Years ago my kids went through a similar progression. I set them up with a really old, crappy PC running Linux. Taught them how to tinker around on the CLI an

Years ago my kids went through a similar progression. I set them up with a really old, crappy PC running Linux. Taught them how to tinker around on the CLI and run Zork in an emulator. They had many hours of fun. Then set them up on the Alice programming environment on the communal/family PC (running XP), and they had fun with that for a long while, too. Once they had free internet access, my daughter discovered Hanna Montana videos on YouTube, and the self-learning pretty much ended. Ditto w/ my son and watching video game playthroughs, though he got a little more incidental learning about computers trying to tweak whatever rig he had access in order make games perform better. However, the internet has really empowered my kids to learn all kinds of stuff. From my son setting up Minecraft servers and fighting with port forwarding on the home router, to my daughter learning sewing techniques and guitar chords online. Today's PC environment has come a long way from my days of exploring arcane PEEK and POKE commands from the back of a magazine on my TI-99/4A (in between rounds of Munch Man, of course). There is so much more info accessible now (both utilitarian and trivial), that I just can't grouse about where most kids run with that info. In the end, I think my kids are way better off now than I was back then, even though they're not nearly as inclined to tinker under the hood as I was.