There was a Mac Plus in the classroom at school. We were given some classes in LogoWriter, and I excelled at it. My dad found an abandoned Mac Plus next to the

There was a Mac Plus in the classroom at school. We were given some classes in LogoWriter, and I excelled at it. My dad found an abandoned Mac Plus next to the church one evening, but it was broken. He gave it to me and told me that if I fix it, it's mine. Of course it was much slower than the family computer, but I wanted my own! So I learned how to replace the motherboard, and kept writing more programs on it for fun. I then sort of stopped programming for a few years, until I wanted to download eBooks and copy music, and I wrote an HTML parser and iTunes tagging script using AppleScript. Since then I've been coding continuously. There are many ridiculous rules that are applied to "children", because they're "too young". I'm sure that Seymour Papert and the Raspberry Pi Foundation would disagree. In fact, I'd like to ask some younger friends from church if they could do a coding project with me and we can post it on HN and see if they get the equal recognition they deserve. There should be some balance between interrupting class work and giving people the freedom to explore independently. But if the class is really that boring, I can hardly blame the kids for playing games instead. Instead of punishing people, why not make the class more interesting?