"Kids have almost zero avenues to build or accomplish things. Their parents don't care or give them meaningful stuff to work on or tools to build stuff with. Th

"Kids have almost zero avenues to build or accomplish things. Their parents don't care or give them meaningful stuff to work on or tools to build stuff with. They might as well be under house arrest." I just want to point up how accurate this comment is. I liked PC gaming quite a bit as a child, both building new games (in QBASIC) and conquering professionally designed games. I would find friends against whom to spar via BBS, Usenet, and the web. Sometime around high school, I found a real-world activity that permitted building. In my case it was a bit odd. I realized that many of my schoolmates were very musically talented, but (at our somewhat dreary public school) had little chance to show off. I built a recording studio and designed reverberation algorithms to make them recordings that sounded as though they were playing in famous cathedrals. Many of them submitted their conservatory applications using these recordings. It was great fun, and taught me the most important rule of business, which is that if you aren't solving someone else's problem, you aren't doing the right thing. Later, I did programming for the Palm OS and built a company out of that. Then I went to college and indulged in the humanities for four years. The observation above, viz., that kids (esp. boys) need ways to feel that they've built something valuable, is exactly right.