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by jgoerzen 5111 days ago
At 3, Jacob knew his alphabet and could find keys on the keyboard. He learned enough to remember, by rote or otherwise, that "worm" launched the worm game and "sl" launched steam locomotives, sometimes using a cheat sheet for help. He could not read or comprehend responses very well. (He derived a LOT of enjoyment from typing nonsense commands, then having me read the error messages that started with BASH)

At 5, he reads well. He is not good at spelling - one reason I give him a short cheat sheet - but he can make out a lot of what's going on. Not everything, of course.

We didn't start them on computers from the cradle. We read books to them a lot, and play games involving numbers and words. Jacob loves Dr. Seuss books and word games.

But lest anyone think we're some sort of tiger parents, we also open the front door and let them go play outside, maybe sending some sidewalk chalk with them if they want it.

I got a TRS-80 at about 5. It had only a CLI (BASIC-based). That was a huge incentive for me to learn to read. Nobody else in the house knew about computers then either, so unless I wanted to wait for my dad to get home from work, it was me and the manual.

3 comments

The idea of sl being something that you want to run is awesome.
<grin> There are a whole bunch of excited preschoolers out there running sl now, apparently, judging from the comments here: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/6359-a-proud-dad
I made my big leaps and bounds reading when around 5 I was given a chance to work with DOS and win 3.1. I can say I would be a different person today if that computer never got dropped off from a family friend.

At 6 I was running through the registry messing up everything I can. (I once made the desktop completely iconless, didn't make for happy parents.)

Now I've got a 4.5 year old daughter, she uses an android tablet pretty consistently and I'm glad she's shown interest, I think I'll be getting a box setup for her soon now that she's showing a bit more interest.

> ..."sl" launched steam locomotives...

:) I never though one second about "sl" being an acronym. I always thought of it as the program I install to punish myself every time I misspell "ls"!