Hey All,
So here’s the deal, I have an old HP laptop I am in the process of resetting and setting up wiping and setting up as my ~8yo nephew’s first computer. He played his first PC game sitting on my lap and I am determined to fuel his budding interest in computers as much as possible. He has an iPad from his parents and has been attending a ‘code ninjas’ camp for kids his age and has been loving it. So for Christmas this year I asked his parents and they’re comfortable with him having his own, supervised, system.
I was planning to start with just a blank slate on the machine with a parent account and then a child account for him. Obviously the parental controls will be in place with his parents getting a crash course in anything they don’t already know how to use(they’re tech literate so I’m not worried about that). But they’re not CS people and I’m only barely self taught over the years.
I have this vision of giving him a sandbox with enough toys and tools (as much FOSS as possible) that he can safely play around and build/make things on his own. So here’s where my question for y’all comes in, what are your recommendations for a budding computer scientist/programmer’s first Windows machine? And just to head it off at the pass, no, we can’t go the Linux route yet. I don’t have the experience/expertise to support a system like that remotely and his parents have even less. I’m also wondering if there are any tutorials or resources I could load onto the machine that he can /watch learn from without an internet connection?
And lastly I’m wondering if anyone has any advice for encouraging him to push the boundaries of the parental controls and locks on the system. Obviously not in a way that undermines his parents authority. But I want to encourage that sense of almost devious exploration that encourages even just users to truly analyze and understand the limitations and cracks in systems they’re dropped into. To give a probably horribly outdated example from my past: figuring out how to bypass the proxy service the school network used to access browser game websites.
- Currently only on mobile and memmy seems to be having some trouble properly displaying comments and posting my replies. I’m seeing things in my inbox but am only able to see my comment on the actual post. Will respond to people once I’m home and can access the actual site. Thanks for all the advice so far, keep it coming!
Don’t do anything Linux or FOSS to start. Get him into Minecraft, Roblox, and fortnite. All run best on Windows and all have major modding tools that get you results immediately.
Ignore anyone telling you to use Linux or FOSS tools that don’t have an industry standard grip. blender and obs are fine but if someone is suggesting vim or emacs over visual studio code or notepad, they don’t understand kids or ease of use. Overall windows is where you want to be. Maybe specifically windows 10.
Overall I’d aim for games and game development with game maker or something more simple like osmo. This will show practical creative use cases for complex math. It will get them interested in files and formats. Hell, I’d throw them some indie games that don’t pack their files so he can just replace them and get interesting results.
Or you can just use tools which are not on the CLI. My mom uses Linux and she’s 60, I guess a child can easily use Linux. In fact, I’m teaching a few dozen kids to learn scratch and Python on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS and they manage just fine.
Please get a grip on the industry standard of teaching people. They’re even doing Minecraft development on these things (although we compile externally).
For making games I recommend the Thonny IDE and Scratch as a start. They both work on Linux. Godot also works fine on Linux if they want to continue that route.
You can do all that with Windows aswell but for teaching our group of teachers found out that it just gets in the way of doing things when updates break stuff and you can’t simply fix it by copying files around.
Yeah you aren’t doing bedrock on Linux. 8 have insights into industry standards and teaching kids. Also just because it “works fine on Linux” doesn’t mean it works best on Linux.
For me this answer is biased. I am a technology teacher and father of five. Had great experience with Linux. Get them on the free ecosystem with no barriers! That’s the best educational environment. Kturtle, gcompris. Krita. Inkscape. Scratch. Godot. Freecad. Gimp. Libresprite/Aseprite. More than enough to keep you busy. I grew up with DOS. The best fuel for me learning computing was trying to make games run. Nowadays everything tries to be so easy and simple and that’s great but sometimes it has an educational drawback. Linux is so much easier for kids than for adults who are already used to windows/Mac. Edit: you could also start with i3wm. That’s what I did with my kids. Of course, the hard part of that is not them learning, but you first learning it so you can show it to them. Have an eye on that and adjust difficulty depending on your time for this project. If you don’t have that much time and willingness to learn yourself, just go KDE plasma or other.
Anything on Windows is much easier than on Linux which is why most companies and people prefer operating systems that consider user experience over Linux distros.
My experience is different. I tend to think the billions of dollars spent by microsoft on marketing and lobbies give them some advantage. And a lot of companies use linux more than windows. But of course it depends on your historical experience and choices.
As desktop environments, less companies use Linux. That’s the context we are already talking about. We aren’t talking about random servers or random devices.
Yeah less use Linux. But, even with all of Microsoft lobbies and marketing, a bunch do. For example in the country where I live, the desktop computers of the main bus transport and courier company all use Suse linux. In a school where I worked, all computers also had Linux. It really makes sense in educational contexts.
Literally every school in my area uses andn teaches windows or mac. Never Linux. I’m in Seattle. Even the charter schools use Windows or Mac. I don’t know if a single business, school, government service, etc that uses Linux as their main desktop environment. Maybe it makes sense to do so in your country but I don’t see how it would make sense in mine. Windows and Mac both heavily sponsor American schools.
Yeah that’s a sad situation. I suppose you already know about the dangers for the future of our children of not having access to software code and one big company having control over our devices and surveillance capitalism and blah blah blah so I won’t waste your time with that again. Every context is different, every mind is different. Hope you succeed in giving this child what will be best for his future. Good luck and congratulations for your motivation!
Yeah there is also a time and a place to teach kids these things. I’d aim about 12 to 18. A point where they start to fully understand what a computer brings to the table and why access to code is important. My kid is 6 so access to code doesn’t mean and won’t mean anything for a long time. So it’s best to give them the things that interest them in computers over tablets or phones.