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When I was seven I got a (used) Commodore 64, and learned a ton experimenting with it. Started me on a path to eventually running a small tech company. So I hear you there. My oldest is 6 now, and I definitely want to get her started on similar things. I certainly won't be giving her unsupervised access to my work computer though. Instead I'll start her on an old laptop with some flavour of Linux, and no internet connection. I'll also take an LVM image, so she can tinker to her heart's content and we can easily revert if it goes wrong. I expect she'll learn far more than she could using my work machine, where there are all kinds of things that could she'd have to be careful with, and that could cost me hours of work (or even worse, potentially, with email access and such). Separately I'm also introducing her to minecraft, which is fantastic for exploration. Of course it needs an internet connected computer, but there's more supervision for that one when she's outside of the game. It's funny, thinking back to getting that Commodore 64, I remember the best piece of tech advice I ever got, again when I was 7-8 or so. My parents' friend, who had previously owned the computer (my parents, like most people in the 80s, didn't have a computer) was teaching me how to use the word processor. He taught me how to create a new document, I think, and I was going over the steps, like "press alt, press f, press n..." And he says, no, no... Don't just memorize the steps—understand what they do, and you won't have to remember them. Then he goes through explaining how alt tells the computer you're going to start a command, f refers to the file menu, which has commands relating to... etc. Stuck with me like nothing else, and that attitude was hugely beneficial in not just computer science, but all aspects of life. It's a bit tangential to the "don't push buttons" thing, but only somewhat. In both case the point is that you want to not just do things, but think through them and understand them. In my mind, that's a great lesson for kids. |