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> Well, maybe it shouldn't have been "techno dad to the rescue", but rather "dad spending a moment with his kids showing them how to setup a raspberry pi/their xbox/etc.". And if the kids aren't even interested in setting up their own XBox, well then that's their prerogative. Give a man a fish, etc.

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That is exactly what the paragraph you quoted means. The author regrets just doing it, and wishes he would have taken the time to show his family how to set things up.

I'm really confused by this comment of yours.

To further this line of thought though...

They won't always be living with "techno-dad", so it behooves them at some point to get some of that knowledge. The onus is eventually on someone to want to figure this out. To bring up a scenario from the article, I know I wanted to play Super Nintendo, so when I got one, I made damn well sure I know how to hook it up & operate it in case something went wrong. If my job relies on being connected to the Internet and editing proxy settings, it's even more important that I know the ins & outs of that...

At some point, it is clear that people don't want to learn, whether they think it is beneath them, outside of their expertise, too hard, or, in this case, they know they'll always have someone else to do it for them.

Just like I don't need to be a certified mechanic to change my own oil or a headlight, you don't need a degree in CS, CE or IS to figure out how to remove preinstalled bloatware from the computer you just bought at Best Buy or to understand that a suspicious link in an email from an unknown sender shouldn't be clicked. In any case, the answer is always a web search away...

There's nothing wrong with saving your brain power for something you like, but I think there is a knowledge divide around computers & the Internet that leads to people getting scammed out of money because people refuse to learn the basics. Or maybe they never get the opportunity to learn, I don't know. They still teach kids how to write checks in school, why not teach them about this sort of thing too?

That was my point when I said I've messed up. From now on I intend to spend more time teaching them rather than doing it for them.

Believe me, I never intentionally make people feel inept. I'm patient in the classroom, and teach to the ability of my students.

maybe it shouldn't have been "techno dad to the rescue", but rather "dad spending a moment with his kids showing them how to setup a raspberry pi/their xbox/etc.".

More than this, I think that in part it's necessary to allow the kids to try and fail before assisting them. I'm not sure that showing and explaining to them how to perform a task from start to finish is much more effective than solving the problem behind a closed door, at least in terms of retention. What's really effective is if they can make an attempt to solve the issue, and then get the solution. Unfortunately, my experience is that not very many parents take this approach, because it includes failure as part of the learning process--and not many parents like to watch their kids fail. I've even seen some parents condemned for telling their kids to go and try it themselves before they provide help--some parents regard this as some kind of neglect.

The goal is to have the kid get 90% of the way there (or however close they're capable) before closing the gap and assisting them with the remaining 10% that they aren't able to get on their own. Part of the issue is that in the eye of the learner (and an observer) is that 0% of the way there and 90% of the way there feel the same. Both of them amount to "I can't do it and had to ask for help." But if you've gotten 90% of the way to a solution yourself, it's much easier to understand when the final (and hardest) 10% is demonstrated for you, and odds are you'll retain at least part of that. Whereas if 100% of the task is done for you, you'll frequently retain none of the solution, even if the solution is accompanied by a lengthy explanation.

In school, I found that I learned most effectively when I attempted the assigned homework before the related material was covered in class. I tried, I failed at a lot of things, and when the lecture came up, I knew what information to look for and what questions to ask. Failure is a critical part of the learning process--it's unfortunate that many people try to avoid failure rather than embrace it.

On the other hand, when I was a kid whenever I broke something on the computer it was my responsibility to fix it. My parents told me I broke it, so I'm able to fix it. So this particular paragraph really actually resonated with me, because if it weren't for my parents going "Well, you broke it, if you don't fix it it's going to stay broken." I probably wouldn't be nearly as computer savvy as I am today, and I probably wouldn't have gotten into programming (ok, maybe I would have, but certainly not as young as I did)

I got to play games because I learned the magic of memmaker.exe, autoexec.bat, config.sys, and boot disks. And I was motivated to learn how to fix things back when they broke because I shared a PC with my dad, who used it for consulting work--and who did not take kindly to service outages.

Hi. Are you me? :)

That's exactly how I learned this stuff. The damn game wouldn't play, so I had to make a boot disk.

Then I learned to make a bootdisk with a menu system called from the autoexec.bat - cos I realized that several games had the same emm386 requirements. And now I program things.

Ahh good times... good times.

I get this, and it makes sense. But the combination of network connectivity and expensive closed-box devices means I'm not sure how to implement it.

The computer I grew up with was isolated. If I broke it, I had a broken computer. I could take my time fixing it. Nowadays, a computer is connected... to the other computers in the house, and the entire internet beyond. If my kid breaks his computer, he might get in all kinds of trouble. I can't let him play around and fix it if it breaks, for the same reasons I don't let him play around with something plugged in to the mains electricity as a way of learning about electronics.

I'm also not going to let him wire up the x-box, because I know that a busted HDMI connector that broke because I was letting my kid plug the thing in is unlikely to be covered y the warranty.

For the computer thing, that's pretty much exactly why Raspberry Pi was created, so there was a cheap open (relatively) computer that kids could play around with, and even if they somehow manage to break it, it's only like $30.

As for the XBox, couldn't you just supervise while your kid hooked it up? Hand him/her the parts, tell him/her to go to it and you'll answer questions and keep an eye on things so he/she doesn't break anything but otherwise leave him/her to figure it out.

Oh man this is so bad, you're worried about a HDMI connector but not worried about your kids illiteracy?

"If you think the cost of education is high, try the cost of ignorance, it is even higher!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQENHCkiMBU

You say that kids who know how to jailbreak their tablet and run a GBA emulator understand computers?

It's usually just people downloading mystery software (could be malware but oh well) onto their computer which promises to have a button that says "jailbreak" and then they jailbreak their device with it not knowing what goes on and then use a magical 'jailbreak app' (cydia, etc) on their device which in turn gives them magical 'free' software and GBA emulators.

So they can Google for what they want and follow simple instructions to get the computer to do what they want? Great, that's probably enough not to have to ask somebody for help with almost any computer problem/thing you want the computer to do. Using computers will always be an exercise in sensible and appropriate abstraction, in this case I doubt they need to know how jailbreaking actually works.

Except that's more like a Harry-Potter way of doing things, where if someone tells you the right incantation you can perform the magic, but there's no way you're going to fix things if it doesn't work and no chance of understanding what's going on in order to do anything new.

Yet his description is precisely how I became someone with over 10 years professional IT experience and 6 years over that as a developer.

My 386 era machine at the time was without internet. My first experience was through AOL and Netcom in the early 90's. I mostly got lucky when things broke as I would fix one thing and break another horribly.

Slowly over time I began offloading large chunks of brain power to the internet as Google and others started really upping their game. Now, as a developer I don't keep syntax idiosyncrasies between languages in my head, I search. I don't keep esoteric error messages from Microsoft Office in my head, again I search. The proper use of Google has practically paid my salary for the last 16+ years. Once Stack Overflow came on the scene, my developer skillset took a quantum leap and I suspect a lot of people could agree with that statement. Now, I can say with certainty a significant portion of my computer literacy comes from my ability to use Google effectively.

I'm completely convinced that teaching proper search techniques to just an intermediate level would bring a lot of people close to being at least "literate enough." I expect everyone to be able to solve any user software problem they have but that should extend to the OS as well. Hardware problems aren't that much harder to solve but they generally require more practical knowledge, like how a specific peripheral behaves under normal working conditions. That can easily be taught as well but I expect only people that care to not pay ridiculously high prices for repair would care to venture into this territory.

Regardless, this is a long way of saying this isn't a Harry-Potter way of doing things for most people. It might seem like magic at first to a vast majority even, but over time that will turn into confidence and skill to solve genres of problems, not just specifics.

| Well, maybe it shouldn't have been "techno dad to the rescue", but rather "dad spending a moment with his kids showing them how to setup a raspberry pi/their xbox/etc.".

Tell that to my brother - every single time I try to explain as carefully as possible, going step by step, making him repeat the steps to make sure he knows how to do it. Aaand two weeks later he's got the same problem and is calling me to fix it... Some people just don't want to understand...