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I've found the same. Bought robot turtles, lasted a few hours. Scratch is cool but too hard for my kids to envision a "finished product" beyond, "make the thing

I've found the same. Bought robot turtles, lasted a few hours. Scratch is cool but too hard for my kids to envision a "finished product" beyond, "make the thing walk 3 steps and fart" (I have 2 boys). We also tried the whole code.org thing which has minecraft and star wars themes, not interested. What I did find, though, is that by taking something they're really interested in and finding a tech way to enhance their experience has been the key. I am putting my money on just constant, positive exposure to tech and how it can solve their problems or answer their curiosities. The thing I'm teaching my kids the most right now is hard work. You want to be a youtuber? great, do the work. Write a script, storyboard your project, plan it out. Don't just turn on the camera and start mumbling about minecraft. I have found that it's 100x easier for them to put in more time on something that doesn't feel like school. I know not everyone cares for Disney but if you and your kids have been to the parks, these two books have been amazing to my kids: Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making More Magic Real https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disney-Imagineering-Behind-Dreams/dp/1423107667/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517582150&sr=8-1&keywords=imagineering https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disney-Imagineering-Behind-Dream... The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (From the Magic Kingdom) https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Mansion-Imagineering-Classic-Kingdom/dp/1484722299/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517582385&sr=1-1&keywords=imagineering+haunted+mansion https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Mansion-Imagineering-Classic-... Just really fun for them to understand all the work that goes into that magic they love.

hmhrex 9y ago
This was helpful and enlightening. We have kids that we're planning on homeschooling. Finding curriculum or even good information on how to introduce technology to kids in a meaningful seems difficult.
always_good 9y ago
My friends getting married and having children has gotten me thinking about how I would raise my own. I look at my best habits that started early on in my life and wonder how I developed them to begin with. I remember my friend James would come over to my house and we'd take turns writing stories in Word. Each of us would write a chapter from our character's POV while the other played Super Mario 64.That early interest in writing has served me all my life. We'd also spend hours taking turns on my computer building custom Heroes of Might and Magic maps/scenarios. But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine. Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck.
- nouveaux 9y ago
  "But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine. Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck." I think we all have the innate desire to create. No one looks at an instagram craft and say "I wish I wasn't able to make that". IMO, failure is the biggest obstacle for most people. If you look at kids in their natural environment without devices, they naturally are creative in their play. I think fostering that creativity without the distraction of television and devices is the key with ample praise for effort. I don't think it really matters whether they are creating on a device or with blocks. If the desire to create is there, they will eventually find a medium they can be successful with.
  - jackhack 9y ago
    >I think fostering that creativity without the distraction of television and devices is the key with ample praise for effort. A thousand times, yes! It would be impossible for me to agree with you more. We are "Entertained to Death" (to steal a title of a book on this very subject). Children need time to sit and think. To be bored and learn that boredom is okay, and what to do about it. These days, television is actively hostile in its level of interruption and intrusion. And I don't mean just the obnoxious advertisements; the deliberate "shaky" camera angles, the change of viewpoint every 3 seconds, the thumping soundtracks, whooshing graphics crossing the screen, all are designed to stimulate, attract, addict, yet hypnotize and sedate. Not to mention the low-value content for the most part. This is not good for anyone. Fools are afraid of being alone with themselves. Was it always this way? I think it plays a part in that many (dare I say most?) adults are simply horrified at the idea of sitting alone, quietly, without a device to distract them with internet/facebook or whatever. The skill/art of just sitting and occupying oneself in our own heads is being lost, but it is essential to happiness (and I think, sanity). This used to be learned by children, but now every kid is handed a dose of electronic crack, lest they fail to be distracted for a single precious moment. Then when it does happen they fall apart. I wonder if asked to choose, whether the average person would choose to skip a meal or go four hours without internet/phone.
svantana 9y ago
> not interested. To be fair, most of us would have been pretty turned off by any educational computer thingy our parents would have pushed on us. In my experience most programmers have learned on their own, which is part of the charm -- it becomes a quest and kids love to learn stuff that their parents don't know. If my kid showed interest in game dev I would get her a good computer and hint that she should download Unity and mess around with the examples. At least that feels real.
- jackhack 9y ago
  True. There was no surer a guarantee that you were about to have a Bad Time, than to be sat down in front of "educational software" of the 1980s. Dreadful, for the most part. Kids are just young, not stupid. They know when they're being cheated out of a good time. >> I would get her a good computer and hint that she should download Unity and mess around with the examples That's funny. I'm going the opposite direction these days. We have a top-notch gaming machine at home (and spend more time on it than I am comfortable admitting) but my young-teen kids are THRILLED with the chance to use my old Apple ][ and make pixel games or text adventure games. When I bring it out, it's a special occasion day! We made a really simple "adventure" game, with me doing most of the coding and them adding ideas about locations and events and characters. They loved seeing it take shape. Then we encountered a nasty bug where player health points could go negative but the player wouldn't die, and my daughter reasoned out the solution! (Need to test for <=, not just less-than. And need to update the health BEFORE the test-for-dead.) needless to say, their old dad was pleased. And they sat there and played that silly game for and hour. It was like showing a kid a yo-yo or a top for the first time. It was more fun than it should have been and they were rightly proud of what we made. Letting them play Zork, Choplifter, Kareteka, and Dung Beetles and seeing the disc drive whirr and clack then the screen light up is as amazing to them now as it was to me 40 years ago, at their same age. Somehow it's just as entertaining as Assetto Corsa or PubG, without the million-dollar budgets or 100-person dev teams. 1mhz. 48k of RAM. 280x192 "high resolution" graphics. How could that be fun? Even more -- WHY? I have a theory. It boots right to a Basic prompt, and off we go creating our own world, or running someone else's. And a lot of games are based on skill. Just like the arcade, the more skill one has, the longer you play. And with these old machines, just as in the 1970s, our imagination is the limit. And not only the limit, the key ingredient, since the fidelity of the graphics is so low it is necessary to use our imagination. Maybe that's why the box art of the golden-age games is so alluring. With promises of spaceships and nebula, dashing swordfighting ship captains with golden epaulets, monsters and robots with similar detail -- when in reality it is indistinguishable from the average Tetris block. Somehow it was fun. And it was enough. As "Thomas Was Alone" has proved. edit: Ugh. I forgot the main point of this thread -- we bought Bloxels as an impulse purchase last weekend and my kids have enjoyed the ease with which they can create and animate characters and quickly lay out levels. It's a thrill seeing your little blocky character come to life. For us, it was a good purchase and I'm really pleased with the product. I found it at Target, for around $35, by the way.
fenwick67 9y ago
I loved my Lego Mindstorms set as a kid, it's very open ended and easy to use, even moreso now. The programming is simple but powerful and the building system is obviously second to none.
- vturner 9y ago
  Yes, yes, yes to Lego Mindstorms. It was the bridge from make believe play to the real world. It was real enough to be a challenge but not so real that I could not grasp it. Did you always use the block based programming language or ever use Lejos?

hmhrex 9y ago

This was helpful and enlightening. We have kids that we're planning on homeschooling. Finding curriculum or even good information on how to introduce technology to kids in a meaningful seems difficult.

always_good 9y ago

My friends getting married and having children has gotten me thinking about how I would raise my own. I look at my best habits that started early on in my life and wonder how I developed them to begin with. I remember my friend James would come over to my house and we'd take turns writing stories in Word. Each of us would write a chapter from our character's POV while the other played Super Mario 64.That early interest in writing has served me all my life. We'd also spend hours taking turns on my computer building custom Heroes of Might and Magic maps/scenarios. But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine. Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck.

nouveaux 9y ago
"But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine. Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck." I think we all have the innate desire to create. No one looks at an instagram craft and say "I wish I wasn't able to make that". IMO, failure is the biggest obstacle for most people. If you look at kids in their natural environment without devices, they naturally are creative in their play. I think fostering that creativity without the distraction of television and devices is the key with ample praise for effort. I don't think it really matters whether they are creating on a device or with blocks. If the desire to create is there, they will eventually find a medium they can be successful with.
- jackhack 9y ago
  >I think fostering that creativity without the distraction of television and devices is the key with ample praise for effort. A thousand times, yes! It would be impossible for me to agree with you more. We are "Entertained to Death" (to steal a title of a book on this very subject). Children need time to sit and think. To be bored and learn that boredom is okay, and what to do about it. These days, television is actively hostile in its level of interruption and intrusion. And I don't mean just the obnoxious advertisements; the deliberate "shaky" camera angles, the change of viewpoint every 3 seconds, the thumping soundtracks, whooshing graphics crossing the screen, all are designed to stimulate, attract, addict, yet hypnotize and sedate. Not to mention the low-value content for the most part. This is not good for anyone. Fools are afraid of being alone with themselves. Was it always this way? I think it plays a part in that many (dare I say most?) adults are simply horrified at the idea of sitting alone, quietly, without a device to distract them with internet/facebook or whatever. The skill/art of just sitting and occupying oneself in our own heads is being lost, but it is essential to happiness (and I think, sanity). This used to be learned by children, but now every kid is handed a dose of electronic crack, lest they fail to be distracted for a single precious moment. Then when it does happen they fall apart. I wonder if asked to choose, whether the average person would choose to skip a meal or go four hours without internet/phone.

svantana 9y ago

> not interested. To be fair, most of us would have been pretty turned off by any educational computer thingy our parents would have pushed on us. In my experience most programmers have learned on their own, which is part of the charm -- it becomes a quest and kids love to learn stuff that their parents don't know. If my kid showed interest in game dev I would get her a good computer and hint that she should download Unity and mess around with the examples. At least that feels real.

jackhack 9y ago
True. There was no surer a guarantee that you were about to have a Bad Time, than to be sat down in front of "educational software" of the 1980s. Dreadful, for the most part. Kids are just young, not stupid. They know when they're being cheated out of a good time. >> I would get her a good computer and hint that she should download Unity and mess around with the examples That's funny. I'm going the opposite direction these days. We have a top-notch gaming machine at home (and spend more time on it than I am comfortable admitting) but my young-teen kids are THRILLED with the chance to use my old Apple ][ and make pixel games or text adventure games. When I bring it out, it's a special occasion day! We made a really simple "adventure" game, with me doing most of the coding and them adding ideas about locations and events and characters. They loved seeing it take shape. Then we encountered a nasty bug where player health points could go negative but the player wouldn't die, and my daughter reasoned out the solution! (Need to test for <=, not just less-than. And need to update the health BEFORE the test-for-dead.) needless to say, their old dad was pleased. And they sat there and played that silly game for and hour. It was like showing a kid a yo-yo or a top for the first time. It was more fun than it should have been and they were rightly proud of what we made. Letting them play Zork, Choplifter, Kareteka, and Dung Beetles and seeing the disc drive whirr and clack then the screen light up is as amazing to them now as it was to me 40 years ago, at their same age. Somehow it's just as entertaining as Assetto Corsa or PubG, without the million-dollar budgets or 100-person dev teams. 1mhz. 48k of RAM. 280x192 "high resolution" graphics. How could that be fun? Even more -- WHY? I have a theory. It boots right to a Basic prompt, and off we go creating our own world, or running someone else's. And a lot of games are based on skill. Just like the arcade, the more skill one has, the longer you play. And with these old machines, just as in the 1970s, our imagination is the limit. And not only the limit, the key ingredient, since the fidelity of the graphics is so low it is necessary to use our imagination. Maybe that's why the box art of the golden-age games is so alluring. With promises of spaceships and nebula, dashing swordfighting ship captains with golden epaulets, monsters and robots with similar detail -- when in reality it is indistinguishable from the average Tetris block. Somehow it was fun. And it was enough. As "Thomas Was Alone" has proved. edit: Ugh. I forgot the main point of this thread -- we bought Bloxels as an impulse purchase last weekend and my kids have enjoyed the ease with which they can create and animate characters and quickly lay out levels. It's a thrill seeing your little blocky character come to life. For us, it was a good purchase and I'm really pleased with the product. I found it at Target, for around $35, by the way.

fenwick67 9y ago

I loved my Lego Mindstorms set as a kid, it's very open ended and easy to use, even moreso now. The programming is simple but powerful and the building system is obviously second to none.

vturner 9y ago
Yes, yes, yes to Lego Mindstorms. It was the bridge from make believe play to the real world. It was real enough to be a challenge but not so real that I could not grasp it. Did you always use the block based programming language or ever use Lejos?