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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Why not. This is pretty much my game plan if/when I have kids: Start them off with a raspberry pi or similar, a keyboard and a monitor, then gradually explore with them and add more gizmos and software together. Some of my fondest memories as a child was playing around on my father's old IBM mainframe workstation computer with two 5 1/5 inch floppies as a three to five year old. At that age I really didn't need much, seeing something happen on a screen after some keypresses and some analog sounds coming from the floppy drive was enough magic for me. I'm thinking that giving a child an iPad at that age could be really damaging - there's just no sense of wonder and accomplishment outside the prepared paths anymore.

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I'm doing pretty much that right now with my 5-year-old daughter with a raspberry pi. She can currently boot it up and check her email by herself (using claws-mail). One of the big things that I think we can do today that wasn't really available when I was a kid is robotics. For a couple hundred bucks and some time invested, you can make a robot platform for them to play with and get them playing with super low-level stuff without any kind of pretense (limiting her to just the r-pi with a BASIC repl would be pretty artificial in today's world, but the state of hobby robotics now is much like the state of computing was 25 years ago). I'm working on a robot repl right now so that she can get the instant feedback like we had with BASIC, but it's slow going for lack of time.

The thing I've found interesting is how she goes back and forth between the r-pi and the iPhone pretty seamlessly. I don't think she realizes that they're fundamentally similar devices. To her the iPhone is just a black box with some fun games on it, but the r-pi is a lot more like an adventure.

This is amazing what you're doing for her. I wish someone did something like that for me but as a girl I was usually discouraged from pursuing science, computers, physics or anything like that. I am sure she will appreciate it all when she's older.

That doesn't add up to me. The children of today will almost surely look back at the iPad the same way you look back at your dad's IBM mainframe and with the same nostalgia as others on this thread. It'll seem quite primitive compared to the contemporary technology of their adulthood.

Here's the big difference: You can't 'play' around with them the same way, they're not built to program on or change / break things significantly. It's not an empowering device.

I bought a kano/raspberry kit for my 5yr old. We explore the terminal, python interpreter, minecraft etc and he is totally pumped, with the ipad lying idly just by his side. What really clicked for him was the fact that he now had a real computer that did stuff like dad's and calls himself a 'real hacker'.

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