[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.