Computers for children

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Wed Jan 13 09:05:39 1999

At 10:00 PM 1/12/99 -0800, Sam Ismail wrote:
>
>Gee, I wish I was your daughter. My dad's idea of cirriculum was:
> Raking Leaves Rake
> Mowing Lawns Lawnmower
[...]
>I had to learn everything else on my own :)

No personal aspersion on Chuck's plan, but in both Sam's dad and
many other parents I've seen, the curriculum (in general, not just
computer-centric) seems to be driven by the parent's interests
and perhaps the child's own natural interests are forgotten.

My three-year-old likes to doodle on my Pilot and PC, but
something inside me wants to let him be a kid for a while,
as opposed to pushing him to become the latest "youngest
NT certified engineer." When I furnished him with an old Mac SE
with a kid-paint program, he enjoyed it, but after a while he
removed the mouse and used it to lasso his fire truck until the
magic smoke left the mouse. Yes, there's a 100bT port in his
bedroom, and a T-1 to the house, but I haven't told him about
that yet. It's scary how the words "e-mail" and "dot com"
worked there way into his vocabulary, though.

I flinch when I see how computers are used in schools. I help
the local school board with some technological issues, and recently
took a tour of the new network wiring at the high school. They've
got fiber to the closets, DS-3 feeding the place, video distribution,
it goes on and on. "What's it going to be used for," I asked
the director. "Well, it might be ten years before we get the budget
to refurbish, so we thought we'd ask for as much as possible, and
we'll let the teachers figure out how to use it."

Meanwhile, the teacher's union is requesting funding for substitutes
so that teachers can take mornings and afternoons away from their
classrooms in order to attend seminars to learn how to use the marginal
Win95 machines they have now. Meaning, of course, that they don't know
how to use what was installed from the last round of funding.

The only use of the Net I saw on the tour was five kids in the library,
surfing sites about their favorite bands. Surprisingly, the "porn filter"
consisted of keeping the monitors in sight of the librarian's desk.

Of course, we all know the Web is peer-reviewed and scholastically
approved, so any material you find there is OK to cut-and-paste into
a book report.

- John
Received on Wed Jan 13 1999 - 09:05:39 GMT