Restoring Old Software for Child Learning Safety

So glad I came across this, I'd never come across 1st Math! Can't wait to get my kid set up on that. Hoping more people post recommendations in the chat here this stuff is hard to find.

It's lazy but I set my 2yo up with a thinkpad running ubuntu that boots directly into terminal and has a bunch of single-letter aliases to open a few very specific sites including a sketchy in-browser dos emulation running math blaster.

Would have loved to actually just get a dos machine running for him but time starts moving so fast after they're born...

Anyway he's 5 now and still loves getting into some Math Blaster, and it's still providing plenty of challenge for him, I forgot how far it went academically.

Interestingly I think this giving kids this kind of retro software has the positive side-effect of boring kids after a reasonable amount of time. I've been thinking of it as finite media.

He loves Math Blaster but will often choose a physical math workbook instead when its math time, and he stops playing after an hour or so at most so I can just give him unrestricted access to his thinkpad and he organically self-regulates screen-time. Noticed similar effects giving him my old gameboy pocket and an old 8 inch CRT with a built in DVD player and a stack of random Reading Rainbow DVDs. Also using a ThinkPad or Raspberry Pi that struggles at least a little bit with streaming YouTube has helped keep that from getting out of control since I couldn't ultimately avoid youtube for some no-dvd-available science / math / music video stuff.

I highly recommend Eureka, Dirk Niblick, udiprod and Minds Eye.

I should dig through my cabinets and boxes and locate all the obsolete software that I have. Surely there is somewhere that can use it now that my kids have outgrown it more than 20 years ago.

I used my old 128k/512k Mac to teach typing and foster artistic skills with MacWrite and MacPaint and an old 386 pc, probably an Epson if I remember right, to set them up with age-appropriate skills games.

There is no substitute though for hands-on learning using manipulatives like puzzles, building blocks, etc. These teach different skills that are critical to gaining an understanding of how things work and in learning to visualize unseen parts of mechanical devices and mechanisms. Understanding physics is aided by assembling various parts large and small, heavy and light together and trying to build a working contraption that doesn't fling parts everywhere when you try to roll it across the floor. Balance and the effects of asymmetry are easier taught with real objects than with computer displays.

Published this last year after introducing my daughter to some old DOS educational games. She is going to be starting Kindergarten soon and my plan is to set her up with her own computer with older educational titles to encourage learning computer skills, typing, and more. Not just the tap and swipe UI of the modern iPad educational games.

If there is enough of this era software running around, it might make sense to make an esp32 laptop with a 7” screen, running a DOS emulator. Bonus if we could do it on a riscV variant. Set it up with a few hundred educational titles, Qbasic, WordPerfect or Ms Works, and an assortment of other programs including old DOS games (and a parental controls) with a launcher menu.

Give it a basic postscript printer driver and a microSD slot for future expansion, a gopher client and a mud client, maybe access to a couple other legacy protocols but no standard web access so it won’t work as a media consumption device or social media outside of things like (AI?) moderated MUDs or chatrooms. You’d want a python or JavaScript interpreter and a simple file manager. Also perhaps an interface to Wikipedia and a telnet type interface to a chatbot API for local or commercial models.

It runs a little against my grain, but perhaps to enable the network Stuff It would need a PPPOE connection to a gateway so that users could be registered and controlled to remove bad actors : tied to chip ID for a “secured area” that parents could opt in to ? iDK, online safety is a tough problem for children. Maybe there is a better solution than total AI surveillance and access controls, but how would you keep bad actors out? Or maybe just not offer any online functionality at all, except maybe a Bluetooth proximity based link to other machines to enable LAN parties?

Something like that would make a pretty great kids computer that could give them access to a complete k-6 education and much deeper computer skills than the current host of consumption oriented devices.

I have been thinking about this problem of "digital curation" quite a bit in the last few months. This is the core thesis: The role of children's teachers and caretakers in curating an environment for children to learn and grow is more important than ever with the overwhelming variety of books, videos, shows, etc all of varying quality and alignment with the interests of the caretaker and child. However, curation in the digital age is also more difficult than ever. The web is a collection of walled gardens which give parents limited and inconsistent controls over what the child will see once inside the walled garden. And, adding controls on-top of a walled garden is impossible or only possible by very computer savvy users.

To be clear this isn't about hiding information from kids. It is about providing places for their curiosity that is age appropriate and of a high quality. What I think all caretakers seek to avoid are books that are of low quality or age inappropriate (e.g. AI generated, scenes of suicide, etc), video that are developed in the style of the Cocomelon "distract-a-tron"[1], or software that encourages gacha gaming and/or uncontrolled open chat/video/etc.

What are ways care takers can practically and easily curate today?

Examples

- YouTube Kids

- Jellyfin, Kavita, or Calibre for ebooks

- Open WebUI with a custom system prompt for kids

Counter Examples

- Netflix, Disney, Amazon, etc: difficult to non-existent curation controls - all or nothing

- Kindle Kids: there are controls but for Library books the process is 12+ clicks between the Libby and Kindle app: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/can-you-share-kindl...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon...

> My long term goal will be to have an “old computer” set up in the house for the kids to play on, learn to type, and more without the risk of undue exposure to the internet, advertising, and bullying

Same here. I plan to restore my old 386 for my daughter as her first computer.

I originally posted this over the weekend and it didn't catch on. I didn't realize HN auto reposts under some conditions! Let me know if you have any questions about the emulation set up.

I have tried this approach to mixed results, got Boxer set up on their laptops with a few classics, but they didn't really gravitate towards it.

I searched for modern alternatives and settled on a mix of the Endless series of games on iPad(Endless Learning Academy bundles them all), and as they got older, GCompris. They can get lost for hours in GCompris exploring the different games and activities.

I got a Raspberry Pi 3 for my nephew in the hopes that he could learn to program on it with supervised, timed internet access only. Anything else, he would have to use what's on the machine, or download it when he's allowed online. We didn't have internet when I was learning how to computer, so I had to entertain myself with whatever we did have. My VIC-20 was strictly a BASIC machine, we didn't even get any games for it. (My TI-99/4A was a different story.) I thought maybe he could benefit from that sort of restricted exposure to tech.

But I was already too late. Kid's WAY into Minecraft, and consumes all sorts of videos from my sister's iPad in terms of how to build things with it.

He's a teenager now, and I'm having some discussions with my sister about when is a good time to expose him to Doom (1993). Fragging cacodemons is a rite of passage any teen must undergo.

Software that sparks the imagination (including sub.. optimized graphics and sounds) feels really important.

This is less about retro software, and maybe more about classic software, or software that did something well with constraints of hardware and software, something a learner often has to do as well.

Does anyone here know Elmer Larsen personally? A little digging online found that he later became a city council member and a mayor. I always love learning about some of the earlier independent developers and what they went on to become.

I really love this! I had a similar idea, but on the software design space.

Now the trend is to design softwares where the interface is not editable anymore, long time ago it was fun to tweak programs so that they look like what we want, change the colors, move things, change rounding, basic stuff sometimes and usually we just needed to change a plain txt file to do it. I miss that, now the softwares are non-personal, distants to the users.

Has anyone tried any of the PLATO courseware, either in its original form or the TI-99/4A versions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/software/plato/plato.html

By the way, for those unaware of the general set up, QEMU provides a complete software emulation of a CPU from that era as well as a Sound Blaster 16 card. The software just runs like it did back then - maybe a little faster without tuning the emulator to slow down.

I have an old iMac G3 from circa 2001 with classic Mac OS 9 on it for this purpose; there are great library websites out there with all educational games from the 90’s - no internet requirement in sight and loads of fun!

My kid is in college now. But I do so appreciate this work, and other works dedicated to finding alternate spaces to the current toxicity and marketing that has taken over the internet. Kudos!

> without the risk of undue exposure to the internet, advertising, and bullying

> I have increasingly wanted to make sure they have access to older educational content that is not dependent on the will of a publisher and does not constantly connect them with possible cyber-bullying.

My life experience leads me to reject some of the premises of this effort, the path to hell is paved by well meaning people trying to control children’s access to information. My parents did everything in their power to ensure I only consumed content that aligned with fundamentalist religion, young earth creationism, and hyper conservative politics. I wasn’t allowed to learn about dinosaurs because content about them made reference to their existing millions of years ago, not inside the “<6000 years age of the earth”. I wasn’t allowed to read science materials that discussed or even tangentially referenced evolution. I didn’t really know what a gay person was until I was an adult. I wasn’t allowed to watch most popular cartoons and movies because they depicted sex, violence, and other sin. They enforced the ridiculous concept of “bad words”. I am thankful every day that occasional unsupervised Internet access allowed me to broaden my perspective. I’m grateful for being exposed to violence and porn and racism and discussion about suicide and every controversial thing that exists because these are things that exist in the world that I should be aware of and understand. I now believe in talking to children about challenging subjects, not preventing them from being exposed to them. My experience made me much more zealous about freedom of information and speech than most.

Cyber bullying is a weak excuse for limiting Internet freedom. I was psychologically tortured in person every day by other kids, made an outcast, and shunned. I was hit/kicked/punched/tackled or threatened with a weapon almost every day for years. I developed something akin to PTSD from constantly watching my back for kids trying to surprise attack me from behind. Internet interactions are incredibly safe environments for learning how to cope with bullies by comparison, like training wheels for dealing with real world bullying you will encounter. Unless you’re associated with something that goes mega viral like Monica Lewinsky or the Star Wars kid making you forever tied to an embarrassment, online bullying will never have even 5% of the impact of what you’ll have done to you in person. We need to worry about the far more damaging things that are done in person with full awareness of teachers/administrators who are sometimes even complicit. Kids can’t even feel physically safe in schools and we’re responding by limiting their access to the Internet. Even more access to the Internet might have allowed me to realize that I wasn’t alone in my experience, it’s almost universally experienced by ADHD and autistic kids, and it gets much better when you get past school.