What could be the best way to introduce the world of computers to a kid, let’s say of 6 years old, so that he learns to handle it like a toy and stops dreading it like some esoteric, arcane and recondite machine from some eldritch, enigmatic, cryptic and phantasmal world ?

  • lad@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    I’m afraid this required much more tinkering back in the day, and will be way less educational now. Maybe building and running a PC from 2005 or earlier will require the same level of getting to know things, but otherwise it will not teach to not treat computer as arcane and enigmatic, imo

    • Lazycog@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      For sure it took more back then, however looking at people using their phones/tablets for everything I think you can still learn a lot by simply trying out and using a computer to do similar tasks you would do on a phone too.

      The screenshot might have been a bad analogy since e.g. steam actually lets you access your screenshots directly in the application, but if you want to set it as your background image you still have to access the file itself.

      • lad@programming.dev
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        54 minutes ago

        What I meant to say is that they can easily use both a phone and a PC, and still think it’s arcane and cryptic. Even if they needed to tinker with it, e.g. a lot of DOS games required me to set IRQ, and I still don’t know precisely what it is