[wplug] computer use for the young

Tim Lesher tim at lesher.ws
Tue Jun 10 14:40:46 EDT 2003


On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 01:03:20PM -0400, Duncan Hutty wrote:
> My daughter is about 2.5 years and I am interested in getting her
> exposed to computers & technology; I believe that familiarity breeds
> comfort & ease. Therefore, I ask you what is that your young
> children do with computers?

My 3.5 year old uses the PC to surf the web.  I have her browser
pointed to a proxy that keeps her to a handful of sites--not so much
out of fear that she'll see something "bad", but some of the links on
the sites take her to "Information for Parents" areas, and she can't
always figure out how to get back, especially when they raise new
windows.  So she roams around nickjr.com, fisherprice.com, and
pbskids.org and doesn't get lost.

She also plays the heck out of the 'educational' games, particularly
the JumpStart series and the games from Humongous.

She uses Windows XP, though, because that's what the family PC is
usually running, and most of her favorites don't work under Linux/Wine
(for the CD-based games) or Linux/Mozilla (for the web-based ones).
I'll introduce Linux when she's a little older; for right now, any
exposure is helping.  On her own, she's figured out most of the window
operations (minimize, maximize, restore), the browser controls
(back/front), and screen resolutions--all of which will carry over to
a graphical Linux environment in a few years.

When she's a little older and a bit better at reading, I'll start
looking for free LOGO implementations, then Python.  But I'm not
worrying about that yet.

As far as the 'corporatism' goes, yes, I'm a little uncomfortable with
that (she's learning to read from corporate logos), but pbskids.org is
a good site.

Besides, it was a proud day when we were in the checkout line of a
store, and she pointed to the logo on the barcode scanner and said,
"Dad!  That's SYMBOL!" (my employer...).

-- 
Tim Lesher <tim at lesher.ws>
http://www.lesher.ws




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