How kids in a low-income country use laptops: lessons from Madagascar
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
I think it used to be like this for a lot of people in the developed world as well when computers were new and most people did not have computers and those that did had only one in the whole household.
Nowadays a lot of people including the children have a smartphone each and the household might have one or more iPads and up to several laptops. And of course a PlayStation or an XBOX.
I don’t have children yet, but when I get children I hope to show them programming and involve them in what I do with computers and to show interest in what they are doing and to encourage them to be creative.
I introduced my 5.5 year old to Tux Typing with a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic keyboard 4000. The games were borderline too fast and frustrating.
But YMMV depending upon the child's level of focus; spring for the paid account if the advertisements are too distracting. "Too" in this context for me means the child stops the lesson altogether to watch the ads.
I start out by setting expectations that I don't care about speed, I only care about accuracy and correct finger placement, and the speed will come later with more time and practice. Inevitably, they want to see you typing as fast as you can and will want to emulate that, so I discourage any emphasis upon speed while learning. The lessons have an accuracy ranking represented as 1-3 stars, and the rule I enforce is they must achieve all three stars (95% accuracy) before advancing to the next lesson.
Finger placement on the keys is difficult for children this young when starting, but a 5 yo will generally catch on reasonably well after about 5-10 lessons. Usually they lack the fine motor control to prevent stray key strikes when that young, so when first starting out, I limit the lessons to 4 attempts at a single lesson to reach 3 stars, then praise them for sticking with it even if they don't get it, and move on to another activity.
After passing the second lesson, I show them how to restart a lesson so if they feel like they are making too many mistakes they can try again without having to go through the system's feedback and feeling dejected by it. I always effusively praise steady persistence performed without undue emotional drama, and if that day's lesson proves too tumultuous, we gently disengage.
Depending upon the individual child, you will have to sit with them to enforce correct finger placement anywhere from 3-10 lessons. There is an enormous temptation at first when there are only a couple keys to learn for a child to use their index finger in a pointing fashion like they are used to their entire lives up to this juncture, instead of properly splaying their fingers out on the keyboard, which is a highly unaccustomed position for them. The dots on most computer keyboard home rows definitely helps center them.
You feel your way through with each individual child, but generally you can ramp up to four lessons per day at 6 yo, and by then it goes fairly quickly. This is already a wall of text, so I omitted how I calibrate ramping up and other starting out guidelines I created as I went along, feel free to respond here if you want more details, but this should get you started.
Heck, I'm not that old and I remember playing plenty of games with my dad and brother on the family PC.
I liked Starcraft 2, but I think Blizzard needs some competition.
It would provide another dimension to the game play.
You could do the same thing to a human opponent in some of those games, or they to you, so in practice you had to micromanage some things like fights in order to kite or retreat effectively.
When I got out of college I had a brief fantasy of trying to consult doing game AI but the whole field cratered and I had no idea if I actually had an aptitude for it, and I got busy doing other kinds of “serious” work.
Now our household has multiple computers per person.
Wow.
But those were the days of splitscreen local multiplayer games. I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.
Yup. I have fond memories of multiplayer mario kart or goldeneye, or cooperative games e.g. coop Secret of Mana / Seiken Densetsu 2.
> I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.
So do I, but Nintendo seems to have kept the flame alive, local multiplayer mario kart works fine on the Switch, and the game is playable with solo joy-cons, so a pair of full-size controllers is enough for 4 players (once you find out how to configure the bloody thing).
I got Mario Kart 8 for Switch and we tried playing it on one large shared TV screen.
We immediately ran into the problem that it's incredibly difficult to see the track on the split screen. Seems like local multiplayer only works well when everyone involved has memorized all the tracks.
And then there were the arcades. My friend was a local celebrity and so good that some arcades had banned him, or set his favorite games to 'super difficult'. When he played, a crowd would watch, whether it was Dinosaurs VS Cadillacs, TMNT: Manhattan Project, or Street Fighter. Sometimes some clueless new guy would challenge him in the latter, and a significant portion of the arcade users would notice and come see the beatdown.
Sometimes we'd go to a new part of town because they had fancy new games, or because they hadn't banned him yet. We'd play co-op games, and he'd help me stay alive as long as possible.
I haven't thought about this in a long time, but this kind of social gaming was central to my youth, now that I think about it.
(and that's not even getting into the 90s/00s LAN parties!)
I am old enough to remember as a child (my grandmother had the only TV in the building, 4 apartments) how every thursday evening all the people from the other apartments came to watch TV (there was a very, very popular quiz show on thursdays in Italy), and after the show we all had some biscuits/cakes (and the adults a glass of wine) together.
My father used to tell me how when he was a kid his father was often asked by the neighbours to put his radio (the only device in several buildings) on the window sill in the evening so that people assembled in the common court could hear the news during the WWII.
I'm old enough to have experienced something similar. When I was young my dad won a color TV in a sales contest. I think it was the first in our neighborhood and was the first in our extended family. Every Sunday evening my grandfather would come over and bring desert and we would gather as a family and watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. As we got older, my siblings and I would beg to be permitted to stay up and watch Bonanza. Good times!
I passed through a border crossing in West Africa last year. The border guard was struggling a bit copying the English names into his ledger, but after copying my hometown, he realised he knew that word — there's a famous British football team.
He got really excited, and pointed out the TV in the corner, and said how everyone in the area had come to the customs post to watch the big final, since it was the only TV.
(Perhaps it was the only TV that could receive a Satellite broadcast of the foreign match, or maybe it really was the only TV — the border crossing was remote.)
tl;dr: It is important to share with your children the things you are passionate about, but equally important is to watch for things your children are passionate about.
Absolutely, it is very important to me that we do things they enjoy. Otherwise I might end up doing the exact opposite of what I intended — and end up with them having an impression that working with technology is plain boring and a chore. Now of course in any creative endeavors there are times of pain and struggle, but I want my kids to experience the joy and satisfaction that can come from it too.
She (and my 3yo) absolutely loved Google's 50 years of Kids Coding doodle [1].
As you've pointed out, finding excitement in the world to share together is the most important thing. The HN crowd tend to be a pretty inquisitive bunch, so there's no shortage of things to look into :-)
[1] https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-50-years-of-kids-...
Full disclosure: I’m the developer on these, but believe they’re relevant here.
[0] lightbot.com
[1] spritebox.com
Will definitely download Spritebox and give it a try. Would you say it's more aimed at older kids and adults?
Thanks so much for making it!
I remember playing games with family members using only a single keyboard. I have vague memories of even somehow managing four player games somehow, right up until keyboards stopped responding to that many simultaneous inputs.
This makes me wonder if part of the appeal the Nintendo Switch seems to have with, in particular, the 30-something crowd, is to do with how easy it is to play two-player games (or more) by just propping up the device and detaching the joycons. Nostalgia seems to really play a role in the popularity of that thing.
I had the same hope for my children (now 12 & 14), so I let them start using devices & playing games when they were 3 (even gave my older kid the first rev of the OLPC laptop). To a large degree, I regret the decision to start that early.
Nothing has gone the same way it did when I was a kid. I had a DOS machine with a couple of crappy games, and a BASIC interpreter. The only thing I could do is learn to program, it was the most exciting thing available.
Today, the absolute flood of high quality content in videos & games has basically prevented them from wanting to spend time figuring out low level details. They have options for spending their time that are so much better than I had that they basically can't choose to create. At least not yet.
My oldest has been talking about creating his own games for years, he's very curious, he's a super user of the OS's he has access too, his knowledge of game styles and history far exceeds mine (and I was a game dev for a decade). But when it comes down to spending time making things, he inevitably chooses to play an interesting game rather than learn coding. My younger son is almost as addicted to games, but has a simultaneous addiction to YouTube.
Recently I met a couple of extremely smart and creative kids whose parents (AI researchers) have completely and severely restricted their access to any devices at all. It got me wondering what the best way to encourage creativity is. Pushing too much will turn them off or make them resist, but a lack of any support can be even worse.
Making sure they have time where they're bored and don't have access to high quality and structured entertainment choices at all times currently seems like a good idea to me.
OTOH, they're growing out of some habits I was worried about, and maybe the best approach is just to set a good example and love and support them in whichever directions they want to go.
I can’t remember why I bought that book at 12 years old and why ActionScript, but learning about OOP before anything else was interesting.
As far as I remember, I didn’t continue with AS, but around 18 I started messing with PHP and never stopped building things since then.
We restrict access to screens to an hour a week otherwise - my kids will always choose a game on the iPad (of any quality) over unstructured time on the linux box. We have tried hard to follow the "set a good example and love and support them in whichever directions they want to go" philosophy.
Seriously.
Check out some simler frameworks that are geared more strongly towards game development. Even as an experienced programmer, I still gravitate towards the Love2D framework for getting an idea on screen quickly, (for 2D stuff anyway) because it handily masks away all of the libraries and support hardware. So long as I can navigate the Lua programming language, I can have moving characters onscreen responding to keyboard input in about an hour.
Point being here, don't underestimate the value of instant gratification. As much as that sounds like what you're trying to avoid, since that's exactly what YouTube and social media feel like to an outside observer, that instant gratification loop of "change code, run game, see results" is crucial for the early developmental stages. Let your kid learn through experience how fun it can be to program the basics, and then stumble on something more complex that he wants to do organically, or bump into a limit of the framework, and at that point he'll know enough about the tools to be nudged towards tackling the harder stuff.
I have that feeling. I learned BASIC on an 8-bit computer where the command prompt was a BASIC REPL.
That's probably the best abstraction level for learning to program.
After a while, I figured out that all the best games were written in this mystical "Assembly" stuff, which ran a lot faster and could, with some wizardry, do greyscale! I taught myself z80 programming without ever stopping to think that it might be difficult. Later, I realized this is a Junior level college course in a great many degree programs. Who knew? For me, it was just another step on the path to making games instead of doing my math homework.
Conceptually, it's incredibly simple and I think this is its most important contribution.
Same philosophy as dessert choices - give a kid a choice between an apple and a chocolate for dessert, they're going to choose the chocolate every time. They'd eat pails of sugar by the spoonful if you let them. But if the choice is between apple and nothing, well...
EDIT: This comment by jerf explains the idea far far better than I have, and they're doing it right now with their own children: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16766756
The whole cult among parents these days about limiting screen time is worrisome to me. The only way I ever got into programming seriously was through gaming, and eventually, modding. An hour a week would never have given me enough time to get into that, however.
I only ever did some light modding, but when I had a chance to take some programming classes in high school, you'd better believe that games were on my radar. Writing emulators is still a hobby of mine.
My parents monitored what I did, like I do with my kid now, and there are the "mysterious" times when the TV stops working (couple hours? OK. All day? No.) So I suppose that my wife and I are taking a kind of hybrid approach: Give kiddo the chance to be familiar with the technology around us, but regulate the time so that an obsession in the wrong direction never develops.
Also, it wasn't unheard of to have a 15 year old making a hit game.
So yes, if at all possible, have your kids in the 1980s.
That said, I scare-quote "screen time" because I believe it promotes weak thinking about the problem. The problem, in my somewhat considered opinion, is not simply the screen. My concerns have been more about effort expended and the real vs. perceived (by the brain) results that are received. Video games, movies, and a lot of apps (even putatively educational ones!) have the problem that you exert little to no effort and you get these superficially amazing results. You click a few buttons and holy cow, you're playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony! My objection to this is that it trains your brain at a very deep level, very early, to the idea that such results come from very little expended effort of any kind, not cognitive, not physical, not any effort. This is basically a lie. That is not how the world works. In the real world, you need to work. (Put aside the details of how much for a moment; there is no forseeable future in which life is as easy as these "screens" present.)
I think "addiction" is not the core problem, but a secondary effect of the above; you get addicted to the "screen time" because your brain very rationally decides that the best way to get rewarded in a given period of time is to put its effort into the "screen". And it's really hard to override the lower parts of your brain when they make what is, from their perspective, such a rational decision. I'm not even convinced it's a good idea in general.
(As the conscious "part" of me, I find there's much more mileage in learning how my foundational brain systems are making their decisions, and arranging it so that they receive the input that will produce the output I want, rather than berating them for producing the wrong output.)
My oldest is now 9. At that age, yes, I did get a lot of "screen time", but it wasn't on the internet, and playing games on the Commodore 64 has its own lessons to teach about patience, and even if it did reward my brain, it couldn't keep up with modern video games and often lost out even to just reading a book, so it's not like it is today. So I have, without shame, limited my children's "screen time" even beyond what limits I had as a kid, because of those differences. Also they have zero access to the internet, again without shame. (There's plenty of adults who frankly can't handle the modern Internet, to be honest.)
Now, I'm still in the early days of this, but recently my oldest has been getting into Scratch. I picked up the Humble Bundle Makerspace bundle [1] (4 more days!) and he's been working his way through the "Super Scratch Programming Adventure" at a decent pace, without much prodding from me. And now the payload of what I'm setting up here: When he's doing that, as long as he's making reasonable effort and progress (as opposed to just screwing around endlessly in the paint editor; there is a difference between exploring and trying to make pictures and trying out the tools, and just aimlessly scribbling, etc.), I don't count it as "screen time", because I don't think it has the characteristics of "screen time" that harm children.
Our kids are 9 and 7 right now, and the message I've been giving them lately is "I want you to have something you're doing, unrelated to school. It can be soccer. It can be piano. It can be learning about programming or learning to draw or anything else. You don't have to stick with it forever, in fact I want you to try lots of things out over time, but you have to be doing something not related to school." Early results are promising. This week they're learning about the pets they are about to get from library books.
Of course other parents with other kids may have other problems; perhaps your kid needs to be encourage to stick with things a little longer, perhaps you need to remind your kid after 3 years of the same thing that they should probably spread their wings a bit. But that's my experiences, I don't have any others. :)
I do plan on loosening up over time. I do expect that there will be troubles in the future with too much access. I'm hoping the foundation I'm laying now will help me point out to them the consequences of what is happening. Ask me again in 10 years. I'm sure it won't go swimmingly, but who knows how it will actually go.
[1]: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/makerspace-books?hmb_sour...
But that came with a total addiction to World of Warcraft, Battlefield, and pirated anime, along with all the broken social interactivity that comes with a pale-skinned weaboo spending his summer vacations hiding in his room and worsening his nearsightedness.
I love my parents and because I don't have kids I won't claim to know the best way to raise them, but I will say I wish my dad had learned enough about computers to actually managed to restrict internet time rather that just throwing on a shitty parenting software his coworker gave him that I surpassed in about five minutes. Or, somehow rewarding me for exploring the pirated copy of 3D Studio Max and fostering creativity there. Or, just taking the damn computer away and forcing me to go hang out with people. I was a shitty kid and I know I was hard to manage, but I think that dealing with that is part of being a parent.
I have no idea if I would have turned out struggling less with the things I struggle with now if they had done things like that, but I suspect this is the case. So, you know, don't take my words at face value, just consider it as one perspective from someone who is now an adult and did grow up with nearly unlimited screen time. I managed to fill the social gaps somehow, get a job etc, not all of my old WoW buddies ever managed to.
I went from being an introvert with anxiety so bad I cried in front of everyone when giving an assigned speech to speech class, to an A-type with endless external confidence, marketable public speaking skills, no shame, and almost no inhibition. This change occurred sometime towards the end of highschool (with a fresh dose of "know-it-all-asshole") and matured throughout college. I regularly try to figure out just what the fuck happened. Who is responsible for this shift? I want to condense it so that others like me can change if they want to. Best I can do is point out a couple memories that I think were "turning point."
1. In middle school I was called "gay" all the time because I was quiet. Back then this was an unacceptable insult and socially ruinous for a 13 year old. I somehow made great friends with a guy who once said "Are you actually gay?" I said "no." He said "who fucking cares anyway?"
2. Freshman year I gave a speech and cried at the beginning from nervousness, the teacher quietly put his hand on my shoulder and made me finish the speech, quietly giving me encouragement, telling me I was doing a great job.
3. Sophomore year I was at my friends' place for an all-night LAN WoW binger. His bathroom's lock was broken downstairs so I'd been using the upstairs one. His older brother (A-type sure-of-himself guy that I admire to this day) went to use the bathroom, announcing he "had to take a dump." I said "oh, use the upstairs one, this one's lock is broken." He said "so?" I asked, "what if someone walks in on you?" He said "I'd say, 'get out of here, I'm taking a dump!'"
4. In highschool we read a book about a little girl that died and was allowed by... god or something... to view certain portions of her life again. She noticed that she wasn't "awake" in any of those memories - nobody was expressing their love for eachother, or appreciation of the moment, everyone was "sleepwalking." I'm sorry, I don't remember the title.
So to sum up my absurdly long post, I would say the things that helped me fill in the social gaps are having supportive people in my life that help me put things in perspective, and a very early introduction to the concept of "mindfulness," though I didn't call it by that name back then. Also, an early introduction to my mortality.
So I guess, support your friends, invite them out even if they don't come (they might eventually), and when they do come out, iron out their faults (I would lash out and be an asshole, and my friends would be so so patient with that, showing me "they right way." Think classic neckbeard arrogant ass.)
Unfortunately, the home edition is hard to buy outside Poland and the U.K. but the version meant for schools ships more widely from Germany (in English).
Absolutely. And this doesn't just apply to kids :)
Looking back, my introduction to computers came from (a) having a PC game I couldn't run a game, and (b) a Dad that was technical enough to replace components in said PC. We had a "pop the car hood" moment where he showed me what each component did, how to change a processor, check the BIOS was registering the changes, etc.
Leading up to programming I became deeply engrossed with game tools. Modding was all the rage, and I did a bunch of map making with Quake, Unreal, and Starcraft. Startcraft in particular, with it's scripted events system, were some of the first exploration I did in structuring statements to get a desired result.
At the same time, my parents had a pretty strict no-videogame policy on school nights, which effectively meant Fri-Sun were my game times. This did not translate in restrictions of general computer use though, so I could still use it as a power user. Game tools were my clever way to subverting that rule, because I wasn't "actually" playing a game.
> But when it comes down to spending time making things, he inevitably chooses to play an interesting game rather than learn coding.
Let's be very honest with ourselves, the Mean Time To Reward for video games is laughably small and non-competitive. This is powerfully true for beginners of programming. To cross that chasm, you need two things: reduce the MTTR and inspire a thirst for knowledge that video games can't quench. Two birds for one stone, use your own game development experience and build a small game in Unity yourself and ask their advice and bug testing. When they spy you working in Unity, and how quickly you are developing, I bet it will inspire that thirst for something more than video games (and structured content in general) can provide.
> he's very curious, he's a super user of the OS's he has access too...
He sounds like he's perfectly on track.
Now that I think about it that seems pretty similar to what you experienced with DOS&BASIC on a "real" computer.
Except the game mod also provides simple & powerful programmable robots called turtles that work similarly to scratch, but are way more fun and feel more useful. Using them was a really good introduction to computing for me.
The "interesting game" your son plays could well be one that integrates programming to advance in it, there are a lot nowadays.
[0]: https://www.feed-the-beast.com/ [1]: http://computercraft.info/wiki/Main_Page
I recently saw bright and social kids from relatives get into YouTube addictions, and I feel like it’s numbing their brains.
If it’s already hard for adults to show self-control when it comes to device addiction, it would be foolish to expect that kind of maturity from kids.
Thinking about it, it wasn't much different at all of my school buddies' places - often the computer was cramped into a corner that it was already hard to sit 2 kids in front of it and I've also hardly of anyone doing this with their parents or siblings, but that's of course not a proof.
- Built-in camera & microphone
- Oscilloscope app
- Special O/S that goes dormant and uses minimum power when idle, to maximize battery life
- Can be charged with primitive generators and manual labour
- Networked
Brilliant design. Too bad too many governments never understood this and thought a PC or Apple laptop were the same thing.
Same can be said for Unicef.
My brother got one of them as part of a subsidized program, and man, it sucked. Slow, barely any free disk space, it was a waste of money even at 50€.
(Doesn't matter where "here" is.)
I'm curious whether users knew that everything they'd be doing was logged and would be examined later.
(A) What sort of information are they canvassing for?
(B) What are they doing with that sort of information?
It was not a “consumer” machine from the start, researchers looking at logs is just a side effect of the basic stance.
Its the beginning, soon enough we all will get those 4k-160hz-retina_display screens. :]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_monitor#/media/File:2...
I remember starting with GW BASIC when I was 10 or so and the first 'graphic' program was an analog clock on a 80x40 CRT console, felt like I could build anything with it..
Adults can work fine with that, and the XO-1 is targeted towards late kids and young teens.