7 ms·

Are you gatekeeping a 7 year old? Learning about character encoding from first principles is an awesome accomplishment.

ceejayoz 6y ago
I’m saying learning character encoding doesn’t support this: > Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning. I watch kids learning circuitry via redstone in Minecraft on iOS and Xbox - walled gardens, yet impressive learning nonetheless.
- skissane 6y ago
  I agree kids can learn useful stuff in Minecraft, no doubt. But when I was his age, all I had was MS-DOS 3.3. And I had to CD around to various directories, DIR *.EXE to remember the names of executables, etc. It was an environment that exposed more technical details, and kids who are predisposed to learn technical details learn a lot just by using it. Windows 10, doesn't promote the learning of technical details to anywhere near the same extent. (I try to make up for it a bit. I introduced him to DOSBox.)
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Wouldn’t it be better to be able to devote limited learning time to more useful things than locating oddly named executables, though? It is a mistake to conflate “it was harder for me” with “I learned more”. My kids can program more complicated stuff in Minecraft than I could at their age. Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits.
    - skissane 6y ago
      > Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits. What is "boring" varies from person to person. I know, when our son plays Minecraft Java Edition, he likes to play it with the debug screen (F3) on. He doesn't understand what most of the details on that screen mean, although he is learning a few. (He was asking me to explain what X, Y and Z coordinates were.) But, even if he doesn't understand most of it, he still likes it, and probably sooner or later he'll ask me more questions about it.

I’m saying learning character encoding doesn’t support this: > Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning. I watch kids learning circuitry via redstone in Minecraft on iOS and Xbox - walled gardens, yet impressive learning nonetheless.

skissane 6y ago
I agree kids can learn useful stuff in Minecraft, no doubt. But when I was his age, all I had was MS-DOS 3.3. And I had to CD around to various directories, DIR *.EXE to remember the names of executables, etc. It was an environment that exposed more technical details, and kids who are predisposed to learn technical details learn a lot just by using it. Windows 10, doesn't promote the learning of technical details to anywhere near the same extent. (I try to make up for it a bit. I introduced him to DOSBox.)
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Wouldn’t it be better to be able to devote limited learning time to more useful things than locating oddly named executables, though? It is a mistake to conflate “it was harder for me” with “I learned more”. My kids can program more complicated stuff in Minecraft than I could at their age. Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits.
  - skissane 6y ago
    > Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits. What is "boring" varies from person to person. I know, when our son plays Minecraft Java Edition, he likes to play it with the debug screen (F3) on. He doesn't understand what most of the details on that screen mean, although he is learning a few. (He was asking me to explain what X, Y and Z coordinates were.) But, even if he doesn't understand most of it, he still likes it, and probably sooner or later he'll ask me more questions about it.