I've found the same. Bought robot turtles, lasted a few hours. Scratch is cool but too hard for my kids to envision a "finished product" beyond, "make the thing walk 3 steps and fart" (I have 2 boys). We also tried the whole code.org thing which has minecraft and star wars themes, not interested.
What I did find, though, is that by taking something they're really interested in and finding a tech way to enhance their experience has been the key. I am putting my money on just constant, positive exposure to tech and how it can solve their problems or answer their curiosities.
The thing I'm teaching my kids the most right now is hard work. You want to be a youtuber? great, do the work. Write a script, storyboard your project, plan it out. Don't just turn on the camera and start mumbling about minecraft. I have found that it's 100x easier for them to put in more time on something that doesn't feel like school.
I know not everyone cares for Disney but if you and your kids have been to the parks, these two books have been amazing to my kids:
My friends getting married and having children has gotten me thinking about how I would raise my own.
I look at my best habits that started early on in my life and wonder how I developed them to begin with.
I remember my friend James would come over to my house and we'd take turns writing stories in Word. Each of us would write a chapter from our character's POV while the other played Super Mario 64.That early interest in writing has served me all my life.
We'd also spend hours taking turns on my computer building custom Heroes of Might and Magic maps/scenarios.
But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine.
Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck.
"But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine.
Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck."
I think we all have the innate desire to create. No one looks at an instagram craft and say "I wish I wasn't able to make that". IMO, failure is the biggest obstacle for most people.
If you look at kids in their natural environment without devices, they naturally are creative in their play. I think fostering that creativity without the distraction of television and devices is the key with ample praise for effort. I don't think it really matters whether they are creating on a device or with blocks. If the desire to create is there, they will eventually find a medium they can be successful with.
>I think fostering that creativity without the distraction of television and devices is the key with ample praise for effort.
A thousand times, yes! It would be impossible for me to agree with you more. We are "Entertained to Death" (to steal a title of a book on this very subject). Children need time to sit and think. To be bored and learn that boredom is okay, and what to do about it.
These days, television is actively hostile in its level of interruption and intrusion. And I don't mean just the obnoxious advertisements; the deliberate "shaky" camera angles, the change of viewpoint every 3 seconds, the thumping soundtracks, whooshing graphics crossing the screen, all are designed to stimulate, attract, addict, yet hypnotize and sedate. Not to mention the low-value content for the most part. This is not good for anyone.
Fools are afraid of being alone with themselves. Was it always this way?
I think it plays a part in that many (dare I say most?) adults are simply horrified at the idea of sitting alone, quietly, without a device to distract them with internet/facebook or whatever. The skill/art of just sitting and occupying oneself in our own heads is being lost, but it is essential to happiness (and I think, sanity). This used to be learned by children, but now every kid is handed a dose of electronic crack, lest they fail to be distracted for a single precious moment. Then when it does happen they fall apart. I wonder if asked to choose, whether the average person would choose to skip a meal or go four hours without internet/phone.
> It is very sad then that so many children are hurried along and not given time to think about themselves. People say to them when they think that they have been playing long enough: "You are no longer a child. You must begin to do something." But although playing is doing nothing, you are really doing something when you play; you are thinking about yourself. Many children play in the wrong way. They make work out of play. They not only seem to be doing something, they really are doing something. They are imitating the grown-ups around them who are always doing as much instead of as little as possible. And they are often encouraged to play in this way by the grown-ups. And they are not learning to be themselves.
and
> People who for some reason find it impossible to think about themselves, and so really be themselves, try to make up for not thinking with doing. They try to pretend that doing is thinking.
-- Laura Riding
> Most of us are unable to sort out reality - we can't distinguish between a thing and a symbol for that thing . This springs from several causes. One cause is that we are isolated from the natural world, where the distinction between a thing and a symbol is more obvious. Another cause is our educational system, which simply reflects the intellectual laziness of the society in which it is embedded. A third cause is resistance on the part of vested interests - if we could think creatively, we would be difficult to govern, and advertisers would have to appeal to reason instead of emotion.
-- Paul Lutus
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
-- Carl Sagan
> Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
-- Hannah Arendt
I think critical thinking are important. Autonomy. So sure, teach your children to customize and program the devices they probably end up using to some capacity either way. But also allow for the fact that "technology", unqualified like that, might be kool-aid, and that following the trajectory of previous generations is not necessarily the best possible direction to go in. Imagine having children that are less alienated than yourself, wouldn't that be cool? People that can hold eye contact longer, that fidget less when they have to wait in line for 3 minutes? Who can bear their own company? Who can let their inner eye stray across their past, their surroundings, their self, at the speed they chose, without any compulsion to ignore or distort things? For as long as they want, instead of not at all? Yes, absolutely cue parodies of spoken word diatribes here, and whatever else. I'm just virtue signalling, and so on.
At any rate, the question isn't "technology or not", the question is what technology and what people use it for, rather than what it uses people for (on the behest of others who are on the run from themselves).
Honestly, looking at the world in a makers/takers dichotomy probably does everyone a disservice. You're a human being doing stuff, they are doing different stuff, woowoo big deal.
There are no real groups, everyone needs everyone.
To be fair, most of us would have been pretty turned off by any educational computer thingy our parents would have pushed on us. In my experience most programmers have learned on their own, which is part of the charm -- it becomes a quest and kids love to learn stuff that their parents don't know.
If my kid showed interest in game dev I would get her a good computer and hint that she should download Unity and mess around with the examples. At least that feels real.
Anecdata- i visited a small game studio once- they had been bank-rupt three times, always ex-changing the "boss" of the studio and refounding the company. There answer on why some of them where working a learning game besides there main title.
"Oh, that is a x-mas title. Grandma buys them for full price, the kids hate them and never play them past the second level, so you get away with basically buggy, shitty uninspired work- and can use the bucks to work on the real game."
Takeaway lesson- if entertainment is not a first class citizen, nobody who is not a adult forcing himself to learn, will ever use it.
True. There was no surer a guarantee that you were about to have a Bad Time, than to be sat down in front of "educational software" of the 1980s. Dreadful, for the most part. Kids are just young, not stupid. They know when they're being cheated out of a good time.
>> I would get her a good computer and hint that she should download Unity and mess around with the examples
That's funny. I'm going the opposite direction these days. We have a top-notch gaming machine at home (and spend more time on it than I am comfortable admitting) but my young-teen kids are THRILLED with the chance to use my old Apple ][ and make pixel games or text adventure games. When I bring it out, it's a special occasion day!
We made a really simple "adventure" game, with me doing most of the coding and them adding ideas about locations and events and characters. They loved seeing it take shape. Then we encountered a nasty bug where player health points could go negative but the player wouldn't die, and my daughter reasoned out the solution! (Need to test for <=, not just less-than. And need to update the health BEFORE the test-for-dead.) needless to say, their old dad was pleased. And they sat there and played that silly game for and hour. It was like showing a kid a yo-yo or a top for the first time. It was more fun than it should have been and they were rightly proud of what we made.
Letting them play Zork, Choplifter, Kareteka, and Dung Beetles and seeing the disc drive whirr and clack then the screen light up is as amazing to them now as it was to me 40 years ago, at their same age. Somehow it's just as entertaining as Assetto Corsa or PubG, without the million-dollar budgets or 100-person dev teams.
1mhz. 48k of RAM. 280x192 "high resolution" graphics. How could that be fun?
Even more -- WHY? I have a theory. It boots right to a Basic prompt, and off we go creating our own world, or running someone else's. And a lot of games are based on skill. Just like the arcade, the more skill one has, the longer you play. And with these old machines, just as in the 1970s, our imagination is the limit. And not only the limit, the key ingredient, since the fidelity of the graphics is so low it is necessary to use our imagination. Maybe that's why the box art of the golden-age games is so alluring. With promises of spaceships and nebula, dashing swordfighting ship captains with golden epaulets, monsters and robots with similar detail -- when in reality it is indistinguishable from the average Tetris block. Somehow it was fun. And it was enough. As "Thomas Was Alone" has proved.
edit: Ugh. I forgot the main point of this thread -- we bought Bloxels as an impulse purchase last weekend and my kids have enjoyed the ease with which they can create and animate characters and quickly lay out levels. It's a thrill seeing your little blocky character come to life. For us, it was a good purchase and I'm really pleased with the product. I found it at Target, for around $35, by the way.
Dang, you are speaking my language! When I was a kid we had an Apple ][e and spent many, many hours on Zork, Karateka, castle wolfenstein (pre-fps), conan the barbarian, summer games, winter games, some snoopy game.
Now I will say I am pretty bitter that PubG isn't coming for PS4 for awhile.
This was helpful and enlightening. We have kids that we're planning on homeschooling. Finding curriculum or even good information on how to introduce technology to kids in a meaningful seems difficult.
I loved my Lego Mindstorms set as a kid, it's very open ended and easy to use, even moreso now. The programming is simple but powerful and the building system is obviously second to none.
Yes, yes, yes to Lego Mindstorms. It was the bridge from make believe play to the real world. It was real enough to be a challenge but not so real that I could not grasp it.
Did you always use the block based programming language or ever use Lejos?
What I did find, though, is that by taking something they're really interested in and finding a tech way to enhance their experience has been the key. I am putting my money on just constant, positive exposure to tech and how it can solve their problems or answer their curiosities.
The thing I'm teaching my kids the most right now is hard work. You want to be a youtuber? great, do the work. Write a script, storyboard your project, plan it out. Don't just turn on the camera and start mumbling about minecraft. I have found that it's 100x easier for them to put in more time on something that doesn't feel like school.
I know not everyone cares for Disney but if you and your kids have been to the parks, these two books have been amazing to my kids:
Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making More Magic Real https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disney-Imagineering-Behind-Dream...
The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (From the Magic Kingdom) https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Mansion-Imagineering-Classic-...
Just really fun for them to understand all the work that goes into that magic they love.