Interest Kids in Computers

Robert Scoble, Eric Mack and their friends are gathering ideas about how to interest kids in computers, generate real interest, such as what’s inside, how to build one, writing software, etc. This sounds intriguing.

I didn’t have to get my kids interested in computers. They got me involved. They’re still teaching and reminding me literally every day, including to do such simple tasks as how to log back into Skype when I unintentionally logged out.

All their lives, they liked to do something, anything it seemed. They learned to do whatever Joan or I were doing, when we did it. We didn’t ask them what they wanted to do. We asked them to do what we wanted them to learn. Educators call this a learning-centered home.

They went from go-for this or that to holding, cutting, measuring, etc. as they could grasp the tool. They all learned to build and fix things as soon as they started crawling and gliding. It was a part of growing up. That’s also the way Joan and I grew up, and our parents and so forth. At first, our children didn’t know that not everyone doesn’t fix and build whatever they want.

As parents, Joan and I learned that Loren took apart whatever he had and sometimes whatever we had. Larry took whatever he could move and nailed it to something else he could crawl into or up. Leanne designed and decorated things, with gusto. Layne figured out how to break them, or more accurately, what range of confidence to have in the integrity of a product, especially if he could find someone else to buy it from him after he fixed it. Her sibs told Lora she had to help each of them to do whatever they did, so she learned to do whatever each did, plus whatever her parents did.

They all did handwork, old fashioned sewing, knitting, painting, car maintenance, yard work, etc. We always had paper, pencils, crayons, cloth, tools, etc. available for anyone who got to it first.

A high school teacher interested two of our children in computers. He brought into his science class boxes of computer and electronic scraps from a local computer manufacturer. Students could have whatever they wanted.

One child sat on the floor at home watching TV our giant 15 inch TV set while he hand drilled, wired, and soldered a computer board from these scraps as he followed a hand drawn schematic he copied at school. The 8080 worked, too, and that’s how he learned to think in machine program language. Another child added years to his age overnight, so he could earn money with a paper route to buy a new computer. One would leave the room huffing about “all you people do is talk about computers!” We all tried to answer the question “What is electricity?”

Layne’s daughters grew up in a computer workshop and assembly area. They’d sit on the workbench or a stool for hours sometimes watching him assemble or trouble shoot thousands of computers. In turn, by age eight, one monitored and corrected hired staff when they got stuck assembling or trouble shooting. The other daughter built huge structures out of foam and other discarded shipping and obsolete products.

This is a long way around to say, I don’t know how to interest kids in computers or anything else without doing something with them and having stuff around for them to experiment with (bad English, but it makes the point). The key preposition I know and Joan and I use is with. We enjoy learning and doing with our family.

I hope you enjoy working with your children, too.