[Mz]

Playing games and other "frivolous" activities are a primary source of learning computer literacy for children. If you say poor kids can't play games on a public computer, you are putting them at a serious disadvantage compared to their wealthier peers, who are much more likely to have access to computers at home and generally have more computer time and latitude. You are putting an additional burden of restriction on an already disadvantaged group.

Years ago, I sent my mother-in-law our old computer when we upgraded, and I made sure to include kid-friendly software on it so my very poor nieces and nephews would have reason to get on their grandmother's computer when they were at her house. I saw this as a very important element in trying to make sure they didn't wind up on the wrong side of the digital divide. At the time, computers were not nearly as central to modern life as they are currently.

[nickpsecurity]

I see where you're going with this. The benefits you're getting at is worthwhile if the software brings those benefits. Most of what kids are doing on games isn't like the other things they'll be doing. The games are just designed to suck up their time if anything making them better at doing that. Lots of their fun apps, esp social media, are the same. Here's a nice article by an educator on how kids don't know how to use computers despite all the time they spend on them:

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13506283

You'd have to curate the experience to do something that forces them to learn necessary skills. I've seen those skills dressed up as games or something on occasion. Most fun apps don't do that, though.

[sillysaurus3]

True, but the vast majority of anything is bad. When I was a kid I spent many years playing an old roleplaying game called Underlight: https://underlight.com/ It sparked an interest in creative writing.

[Mz]

From the article:

The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

And you posit that their computer literacy will go up if we start throwing them off the public computers so they can't even use Facebook and Youtube?

Your argument that they aren't so hot currently in no way rebuts my assertion that if you start throwing poor kids off the internet at public libraries they will be left even further behind than they already are currently.

[nickpsecurity]

My argument isn't against throwing them off the Internet: it's against keeping them on things that don't develop the improvements in thinking or skill we want. I deal with the masses on a daily basis. Most of them don't gain serious skills by screwing around with the popular tech. It's a distraction preventing that. Most of them that did get skills did so by ignoring that in favor of putting time and work in. It was usually drudgery but sometimes a mix of that and fun. I see a small percentage of people on computers at the local library doing those things.

[Mz]

I was arguing against simply throwing kids off of public computers willy nilly. I was not advocating actively promoting the pursuit of such activities. There is a difference.