>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 ceili

>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.