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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

When my son was in 4th grade, his classroom used locked-down tablets with only Chrome as an interface. Even then, they could only browse to one or two class-specific websites.

One day, my wife and I got to have a nice chat with the principal because he'd allegedly managed to hack all of the chromebooks and install games, and in doing so, broke all of the internet connections.

On the way home, I asked my son what he'd done. As it turns out, he discovered how to use the physical switch on the devices to disable WiFi, which causes Chrome to show the dinosaur game. He naturally shared that exciting discovery with his classmates. All it would have taken to fix things would be to just flip the switch back to enable Wi-Fi.

This was pre-COVID, but a great reminder of how creative, resourceful, and willing-to-experiment-by-pushing-all-the-buttons our kids are.

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> willing-to-experiment-by-pushing-all-the-buttons

This is a great way of putting it and something I haven't thought of before. Mostly, I have been guarding my 2yo from pushing-all-the-buttons because I'm scared of her breaking something expensive (air purifier) or hurting herself (elevator). But I want to foster this sense of creative exploration.

She has taken a lot of interest in my Macbook (lots of keys to press, and she sees me using it) but zero interest in the cheapo tablet I bought her.

Any advice?

Disclaimer: not a parent, but anecdotally curious as a child.

Give them video games. Problem solving, and creative button mashing as a must if you want to be good at a game. Then slowly extend to things like old laptops (get them to help you switch out the hard drive), etc.

>Any advice?

I can tell you that getting an RGB keyboard is not a great idea. I learned that from experience.

In my own experience (of exactly 1 child), teaching him to understand what's ok and what's not ok to play with is important. We felt, from a distance, a hot stovetop well after the burner was off, touched the edge of a knife to see how sharp it was, etc. We lived in a city, so we got to see, in person, cars running lights and getting into an accident (look both ways, even with a walk signal!).

I also let him participate in the button pushing with guidance. Kids want to do what you're doing, so making that as real as possible is a good thing. In my case, I had an only laptop kicking around. It could do some web games and looked and felt similar to what Daddy was using.

This reminds me of secretly installing the metal slug emulator on computers when I was in high school so me and my friends could play before band class lol.

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