5 ms·

I tried Doudou, and then Qimo, and finally gave up and gave my kids xubuntu. The sad truth is that the childrens games like Childs Play are sad stale games wit

I tried Doudou, and then Qimo, and finally gave up and gave my kids xubuntu. The sad truth is that the childrens games like Childs Play are sad stale games with hopeless UIs and glaring bugs like mislabelled animals in quizzes and things. I have lots of feedback from watching my kids learning to use and play with Doudou and Qimo; even though it is several years ago now, I think - from looking at the screenshots - that nothing much has changed :( http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy-generation http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-te... I hope there are modern set of games produced, but I'd imagine they'd be better served over http into the browser than as native apps.

vanderZwan 10y ago
I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery. You know, like the "low barrier to entry, high ceiling" principle of Smalltalk? Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. Also, I started out on DOS at the age of six, with the left-over computer my parents had after they upgraded the server at work. It had two hard drives of a whopping 40mb! Anyway, the neighbours next door had a slightly older son who explained to me how cd, copy, mkdir, del, etc. worked and he gave me a bunch of games via floppy disks. I didn't understand everything (this was before I spoke English, so no idea what the "park" command referred to or why it was important), nor knew why everything worked, or understood why some games didn't quite work when copied to the hard drive (because I didn't copy the sub folders) but I managed. Wanting to play games is a good motivator to learn any interface. Based on Sugata Mitra's experiments, I'd say as an individual I wasn't exceptional in any way; give a group of kids a computer without an artificially low ceiling and watch them go! The circumstances I was in might have been unusual at the time, but that's different. https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_... We shouldn't underestimate the abilities of children to figure out how computers work.
- keithpeter 10y ago
  Low floor, high ceiling activities (or low threshold, high ceiling in US) are a thing in Maths teaching as well. http://www.mathematicalresilience.org/ http://www.mathematicalresilience.org/ http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/ http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/ and http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/assessment/index.html http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/assessment/index.html Latter has example activities and sample student responses.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    Forwarded to a bunch of friends of mine who are (enthusiastic) maths teachers, thanks!
    - keithpeter 10y ago
      If they are in the UK, I'd recommend the staff development that the resilience gang provide. Reasonable rates to institutions that can get 16-20 teachers together. (I'm a happy participant, no financial interest, &c.)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Fully agree with you. I was a bit older at the age of 10, but on those days the Spectrum and C64 were the more advanced machines we could get hold of anyway. So for the first two years it was mostly LOAD "", or trying to type-in listings from magazines that my father used to buy, mostly without success as they tended to have print errors we could not easily understand. But eventually the bug stuck inside, and around the age of 12 I was already getting into Z80 Assembly. Also it was great that back on those days, at least in Portugal we even got listenings on newspapers. Many might remember the "A Capital" computer section on Fridays. :)
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    Aside: I just noticed that I wrote down "six" where it is supposed to be a "nine"! If it was a 6/9 typo I'd understand that, but written out in full like that it is kinda embarrassing. I started playing computer games at the age of six, but having my own computer came a bit later. I'm sure there are some very intelligent six-year olds out there though.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  > Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. The first computers I used (Amigas) ran off floppy disks. Whenever we bought new software, we'd use copies of the disks and keep the originals stored away. This had the effect of making everything safe; even accidentally formatting an OS disk was no problem, since it was just a copy and most things didn't need it to boot anyway. When I was about 8 we got a hard drive, which made life much more convenient (e.g. the ability to install games, rather than swapping floppies around, easily finding saved data compared to trawling through umpteen disk boxes, etc.) but also introduced some danger: changes (including mistakes) would persist across reboots, the HD didn't just contain copies of stuff (we, like most people, didn't have backups), and the impact of something like data loss was expanded to include everything we have (including other people's stuff), rather than just the particular floppies in the drives. I imagine those introduced to computers between, say, the mid 90s to ~2010, would be under more pressure to be conservative, as their mistakes might have a real impact on things like their parent's budgeting spreadsheets, etc. Also, a bit tangentially, I feel that Windows and Linux present more opportunities for mistakes compared to AmigaOS: they spread important files around various parts of the filesystem, and there's a quite tight coupling between the OS and third-party applications. My Amiga HDs all have a standalone Workbench partition for booting, an Applications partition with each program in its own drawer, etc. which limited the scope of any of my experimenting; I remember trying to set up Windows in a similar way, and find that whilst all installers give the option of installing to a user-chosen directory, many programs don't actually work if they're not in the default "C:\Program Files" :( This is where I think initiatives like the RaspberryPi really shine: they're inexpensive, standalone machines, so the impact of any mistakes is very low. Accidentally formatted the drive? Your parent's work documents are safely stored on a different machine. Whilst you can't get back to a clean slate by rebooting, at least SD cards are easy to pull out and make backups of.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Easy solution: Let the children work in a VM and take regular snapshots.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery A modern GUI OS for adults has a very low ceiling of mastery. I don't know why we need to make simpler designs. When my kid was literally fourteen or fifteen months he could pick up a phone or tablet, swipe to the youtube app, press it, and then press the thumbnails from a recently viewed video and watch videos (usually Peppa Pig). Kids don't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays for adults. This reminds me of why the OLPC failed so badly. Even ignoring the cheap netbook competition, the interface was too 'top down' academic crap about 'how kids think' and involved a lot of shoddy assumptions on how to teach kids how to use a computer. A netbook with XP was perfectly usable by even the very young. I was 6 or so I could use my parent's TRS-80 and was writing fun little BASIC programs with it. I think we need to give kids more credit here. They're much smarter than we think and its adult hubris to pretend they're so unintelligent and unable to figure things out on their own. Perhaps we shouldn't shy away from overly-challenging kids. The recent trends of 'soft' and 'helicopter' parenting cannot be good for the long run. I plan to be somewhat tough with my son because I don't want him to grow up into some of the people I work with who have near zero self-learning and critical thinking skills and have a 'give me fish' mentality and will actively fight against a 'teach me to fish' mentality.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    > Kids don't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays for adults. Highly relevant to this statement (which I fully agree with): http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
- agentgt 10y ago
  Speaking of Smalltalk an alternative is to run Squeak and/or one if its subprojects: EToys, Scratch. I haven't tried them in a while but they are designed for kids to explore and have high ceilings. Scratch particularly looks pretty cool.
pen2l 10y ago
I've tried these things with the kids I'm around (aged 2-7), and I was just met with frustration for all the things I tried (Doudou, Xubuntu, whatever). As much of a nix-zealot that I am, in the end I resigned to using an iPad with several educational apps.

vanderZwan 10y ago

I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery. You know, like the "low barrier to entry, high ceiling" principle of Smalltalk? Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. Also, I started out on DOS at the age of six, with the left-over computer my parents had after they upgraded the server at work. It had two hard drives of a whopping 40mb! Anyway, the neighbours next door had a slightly older son who explained to me how cd, copy, mkdir, del, etc. worked and he gave me a bunch of games via floppy disks. I didn't understand everything (this was before I spoke English, so no idea what the "park" command referred to or why it was important), nor knew why everything worked, or understood why some games didn't quite work when copied to the hard drive (because I didn't copy the sub folders) but I managed. Wanting to play games is a good motivator to learn any interface. Based on Sugata Mitra's experiments, I'd say as an individual I wasn't exceptional in any way; give a group of kids a computer without an artificially low ceiling and watch them go! The circumstances I was in might have been unusual at the time, but that's different. https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_... We shouldn't underestimate the abilities of children to figure out how computers work.

keithpeter 10y ago
Low floor, high ceiling activities (or low threshold, high ceiling in US) are a thing in Maths teaching as well. http://www.mathematicalresilience.org/ http://www.mathematicalresilience.org/ http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/ http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/ and http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/assessment/index.html http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/assessment/index.html Latter has example activities and sample student responses.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  Forwarded to a bunch of friends of mine who are (enthusiastic) maths teachers, thanks!
  - keithpeter 10y ago
    If they are in the UK, I'd recommend the staff development that the resilience gang provide. Reasonable rates to institutions that can get 16-20 teachers together. (I'm a happy participant, no financial interest, &c.)
pjmlp 10y ago
Fully agree with you. I was a bit older at the age of 10, but on those days the Spectrum and C64 were the more advanced machines we could get hold of anyway. So for the first two years it was mostly LOAD "", or trying to type-in listings from magazines that my father used to buy, mostly without success as they tended to have print errors we could not easily understand. But eventually the bug stuck inside, and around the age of 12 I was already getting into Z80 Assembly. Also it was great that back on those days, at least in Portugal we even got listenings on newspapers. Many might remember the "A Capital" computer section on Fridays. :)
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  Aside: I just noticed that I wrote down "six" where it is supposed to be a "nine"! If it was a 6/9 typo I'd understand that, but written out in full like that it is kinda embarrassing. I started playing computer games at the age of six, but having my own computer came a bit later. I'm sure there are some very intelligent six-year olds out there though.
chriswarbo 10y ago
> Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. The first computers I used (Amigas) ran off floppy disks. Whenever we bought new software, we'd use copies of the disks and keep the originals stored away. This had the effect of making everything safe; even accidentally formatting an OS disk was no problem, since it was just a copy and most things didn't need it to boot anyway. When I was about 8 we got a hard drive, which made life much more convenient (e.g. the ability to install games, rather than swapping floppies around, easily finding saved data compared to trawling through umpteen disk boxes, etc.) but also introduced some danger: changes (including mistakes) would persist across reboots, the HD didn't just contain copies of stuff (we, like most people, didn't have backups), and the impact of something like data loss was expanded to include everything we have (including other people's stuff), rather than just the particular floppies in the drives. I imagine those introduced to computers between, say, the mid 90s to ~2010, would be under more pressure to be conservative, as their mistakes might have a real impact on things like their parent's budgeting spreadsheets, etc. Also, a bit tangentially, I feel that Windows and Linux present more opportunities for mistakes compared to AmigaOS: they spread important files around various parts of the filesystem, and there's a quite tight coupling between the OS and third-party applications. My Amiga HDs all have a standalone Workbench partition for booting, an Applications partition with each program in its own drawer, etc. which limited the scope of any of my experimenting; I remember trying to set up Windows in a similar way, and find that whilst all installers give the option of installing to a user-chosen directory, many programs don't actually work if they're not in the default "C:\Program Files" :( This is where I think initiatives like the RaspberryPi really shine: they're inexpensive, standalone machines, so the impact of any mistakes is very low. Accidentally formatted the drive? Your parent's work documents are safely stored on a different machine. Whilst you can't get back to a clean slate by rebooting, at least SD cards are easy to pull out and make backups of.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Easy solution: Let the children work in a VM and take regular snapshots.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery A modern GUI OS for adults has a very low ceiling of mastery. I don't know why we need to make simpler designs. When my kid was literally fourteen or fifteen months he could pick up a phone or tablet, swipe to the youtube app, press it, and then press the thumbnails from a recently viewed video and watch videos (usually Peppa Pig). Kids don't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays for adults. This reminds me of why the OLPC failed so badly. Even ignoring the cheap netbook competition, the interface was too 'top down' academic crap about 'how kids think' and involved a lot of shoddy assumptions on how to teach kids how to use a computer. A netbook with XP was perfectly usable by even the very young. I was 6 or so I could use my parent's TRS-80 and was writing fun little BASIC programs with it. I think we need to give kids more credit here. They're much smarter than we think and its adult hubris to pretend they're so unintelligent and unable to figure things out on their own. Perhaps we shouldn't shy away from overly-challenging kids. The recent trends of 'soft' and 'helicopter' parenting cannot be good for the long run. I plan to be somewhat tough with my son because I don't want him to grow up into some of the people I work with who have near zero self-learning and critical thinking skills and have a 'give me fish' mentality and will actively fight against a 'teach me to fish' mentality.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  > Kids don't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays for adults. Highly relevant to this statement (which I fully agree with): http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
agentgt 10y ago
Speaking of Smalltalk an alternative is to run Squeak and/or one if its subprojects: EToys, Scratch. I haven't tried them in a while but they are designed for kids to explore and have high ceilings. Scratch particularly looks pretty cool.

pen2l 10y ago

I've tried these things with the kids I'm around (aged 2-7), and I was just met with frustration for all the things I tried (Doudou, Xubuntu, whatever). As much of a nix-zealot that I am, in the end I resigned to using an iPad with several educational apps.