PM (#13332426)
      DisneyWarner ad machine

      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.

  • My kids (6 1/2 year old boy and 4 year old girl) both really enjoy pbskids.org. There are games there for each of the pbskids cartoons. My son especially liked CyberChase, as there is usually a math lesson in the cartoon. He loves numbers.

  • Not to sound harsh but... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • Try teaching him how to use Tux Paint (free download at: http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/ [newbreedsoftware.com]), an open source (free) drawing software designed specifically for children. Personally, I find using drawing software the best way to learn computer -- for both children and adults. You learn how to use the interfaces, how to be creative, how to solve problems, and the children get to create a bunch of cute graphics for wallpaper.

    I taught myself how to use GIMP, a more advanced open source graphics sof
  • Start them early with Oracle Finacials so you can get them working in a 21st Century Sweatshop at 8.

    Spare the Rod, Spoil your early retirement.

    Oh and if you got a cat or two freeloading about the house they actually can type, get them going on perl scripting. You would be suprized what cutting back on Catnip can do for productivity.

  • No pun intended, although feel free to interpret it that way.

    When I was a kid, my parents bought the family an Atari XE. A "console" system that was physically a keyboard and ran BASIC. You could type in a program from the command line and it would run. At the time, I was 4 or 5 I think, and I would just type stuff verbatim from the book. But it was an awful lot of fun. When the book has you do stuff that essentially just results in a flashing screen or a moving blob, sure, that's boring to adults or

  • Neopets is a good choice, my 7 year old loves it. Slews of little webgames that reward higher score with more neopoints to buy stuff. Good for hand eye coordination in alot of cases.

  • Edu-Games (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fwice ( 841569 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @02:14PM (#13331994)
    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).
    • I don't think any age is "too young", it's merely a matter of manipulation.

      For my 1 year-old (who's 10 now), I wrote a simple program that just displayed a single letter (character) on the screen...whatever key he pressed on the keyboard.

      It was plain, simple and somewhat interesting to him. At least he's comfortable around computers...he better be, there are 10+ in the house.

  • It's easy! Just set him up a hotmail account. Soon enough he'll be hitting all the sites, buying and selling like a pro, and he'll even get an early start on the teachers thanks to all natural herbs. When it comes to school, you can never hold a child back!

  • "Ceteris Paribus" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @02:22PM (#13332053) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • PE will not teach kids how to run, how to exercise or anything except this:

      Jocks are "naturally gifted" at being thugs and winning at sports, but geeks are "naturally gifted" at things that require two braincells or more actually firing electrical impulses at each other.

      Get what I'm saying?

      If you want them exercising, teach them properly. Teach them to avoid junk food and to use "treats" in the right amounts. Otherwise they'll eventually get lazy and become fat. Later they'll say that they were "naturally
      • PE will not teach kids how to run, how to exercise or anything except this:

        You must have gone to a suck-a** school.

        When we were in grammar school, they taught us fun things like kickball, dodgeball, softball, basketball, and generally got us moving. Pretty much the only excersize I got at all.

        In junior & senior high school, it got harder, but so what? Being a pudgy geek, it emotionally hurt, but now I'm glad they pushed me to do things I'd have never done on my own. Of course, they were Good People,
      • Jocks are "naturally gifted" at being thugs and winning at sports, but geeks are "naturally gifted" at things that require two braincells or more actually firing electrical impulses at each other.

        No, I have to disagree.

        Jocks are people who happen to be aware of the natural physical potential that nearly every human being is born with, and in whom that potential hasn't been squandered.

        Geek are people who happen to be aware of the natural mental potential that nearly every human being is born with, and in who
  • don't let him get to bash.org for quite a few years yet, maybe show him Blender [blender.org], and let him have fun creating stuff on his own. In a year or two give him an old computer and as a previous post said a linux distribution (gentoo is a little harsh for starters, even though I'm a big fan of it, but you can introduce him to Fedora first, then gentoo later). Have him discover what really goes on under the hood at his pace. Eventually he'll know a lot about it, probably more than you. And that's what's sad: the n
  • I prefer the Atari 8-bit series, mostly the 800XL. You can either get a disk drive for it, or better yet, make a SIO2PC cable, get a copy of APE [atarimax.com] and an old PC. The old PC acts like a disk drive, and makes it easier to download software for the Atari from the Internet.

    You can get started with programming in Basic, and can also play a ton of games.

    P.S. Steve Tucker at AtariMax.com [atarimax.com] has a bunch of cool toys for the 8-bits, including flash carts.

  • First, he showed me the game. Maybe I was 5 at the time (the games we had were simple and cutesy), and I was hooked. It all flowed naturally from there.

    "If you give a mouse a cookie," for those of you who are familiar with the reference. Soon I was asking my dad how to run the games. Next I asked my dad how to install new games. One thing lead to another, and I started learning basic system administration. Later I started asking him how to program, and he sat down and taught me the fundamentals of BA

  • Under linux, add to /etc/hosts:

    127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
    127.0.0.1 slashdot.com
    127.0.0.1 slashdot.net
    127.0.0.1 slashdot.edu
    127.0.0.1 slashdot.tv
    127.0.0.1 slashdot.xxx
    127.0.0.1 slashdot.info
    127.0.0.1 slashdot.cx
    etc.
  • First, let me recommend Neopets [neopets.com]. It's been getting fairly commercialized, but what I saw of it a few years ago looked good for younger children (and adults who act young. :P) Neopets will give you son a pet or pets to take care of as well as introducing him to an economy (through the market place) and allow him to play many fun games. The only thing to really watch out for is the merchandise. :P As for programming experience, I do recommend it. I personally was exposed to BASIC when I was 2 and 8, and
  • My kids just loved the KidPix software. I'm not sure if it is still available, but it was surely a winner. Other than just line drawing and filling, it had stamps, patterns, coloring templates (and make your own templates) and even animation. As they got older, they switched to more sophisticated programs and now adobe illustrator, photoshop and proCreate and similar design/art tools are their favorites. The "read aloud" type books were ok - once or twice. They quickly lost their novelty. Some of the
  • Start him on Dr. Scheme http://www.drscheme.com/ [drscheme.com] as a calculator, and gradually teach him to write functions, evaluate lists. The mere incentive of having the computer doing his homework as soon as he builds the abstract toolkitshe needs will have him writing simple functional programming libraries in weeks.

    Oh, and he won't have been spoiled by GOTOs.
  • I started fiddling in basic at the age of 6/7. I was just left to my own devices with some 'my first basic' book and basic open and hacked away till I could work out stuff. I think it taught me a lot.
  • When he was two, I took an old iMac G3 we had and set it up with a couple of preschooler games. He grasped the mouse idea very quickly, and now at 3 1/4, he's actually pretty proficient with his Mac. I've set him up with the Simple Finder in Mac OS X 10.3, and I made .dmg files from all the games that require the CD to be inserted - and then set them up to auto-mount. I covered the CD slot with a shield of duct tape, since he can't always resist the impulse to put stuff in there (and disassembling the iM
  • Whatever you decide to introduce kids to, let the learn and explore for themself. Sure, introduce them to things, but don't tell them what to do, let them figure that out themselves, kids have an incredible capacity for learning, and using their naturally high curiosity to drive this, is one of the most satisfying ways to watch a child learn (and also satisfying for the child).
  • Come on man, be real - what motivated you when you were six or seven?

    Pr0n, and plenty of it. If the kid wanted to watch Disney he would go pop in his favorite tape / DVD.

    Pr0n is why VHS dominated Beta. In fact it is why VCR's made it into every home on the planet in the first place.
    Pr0n is why the Internet took off as fast as it did.
    Pr0n drove the first profitable aspect of the web.

    You want your kid to learn how to navigate the file system, throw some Pr0n on there - and hide the really good stuff in some

  • Back in the '80s, my dad would disparage my interest in computers, which were basically bad video games back then. Anything that looked like a toy couldn't possibly be of use in the future. Yeah, he was wrong and clueless, but I'm not going to make the same mistake my dad did. And that mistake is thinking that the facts and situation of this culture today will be applicable twenty years from now.

    You have to stop thinking, "if I can get my kid to be an engineer, or doctor, or computer/electronics whiz,

    • Wow someone sounds bitter. Computer skills will be a necessity even for scientist type jobs. Heck many researchers write their own test software to run simulations sometimes. Teaching your kids those skills will give him an edge. Computer skills cross boundaries. Knowing how to program doesn't mean you can only use that information working for a software company. It also teaches valuable thinking skills. Knowing how to research on the web is useful anywhere.

      By all means the ability to think and read and dis
      • 1) If the kid was meant to program, he's gonna program. He doesn't need an adult to muck up his development with his '70-'90's era thinking.

        2) Getting a kid to use a computer at the age of three is the same kind of retarded thinking that computers are critical to primary school education. That's idiotic. Reading, writing, arithmetic, science; that's critical. But no, lets lose those textbooks and teachers so we can have an up to date computer lab, along with salaried sysadmin, and chuck that equipment t
  • For younger kids, check out the BBC Teletubbies web site http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/teletubbies/funandg a mes/index.shtml [bbc.co.uk]

    There are a lot of cool but simple games there, and they are on a level that does not really require reading skills nor the capability to understand English. So our soon-to-be-5-year-old daughter has surfed that site a lot after she got the idea of a mouse two years ago or so.

    Other favourites for our kid have been SimTunes and Bille & Trille games from Savannah in Denmark http://www [savannahkids.net]

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