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> One of the most enduring ideas in educational psychology is the stage-based theory of Jean Piaget[0]. Computer use belongs very much in 'formal operations', the last stage of the theory, because everything that happens in the computer is just an abstract representation of what happens in the physical world. Progress between stages varies from child to child, but from Piaget's observations, it usually happens around the age of 11, which is when children transition from primary school to secondary school in the Australian and British school systems. This is why children struggle to learn, say, algebra, in primary school. If you introduce these ideas before children are ready for them, they internalise them as social rules in the same way as 'raise your hand before speaking in the classroom'. So not only does introducing computing too early harm the development of other skills, it also teaches a suboptimal approach to computing.

Bear in mind approximately none of his claims have been experimentally validated, and my experience (and I suspect that of many other HN users) is the opposite.

Anecdotally, dunno how much I can get behind this. By 11, I'd learned to touch type and was building virtual houses using one of those consumer CAD programs. My friend was a webmaster and ran a small Pokemon forum. Another friend was producing small musical albums. I'm sure countless SWEs can tell you about their early coding adventures.

The real-world experience came first, of course (a whirlwind house hunt that taught me a lot about style and layouts; an intense interest in the series; an early mastery of the piano, respectively). But, "You're too young," would have represented a frustrating impediment to our curiosity and industry. I faced that anyway, later on ("We can't afford that," to multiple attempts at breaking into CGI), but I know at least the latter friend is a prolific musical artist and virtuoso on several instruments. And I imagine quite a lot of software wouldn't exist, or would be/perform much worse, if the people who made it hadn't had early encounters with - in fact, were shaped by - computing.

I started computer programming at a similar age, but there's a difference between an individual child following their passion at the level of their own abilities, and a classroom teacher trying to develop abstract thinking in 25 or 30 children simultaneously.

There was a great paper I read from the 1950s, where the researcher simply observed a teacher reading a story and asking comprehension questions of the class, who were six years old or so. When the teacher asked a question, all the children raised their hands, but when a child was nominated to answer the question, the children frequently didn't have an answer. They were just raising their hands because it was the socially desirable thing to do; they just wanted to please the teacher. As children grow older, they become more skilled in feigning understanding, and even when teachers do see through the illusion, they often don't have the time in the classroom environment to provide the individual support needed to fix the problem.

> They were just raising their hands because it was the socially desirable thing to do; they just wanted to please the teacher

When I read this sort of thing it reminds me of how some adults didn't seem to take children seriously. My recollection of K-1 is that kids in the class often paid close attention to what was being said by the teacher(s), and were very literal.

If you raised your hand in my kindergarten or first grade classes, it usually meant you had something to say. IIRC kids were pretty good at answering questions as well.

You're making some big jumps here. There's a chasm between the developmental level of 6-year-olds and 11-year-olds. Also, looking at a paper from the 1950s, when, as you say, research in this field is cyclical, seems to suggest that that particular finding wasn't sufficiently replicated. Finally, micro-computer use is inherently an individual task, because the user experience has been designed for individual use. Even with a teacher involved, each child is largely on their own and making their own learning. Young children learn instruments (including their own voice), and participate in both individual and group musical acivities. By your logic, that would be inappropriate, but it not only happens every day, across the country, but is the source of quite a few musical artists' later success.

I think, if anything, the key might be in the expertise educators have with the given instrument. Most music instructors are talented musicians or vocalists themselves, and I imagine most have a keen sense for how to encourage proper care of both the student and their tool. Maybe it'e changed, but most of the teachers I had growing up that were involved with computer use were largely trained in library sciences. I don't know that there even IS any effective deep training wrt computer use. It's not just that the technology is new, but also that most experts are going to be coming from a tech industry whose modus operandi is purposely cultivating unhealthy relationship with their products.

> (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over and over again.)

I would suppose if you didn't break the rule the same ideas would be reinvented over and over again, but you wouldn't see it

"The first thing I was told in an educational psychology lecture was to never cite any research more than ten years old."

Just to confirm, did you really mean to say MORE than ten years old or did you mean LESS?

There's no typo there, what I typed is what we were told. There's a genuine belief that research expires after ten years in educational psychology (and possibly other human sciences). It was a sharp contrast to my major in physics, in which the first year was almost exclusively ideas from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.