[jgoerzen]

The iPad, to me, represents everything that is wrong with raising children.

First of all, I should say that computers are a small part of my boys' life. We live on a farm. They get lots and lots of time to explore outdoors, climb in trees, and all that good stuff that so few kids get these days. That is really more important to me.

You are probably right that they would also be delighted at an iPad. But what would that achieve? A simulation of things they could do with paper, out the front door? Reinforce the message that cool things are expensive and welded shut?

Research shows, and I firmly believe, that children need unstructured play. They need to be able to pretend, to create, to examine, to fail cheaply. Lots of toys and gadgets don't foster this. Don't get me wrong; our boys have plenty of toys, but we try hard to keep it from being so vast an amount like so many people have. When we travel, we don't bring a lot of toys. Walking in downtown Portland, for instance, they might find some leaves and make a game out of throwing them in the air while we walk.

We built this computer from spare parts. They were active participants in that. When it breaks, we will take it apart together and look at it. Maybe we will open it up other times just to see what it's like. This machine was free; it was built from old parts in my basement that I had discarded.

I vehemently disagree that more cost == better experience for children.

Two other things they've loved that were also free to me: an adding machine about to be thrown out (they love printing "cards" with it), and a manual typewriter (think of all the mechanical discovery awaiting one of those.)

Outdoors, they invent all sorts of games. They both have picked out trees on our yard that are "trains", designating branches as various controls and sometimes inviting me to ride on their train.

[pivo]

This reminds me of an experience I had with my girlfriend's eight year old son who was raised on xboxes and other high-tech toys. One day we got him a baseball, glove and a net that allowed him to throw the ball into the net and catch it on the rebound. He reluctantly started playing with this stuff in the yard and a half hour later he was still at it, and really enjoying it.

Afterwards he told me, "I don't understand why this is so fun." At first I didn't understand what he meant by that, but then I realized that he was confused about how something so low tech could actually be really entertaining.

[ThomPete]

I don't understand this.

Was learning how to use the VCR everything that is wrong with raising children?

How is the iPad limiting? Aren't you confusing the Apple ecosystem with the apps on there?

Give them a piano app and see them fail, Give them a drawing app and see them fail. Let them play some of those gravity games and see them explore and fail.

I understand what you are trying to do. I too am thinking (and overthinking) how to best allow my kid to become great. I see no problem in you doing it. I would encourage it. But you seem to be overthinking your principles.

But that's just me. My son loves hammering at the computer too. (He is working he says) but he also loves playing games and music on his iPad.

They aren't mutually exclusive. For a child the iPad is not a walled garden and if they think it is then just jailbreak it with them. Actually now that I think of it, that seems to be a much better lesson in teaching them how to become a hacker.

[jgoerzen]

Perhaps my first sentence overstated it a bit; I was reacting to the person that was "a little queasy." Sure, it's possible to use an iPad in a way that is not actively bad, and probably beneficial.

But it's still a box sealed shut that someone else built. And, perhaps most devastating, it's designed to just work out of the box.

I'm drawing an analogy to the maker movement here. I don't want childrens' experience to be defined by others, or to live in the boxes invented by others, whenever I can avoid it. Left to their own devices, they invent their own boxes all the time. I would have never imagined that one of our trees would be a pretend locomotive, but there you go.

My first computer, a TRS-80 CoCo II, turned on to a BASIC prompt. Yes, you could run software others wrote. But you were almost inevitably learning concepts about the computer, too - how can you copy data from one disk to another when you only have one drive and your RAM is smaller than it, for instance? Sure, you can use something Tuxpaint on an iPad, but you wouldn't be using it on something you built.

Apple's ecosystem is the antithesis of the "I can do it myself" approach. (If you do jailbreak it, then I start to see some more value.)

Linux is the embodiment of the "I can do it myself" approach. I remember as a kid opening up a hex editor and modifying the boot sector of a floppy so that when you forgot it in the drive at boot time, you saw my name instead of the "Non system disk or disk error." But my boys will have source code, if they should ever want to use it. How cool is that?

[ThomPete]

It's a little weird having this discussion as I am fundamentally agreeing with you in what you are trying to do. :)

Having said that. I just cant help having the feeling that 99% of what you are doing with your kids is lost on them. I.e. they are not there yet where they can actually appreciate and use all the information they are receiving.

I went through the same things with my son and music. As a former musician myself I was of course eager to have him learn to play an instrument. But more or less any music teacher i talked too basically said that before 3 learning an instrument was lost on them.

So instead we sing songs and I have bought a bunch of proper instruments that he can play around with as he wants.

On the iPad have have a very interesting synt app called MorhWiz and where he like to fiddle around with the other instruments he loves using MorphWiz.

This I believe is because the MorphWiz takes away some of the difficulties while still allowing for exploration. And there he actually plays stuff.

My point is. For your kids, the Ipad is like a linux system they can do everything they can think of with. They are not yet ready and cannot yet internalize the way you seem to think they internalize.

Again it's not my children, I am not in disagreement with your goals. But I think your kids could get even more out of this if you started from where they are not where you are.

[jgoerzen]

<grin>, I do think we agree on the big picture, perhaps.

I completely agree with starting them where they are.

And yes, they do not yet know what a for loop is, or what a compiler is, or what it truly means to install something. But they do know sequencing of commands and cause and effect.

If a 2-year-old wants to pluck strings on a guitar, as ours has, then great! Maybe they will sing with their random music sometimes, and as a parent, that's beautiful. It is probably not teaching them actual skill in the technique of playing a guitar, but it's teaching them: 1) that "I can do this", 2) this thing make music, and 3) this is fun and merits more exploration.

I think I did meet them where they were at, and part of doing that was going ahead and installing a GUI for them now. There is no reason to believe that my excitement over a CLI when I was 5 was something unique to me. I think that many more children could do and enjoy it than are given the chance.

[superuser2]

This goes both ways. The fact that my Mac "just works" means I can use it to make things and solve new problems, rather than spending all my time reinventing the sovled problem of a working desktop.

I've played with desktop Linux. The hours that went into to fighting Xorg or chasing WiFi drivers were perhaps educational, but definitely not productive. In the time it took me to get internet connectivity in Ubuntu on an old Dell, much less learn to stumble around vim, I could have made something new and useful with Twilio, Django, and TextMate on my Mac.

If I were a mechanic, I'd rather spend time fixing cars than fixing my tools.