-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 10/05/13 15:59, Byte Soup wrote: > On 10 May 2013 10:02, James Tait <james.t...@wyrddreams.org > <mailto:james.t...@wyrddreams.org>> wrote: > > On 09/05/13 23:04, SuperEngineer wrote: >> just one final word (sentence)- my word "educate" was >> deliberate... get the kids using Linux, let them think it's >> 'normal'. > > I'm sure my boys' response to that would be "Why, isn't it?" > > Kids are impatient, they dont want to wait for things to happen, > and generally they dont want to be bothered with installing a > package or searching out equivalent application to get what they > want, so when they google "how to do <something>" invariably the > answers will all come back based on the most widely used operating > system so they will say "why cant we just have a windows machine > like our school / my mate steve etc"
And therein lies the opportunity for education. It's not an easy conversation to have with kids, admittedly, but it is one worth having. My point was that, in a household where all the computers run Ubuntu, Windows would be considered the oddity - though I totally understand your point. > I can only speak from my personal experience, my kids are no > strangers to different interfaces but they are not interested in > bringing up a command shell to solve a problem and as this is not > something seen commonly in the schools, so we'll end up with a lot > of the next generation being more technology "consumers" than > "creators" ... thats only my thoughts though. My youngest (6) totally surprised me the other day. My boys got into Minecraft on my wife's Android phone, and wanted to play it on their computer. He looked it up on the Software Centre and it cost money, so he came to me for help. I ended up installing Minetest, a GPL-licensed game of the same ilk, and we've been playing that. I set up a network server for us all to play on, but sometimes they play single-player on their own machines. My eldest (9) has created a world which he's called Nyancoaster, and the youngest wanted to play on it. Unfortunately there was a bug (now fixed - we're using the daily PPA - which was a conversation in itself) in the GUI that starts up a network server, which was causing a segfault. So I said I'd look into setting up a server for Nyancoaster on the one machine that they could both connect to once I'd finished work. He went away and Googled for "Minetest server", found the instructions and came to me to ask: "how do you get that thing where you do your programmy thing?" He meant the terminal, of course, and once I showed him that he was quite happy to try the commands himself. Kids are impatient and demanding and want to do all the stuff their friends do - but they're also inquisitive and fearless and sometimes like to do something a little bit different to everyone else, and then share it and have their friends say "Wow, that's cool!" It's just a matter of finding that thing that sparks the imagination. JT - -- - ---------------------------------------+-------------------------------- James Tait, BSc | xmpp:jayte...@wyrddreams.org Programmer and Free Software advocate | Tel: +44 (0)870 490 2407 - ---------------------------------------+-------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlGNJioACgkQyDo4xMNTLiY3pACfUuy1ARZhLMDqMlZsJF0pMQ4b HFgAoOWBDkU6hgt3k/GJlBmZRmzYJ0gG =RQuf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
