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Just think how happy they would be with an iPad or something like that. I think it's all relative, but it reminds me of that film "about a boy" where the kid wa

• bornhuetter 14y ago
  > Just think how happy they would be with an iPad or something like that. And they would learn absolutely nothing about computing. I think you missed the whole point of the article.
  • ForrestN 14y ago
    Which is what? That learning about computing is more important for children 5 and under than happiness?
    • invalidOrTaken 14y ago
      An iPad will not make you happy. Happiness comes from our relationships, our health, our work, our marriages, and our self-concept. Technology is necessary for none of these for children. With, that is, the possible exception of self-concept. "I know how computers work and how to use them" is a positive self-concept. Author is knocking the ball out of the park here.
      • ForrestN 14y ago
        I didn't argue that an iPad will make you happy. Rather that it would make a very young child more engaged, more "delighted" and thus, a bit happier, than would a command line interface. As I said elsewhere, it seems even more preferable for kids that young to mostly skip all of the above.
        • jgoerzen 14y ago
          I disagree. A blank command line is freedom. It's an invitation to do whatever you like. To discover. To try. To fail. To explore. If you have 5 (or 50) icons to choose from, where's the blank slate? Where's the great outdoors? Where's the "I built it myself!"? The boys love to eat the food from our garden that they helped plant and nurture a lot more than food from a store. If they have ownership and freedom to explore, engagement is natural. If you don't start with the preconceived notion that the command line is too hard or not engaging enough for children, maybe you will find that it isn't.
          • icebraining 14y ago
            I love the CLI and spend much more time in it than in every other UI, but I was a Windows user for years, where I barely used it, and I still felt all of that. My blank slate was an empty text file in Notepad and a browser (this was on a public computer, I couldn't install stuff). On the iPad, I'd say the blank slate is Codea: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/ http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
        • ef4 14y ago
          The article (and the rest of the author's writings on the topic) contains a lot of evidence that his children are delighted with what they're doing. They're happily choosing to spend hours of time tinkering with this stuff, both with dad and on their own. And it's not surprising at all. You're not thinking like a small child. Children focus intently on things that would bore adults to tears all the time. They have so little context that almost anything can be deeply interesting to them. Now that I have a one-year-old, we spent a lot of time admiring the workings of garbage trucks, examining grass, etc. I can easily see his curiosity evolving over the next couple years to the point where he could amuse himself for hours with a command line and a speech synthesizer. And he likes the iPad too. This isn't an either-or proposition.
  • timc3 14y ago
    That just not true. There is plenty to learn from a computing device of any type. The best thing I find to learn is that they are not endless gaming playing machines but you can create things on them. The iPad allows for that