Particularly I was trying to make games with Pascal and Assembly on an 80386. Asphyxia tutorials. No Stack Overflow, no Khan Academy, Wikipedia, in fact no Internet or even BBS at all. I feel nostalgic towards this time, but I guess that those feelings are more attached to the curiosity of an analog child being introduced to the digital magic.
I was introduced to it slightly after I was in school, but unlike school, gamedev is what made me actually understand it. Then the whole trigonometry, and basics of vector arithmetic and matrices. School for me was boring repetition of arbitrary tasks forced top-down by unpleasant people. Wanting to make my own game, that gave me huge motivation.
(Then I went to university, and on the first year's physics lab, I was asked to solve something on a whiteboard. It was a simple thing involving a vector cross product, so I proceeded to write out the formula and calculate the result. TA looked bewildered and asked me what the hell am I doing? Turns out, I was supposed to first do a whole dance around base vectors and 3x3 matrices to derive the appropriate formula, which I simply memorized when I was 14, having implemented it in C++ half a dozen times. Turns out, gamedev-driven education can leave you with holes in theory.)
So like, the TA asked you to compute
<1,2,3>X<4,5,6>
and you jumped straight to
<2x6-3x5, -(1x6-3x4), 1x5-2x4>,
without the intermediate step of
| i j k |
| 1 2 3 |
| 4 5 6 |?
Or did you begin by computing the angle between the two vectors, so as to use the sine formula for cross product? Either way, I can certainly understand how your classmates (and TA) would be bewildered (especially if the two vectors were such that it wasn't immediately obvious what the angle between them was).
I understand why TA didn't like it, though back then I wasn't happy that my short and "obvious" solution wasn't received well.
x=a*sin(t)
y=a*cos(t)
In high school, my electricity teacher made us draw the sine waves of monophasic and tri-phasic (if that's what it's called in English?) voltages manually by drawing into a Cartesian arrangement and projecting onto a line diagram, much like the animation about halfway through the article. It was tedious and it seemed very repetitive to draw the various variations, but in later years I started to understand its relevance (also with regards to the relation between current, voltage and power). Just in general it gave me such a good example of the relationship between the geometry, trigonometry and calculus involved, much better than the canonical speed/distance example ever did (for me). There are only a few core concepts I learned in high school that I still use often, and this is definitely one of them.
I don't know if children in today's generation can at all be called as 'analog children'? And that plausibly is not good, overall.
But it's certainly not avoidable.
The best that parents can do is to try and teach and encourage children to focus on healthier stuff. To not be slaves to their mobile phones. To have empathy. Easier said than done though.
It certainly is avoidable. The difference between my friends who are very conscious of the exposure they give their children to TV, phones, tablets, etc vs those who don’t is striking.
Case study A: a friend who lives with her 6 year old son in a tiny Paris apartment. She has a laptop for work and an old phone she uses for WhatsApp/basic tasks, and that’s it. When I spent a few days at her place last winter, the kid helped us cook, we played board games after dinner, and he was really excited to go to the park the next day.
Case study B: San Francisco friends who let their kid use an iPad pretty much any time there is any chance the kid might be bored, moody, etc. She is pretty much addicted, and it’s quite hard to get her excited about anything else.
It's hard to say if at some point the disadvantages of limiting screen use is outweighing the benefits. Worse, if children already use social media heavily, stripping them of access during the school hours (or longer) will actually increase their anxiety levels. Children's social dynamics are tricky, especially for adults, and a lot can go wrong.
In my youth I wasn't spending so much time with a computer because it was my free choice. I lacked the social skills to make friends and was bullied heavily through my entire school life.
Next problem: To entertain a child without iPads requires a lot of time and conscious effort, which not all parents can spare, despite their best efforts. Instead of iPads, especially with preschool children, you'll see parents give them some food item when they need to be still for a time (bus, train etc). That's not necessarily a better solution.
Nor is letting them cry all the time because children at such ages can't control their focus and impulses for a meaningful amount of time.
I didn't remember what it was by read those back in the early 90s as well, learning to program on a 486 with an early SVGA card. I think I downloaded them on a trial of AOL, my parents wouldn't/couldn't pay for AOL but I sucked all those tutorials down when I had a chance.
I was taking Pascal in school but learned a ton more from those tutorials. I wrote an asteroids type game and got tons of eye rolls from the teacher as the other students were playing my game after I shared the source. I had done the whole years curriculum in a month or two and then sat there and wrote games in class. The teacher didn't really care as I'd just about matched his knowledge by the middle of the year. He was a great teacher, had a PhD in math which was pretty darn rare for high school.
Those tutorials had a significant effect on my chosen career path.
Quite a surprise when I was finally introduced to trig at school and found out it had a name!
And then one day someone explained the high-level point to me: "Of the six quantities of a triangle (three angles and three sides), given any three of them, at least one of which is a side, the other three are automatically nailed down." Suddenly a switch was flipped. After that, the rest is just details that write themselves.
I was kind of surprised that the article used circular motion as its main motivating point, since I feel like just moving at some angle is so much more common.
And it really doesn't take much to learn programming in class 5 or 6...
I believe my teachers were pretty good, overall. At least as good as can be expected.