What do you let your kids play with?

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OVERKILL

OVERKILL

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Got thinking about this tonight as I setup an older ASUS F3F for my middle child (he's 7).

My 5 year old (daughter) has had some sort of tablet for about the last two years. First it was a Blackberry Playbook, now she has my Lenovo ThinkPad tablet with Cyanogenmod on it to play with.

My eldest has a laptop for school, so to make things fair I had a "cast off" (the F3F) from a client that I figured I'd load up for his younger brother. I installed Ubuntu LTS 12 on it, and then did the install for KDE to turn it into KUbuntu (I prefer this interface over Unity). Installed a minecraft clone as well as chrome for him on it and he played with it tonight until bed time.

My wife has an aversion to Linux (I tried to make her use it... that was a mistake) so of course she's telling me to put 7 on this thing but the kids are exposed to 7 at school. Linux is something different and I wasn't all that much older than him when I started getting into the *nix derivatives and there certainly wasn't any support for basically anything computer oriented let alone *nix stuff in schools at that point in time, so I figure I'm just giving him a bit of a head start over what he'll be exposed to in the future.

Both my boys have had the opportunity to tear down and put back together computers and can handle that no problem. But the software side of things is a bit different and there's definitely a different learning curve associated with it. They have to have the drive to tackle the things they don't understand rather than just asking me. I want them to work on problem solving and figuring it out for themselves. If they know how it works, they can figure out how it got broken. And if they know how it got broken odds are they can probably fix it.

What do you guys do with your kids?
 
Within the next few years, my kid's school will completely transition from textbooks to electronic tablets.

It's still in testing right now with an ever growing list of blacklisted apps.

I'm continuously surprised at what he knows (and what he doesn't) He goes to a technology class and they taught him pretty well but they have completely neglected keyboard shortcuts and other input tricks.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
What do you guys do with your kids?


I bought her a new laptop with Windows 8.1 and made the first $8,000 tuition installment.

Then she asked why her car wasn't fixed so she could go out with her friends when she came home from school.
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I have a 9 yo girl and a 5 yo boy. The girl just got an iPad for Christmas, and Id say she only uses it 3-4 times a week. The boy on the other hand, is addicted to my wife's iPad. He max's out his allowed usage, which is about an Hour per day ( we call it technology time).
 
Originally Posted By: Spazdog
Within the next few years, my kid's school will completely transition from textbooks to electronic tablets.

It's still in testing right now with an ever growing list of blacklisted apps.

I'm continuously surprised at what he knows (and what he doesn't) He goes to a technology class and they taught him pretty well but they have completely neglected keyboard shortcuts and other input tricks.

as of next school year, my 12 yr old nephew will have is own public school issued laptop. in the 6th grade... I'm only 34, but [censored] that makes me feel old.
 
I have a middle school age child in a district that has issued iPads to all middle school kids and MacBooks to all high school kids. The application of these devices in the classroom has been, in my opinion, a disaster. The apps that download the teacher's lesson information and upload the completed assignment are problematic at best. The worst aspect is that the school district has made the decision to not install any filtering or content management software whatsoever. Safari is installed and these devices are WiFi enabled, so unless the router is filtered (as my home router is) the school issued devices can access anything. My middle school kid has told me some of the things he has seen on the high school kid's MacBooks on the school bus. It infuriates me to no end, particularly since I have brought this up with the Principal and district IT manager, to no apparent urgency. I'm in the process of contacting the school board in the hopes they can require a suitable content management app in student issued devices.

Now that my rant is over and I feel a little better, to answer the original question: We have several Win7 machines in the house that the kids can use for homework and limited entertainment. We make the kids get out and do things (sports, music, Scouting, martial arts, etc.) rather than using the computer. My observation is that when we have been permissive in allowing the kids access to computers, they get "lost" in it and will be transfixed for hours to the exclusion of everything else.
 
I didn't get my first computer until 1996 when I was a freshman in College. kids getting computers are 5 yrs old. I can believe it though. My wife is letting our 2 yr old play learning apps on her nexus 7 to my chagrin as a babysitting tool. my 2 yr old getting addicted already to technology.
 
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I dont have kids but I cant help but think thats theres something very wrong with all of this.
 
Originally Posted By: stro_cruiser
I dont have kids but I cant help but think thats theres something very wrong with all of this.


LOL! I was 8 when I got my first computer. Was a Hewitt-Rand 8088 and that set the stage for my career in technology
smile.gif
 
My wife & I got our son a Kindle Fire HD when he was about 18 months old. He's now just over two years old and can count to 10, recognize basic shapes & numbers up to 10 and is comfortable enough with technology to operate it by himself.

Why did we give him something like this at such a young age? My wife is a teacher, and she has watched her school issue notebooks & tablets to kids in progressively younger grades for years. By the time he is in first grade, it's highly probable that all his books & much of his homework will be done on a touch screen device.

I also view it as this generation's new thing. First it was the radio... then TV... then video games... then computers... then the internet...

To many of us (especially those 30 & under), the aforementioned list has just 'always been around'. I can see mobile computing devices falling into that realm pretty easily for my son.

Edited to add: We also have to go on long car rides to see family. This device has made that a walk in the park.
 
Mine is closing in on six...he does not have his own (yet) /but it gets to use both our kindle and labtops, and he is good at both...
 
Originally Posted By: stro_cruiser
I dont have kids but I cant help but think thats theres something very wrong with all of this.


It's a mixed blessing.

No more out of date textbooks. I was already out of school during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but I can imagine geography/social studies teachers telling their students to just skip the part of the book on Europe because it was no longer accurate. Printers probably wasted tons of paper to print pages that would never be bound into a book.

Students can access new scientific information immediately. If something is disproven? It is no longer in the text or it is shown as being disproven.

Students can access so much more information now. Remember trying to do a report from Encyclopedia Britannica? You had to wait and wait and wait in the reference section of the library for that one freakin' book and then got the abridged version of the information.

But it comes with negatives. Kids will be kids and load things they are not supposed to or use the device in unauthorized/unintended ways.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Got thinking about this tonight as I setup an older ASUS F3F for my middle child (he's 7).

I should send over my Model IV and the wheelbarrow full of manuals. That's the way for a kid to learn.
wink.gif
 
Well they aren't my kids, but my siblings have pretty much anything they could want. They both have laptops but they are 3 years old and not in the best shape. Not that they use them that often anymore since I built both of them desktops they can use to play games. My sister has an iPhone, my brother does not have a smartphone yet but does have a nexus 7, a second gen. I gave my sister my old nexus 7 when I got a new one. It's worth mentioning that my sister is 16 and my brother is 14 so it's not like they ate really young or anything. I spoil them too much
 
Nowadays any child without good computer literacy and skills will be at a huge disadvantage in adult life.

Look at South Korea and Japan for example.

South Korea has some of the fastest internet on the planet.

I go my daughter her iPad2 nearly three years ago at 12. They have laptops and home computers aswell.

But they are more for schoolwork

Tablets are very convenient and user friendly
 
Originally Posted By: R80RS
My middle school kid has told me some of the things he has seen on the high school kid's MacBooks on the school bus. It infuriates me to no end, particularly since I have brought this up with the Principal and district IT manager, to no apparent urgency.


You would not believe some of the books in the town library either!!! And they hide behind the 1st amendment!
 
I have two daughters, 4 and 6.

The younger one seems much more technically astute and uses my Ubuntu laptop for games and videoconferencing w/ relatives. I gave her my old Motorola Atrix phone when I upgraded a year or so ago and she uses that for same: some games, some chatting w/ relatives and lots and lots of photos!

The 6 year old has a cheapo Android tablet that she rarely uses but to listen to some music and watch videos from time to time.
 
My 5 and 7 year old boys received I-Pad mini's for Christmas. They get to play games and such but they also have a few educational site apps. Raz-Kids (reading) and IXL (math). It really has stimulated them working on these sites. It was the tipping point that got my 2nd grader on the honor roll. Kinda made homework a little cooler.

But as with everything, it's all up to the parents to monitor and mentor.
 
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