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I believe typing in early age will lead to carpal-tunnel syndrome so I'm not pushing my kids to learn typing. In my experience Scratch or SNAP! are great to le

I believe typing in early age will lead to carpal-tunnel syndrome so I'm not pushing my kids to learn typing. In my experience Scratch or SNAP! are great to learn programming. We recently made auto-clicking mouse with microPython and I could see they understood the code well because of their experience with Scratch. My kids like to follow tutorials by griffpatch on YouTube which I think are superb.

keerthiko 5y ago
> I believe typing in early age will lead to carpal-tunnel syndrome so I'm not pushing my kids to learn typing. Typing extensively and without proper ergonomics will lead to carpal-tunnel and other syndromes. Not teaching them proper posture and typing ergonomics as kids means when they inevitably have to use computers in school/college/work, they will be much more likely to develop a strain-based condition.
- antattack 5y ago
  I would argue there's no 'proper posture' for child's hands on adult sized keyboards and keys.
  - throwaway47292 5y ago
    backspace and enter are especially an issue, i teach her to use ctrl+h and ctrl+j capslock being control, on windows i made https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/tree/master/projects/backspace https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/tree/master/... to help with that
mavhc 5y ago
Spending half your time dragging with the mouse seems to cause way more wrist issues than typing. For me at least
- antattack 5y ago
  At least pointing devices come in different shapes and forms, including vertical and trackballs. We used to enable chrome accessibility feature [1] to automatically drag-click when the mouse button is stopped. Although, as kids got faster they turned it off. It's a nice option to have. [1]https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/how-to-make-your-mouse-click-automatically-in-chrome-os https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/how-to-make-your-mouse-click-... One of the reasons why we made auto-clicking mouse is so, when playing games, they don't have to click it crazy fast (besides it being fun project). To increase keyboard ergonomics I am thinking on a custom keyboard with programmable keys to, for example to turn long-press space into backspace, shift space to enter.

keerthiko 5y ago

> I believe typing in early age will lead to carpal-tunnel syndrome so I'm not pushing my kids to learn typing. Typing extensively and without proper ergonomics will lead to carpal-tunnel and other syndromes. Not teaching them proper posture and typing ergonomics as kids means when they inevitably have to use computers in school/college/work, they will be much more likely to develop a strain-based condition.

antattack 5y ago
I would argue there's no 'proper posture' for child's hands on adult sized keyboards and keys.
- throwaway47292 5y ago
  backspace and enter are especially an issue, i teach her to use ctrl+h and ctrl+j capslock being control, on windows i made https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/tree/master/projects/backspace https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/tree/master/... to help with that

mavhc 5y ago

Spending half your time dragging with the mouse seems to cause way more wrist issues than typing. For me at least

antattack 5y ago
At least pointing devices come in different shapes and forms, including vertical and trackballs. We used to enable chrome accessibility feature [1] to automatically drag-click when the mouse button is stopped. Although, as kids got faster they turned it off. It's a nice option to have. [1]https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/how-to-make-your-mouse-click-automatically-in-chrome-os https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/how-to-make-your-mouse-click-... One of the reasons why we made auto-clicking mouse is so, when playing games, they don't have to click it crazy fast (besides it being fun project). To increase keyboard ergonomics I am thinking on a custom keyboard with programmable keys to, for example to turn long-press space into backspace, shift space to enter.