Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

http://www.mathematicalresilience.org/

http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/

and

http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/assessment/index.html

Latter has example activities and sample student responses.

I was a bit older at the age of 10, but on those days the Spectrum and C64 were the more advanced machines we could get hold of anyway.

So for the first two years it was mostly LOAD "", or trying to type-in listings from magazines that my father used to buy, mostly without success as they tended to have print errors we could not easily understand.

But eventually the bug stuck inside, and around the age of 12 I was already getting into Z80 Assembly.

Also it was great that back on those days, at least in Portugal we even got listenings on newspapers.

Many might remember the "A Capital" computer section on Fridays. :)

The first computers I used (Amigas) ran off floppy disks. Whenever we bought new software, we'd use copies of the disks and keep the originals stored away.

This had the effect of making everything safe; even accidentally formatting an OS disk was no problem, since it was just a copy and most things didn't need it to boot anyway.

When I was about 8 we got a hard drive, which made life much more convenient (e.g. the ability to install games, rather than swapping floppies around, easily finding saved data compared to trawling through umpteen disk boxes, etc.) but also introduced some danger: changes (including mistakes) would persist across reboots, the HD didn't just contain copies of stuff (we, like most people, didn't have backups), and the impact of something like data loss was expanded to include everything we have (including other people's stuff), rather than just the particular floppies in the drives.

I imagine those introduced to computers between, say, the mid 90s to ~2010, would be under more pressure to be conservative, as their mistakes might have a real impact on things like their parent's budgeting spreadsheets, etc. Also, a bit tangentially, I feel that Windows and Linux present more opportunities for mistakes compared to AmigaOS: they spread important files around various parts of the filesystem, and there's a quite tight coupling between the OS and third-party applications. My Amiga HDs all have a standalone Workbench partition for booting, an Applications partition with each program in its own drawer, etc. which limited the scope of any of my experimenting; I remember trying to set up Windows in a similar way, and find that whilst all installers give the option of installing to a user-chosen directory, many programs don't actually work if they're not in the default "C:\Program Files" :(

This is where I think initiatives like the RaspberryPi really shine: they're inexpensive, standalone machines, so the impact of any mistakes is very low. Accidentally formatted the drive? Your parent's work documents are safely stored on a different machine. Whilst you can't get back to a clean slate by rebooting, at least SD cards are easy to pull out and make backups of.

A modern GUI OS for adults has a very low ceiling of mastery. I don't know why we need to make simpler designs. When my kid was literally fourteen or fifteen months he could pick up a phone or tablet, swipe to the youtube app, press it, and then press the thumbnails from a recently viewed video and watch videos (usually Peppa Pig).

Kids don't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays for adults. This reminds me of why the OLPC failed so badly. Even ignoring the cheap netbook competition, the interface was too 'top down' academic crap about 'how kids think' and involved a lot of shoddy assumptions on how to teach kids how to use a computer. A netbook with XP was perfectly usable by even the very young.

I was 6 or so I could use my parent's TRS-80 and was writing fun little BASIC programs with it. I think we need to give kids more credit here. They're much smarter than we think and its adult hubris to pretend they're so unintelligent and unable to figure things out on their own. Perhaps we shouldn't shy away from overly-challenging kids. The recent trends of 'soft' and 'helicopter' parenting cannot be good for the long run. I plan to be somewhat tough with my son because I don't want him to grow up into some of the people I work with who have near zero self-learning and critical thinking skills and have a 'give me fish' mentality and will actively fight against a 'teach me to fish' mentality.

I haven't tried them in a while but they are designed for kids to explore and have high ceilings.

Scratch particularly looks pretty cool.

They even give a solution for the sensitive Americans: call it "dow dow" and forget about how is pronounced in French.

    1. naming things
    2. ...

As a native English speaker, I would pronounce "Doudou" the same as I'd pronounce "Loulou" -- "Doo doo" and "Loo loo" respectively.

What do you mean by this? Would something like Arduino not fall under that category in your view?

I just realized that it's strange that there would be a slang term only used by children, but that remained in use by generation after generation of children over a period of at a minimum 50 years but probably much longer.

I'm not a parent, but I suspect that it's a word used by American parents during potty training, hence its longevity.