Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 17:06:54 -0600 (CST) From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@tumbolia.com> To: dannyman <dannyman@toldme.com> Cc: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>, Rob <europax@home.com>, "freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: How do you get kids interested in computers- other than playing games? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0103131640420.55797-100000@shell-1.enteract.com> In-Reply-To: <20010313142035.K3500@dell.dannyland.org>
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On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, dannyman wrote: :On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 09:29:37PM -0600, David Kelly wrote: :[...] :> Put MacOS X on it two weeks from now. It should have a pretty enough :> interface to keep him amused. And a solid foundation underneath. :> :> My brother started his kids early. They could type before they could :> talk. About 8 years old now and still not programming. But for the last :> couple of years they have been "writing books." They write the darndest :> things which almost make sense. Much like in the moments before waking :> when dreams almost make sense. : :I'm no parent, but I like this answer best - MacOS X is probably good (like :the Amiga I cut my teeth on) where you get a cuddly GUI but over the years you :roll up sleeves more often to get down and dirty. : :But the real answer is that "maybe the kid don't want to code, but he'll find :something else cool to do." You sure he wants to grow up to be a l33t h4XX0R? :Maybe he is interested in writing, or art, or music ... Mac is a good platform :for this, as far as I can tell. Go for OS X. Linux is not yet a good :plaything for a youngster looking to find his interest. The way I see this is that computers are tools. They are useful to solve problems -- whether the problem is what do I use to write the great american novel (LaTeX, of course!), or how do I mindlessly entertain myself, or how do I get a job, or whatever. It's a very small set of computer users who have the right sort of mindset to do much beyond that. Teaching that computers are powerful, flexible tools, that can be made to do what you want, and not just what they want you to do, and you can pretty easily whip up a script to do lots of things, will help. One of my biggest complaints with Windows, and Windows monstrerously-bloated-every-piece-of-software-has-to-do- everything-poorly-but-nothing-well software is that you can't get it do anything. It's conditioned people to be a tool of the computer and not the other way around. I tried to explain to someone why I used a UNIX box to read my mail, and not the company normal Outlook. That the user interface is awful wasn't really the point (pine's sucks pretty hard), but that I couldn't make the machine do arbitrary things with my mail. I had a hard time time convincing him this was useful until I showed him a webpage that showed some interesting stats on it. I built it with a makefile, which ran a script to grab some data from a database, process it, and update the webpages with it. The kicker: it was run by procmail, and got kicked off by regular mail message that had updated data in it. He was unable to suggest a way to get a windows box do the same thing, particularly one that didn't cost a cent. Showing people things like that often generates a "Wow, I didn't reallize I could make a computer do that for me!" response. If you can install the right adititude towards computers in someone young enough, you can probably get someone who will eventually want to write code. This should be especially true if you can convince them that it's not really some sort of black art. It's another failing of windows, that it's a big leap to being able to write useful programs -- since they have to have a user interface. Things like VB (blethourus as it is) help that, but an environment where there's a powerful command line interface available are even more useful. David Scheidt -- dscheidt@tumbolia.com Bipedalism is only a fad. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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