I'm not sure if this thread is looking for serious replies or not. Here is my experience with my 3.5 year old daughter.
1. TuxPaint is a must have program. Stella started using it at 2.5 years of age and still plays it. It is a paint program designed for children. Builds good mouse skills, has fun noises and animation. 2. Potato Guy - I'm not sure why this is fun, but Stella likes it: http://www.dotmon.com/hwyl_a_sbri/subalbum_30.html 3. Tux Type and Tux of Math Command - These are missile command style games that teach the keyboard. This can provide about 15 minutes of playtime before boredom sets in (that's pretty good). All of these so far ship with the EEEPC from Asus. Finally! A human whose hands actually fit the darned thing. 4. pbskids.org has a lot of Flash games that are great. Caillou and SuperWhy are among the best. However, Stella wasn't capable of playing these until she was about 3.5 years old. 5. Wii - Stella is capable of playing a few minutes of World of Goo (puzzle game) unsupervised. Wii sports is a hit of course, and Raving Rabbits 2 & Cooking Mama are good. For all wii games though, you really need to guide a child through using it. For some reason she doesn't want to do it alone. Also, most games are way too hard. 6. Eclipse + Groovy - Seriously, Stella and I wrote our first program while on the airplane earlier this week. The reason Groovy is important is because of support for multiline strings (with the triple quotes). I did a println """ """ and then let her write a letter to mom in the space. Clicking Run to see the output was fun. We also paired on a quick rhyming script to create derivations of her name that we could laugh at. Actually trying to program was pretty tough though. I tried with Logo but she is really uninterested. Logo is _not_ a language for toddlers. However, I was writing a toddler accessible version of Logo in my spare time this Fall. If anyone seriously wants to know more about an F# based Logo interpreter and IDE disguised as a Paint program for kids then let me know. My daughter played with it quite a bit and it's not as bad as you'd think. -- Hamlet D'Arcy On Feb 22, 4:50 pm, Patrick Wilkes <[email protected]> wrote: > > It sort of a little experiment, what is the earliest a child can > > actually make meaningful use of a computer? Is there such a thing > > as 'Toddler Linux' ? > > There is the Sugar GUI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_(GUI)), > which is the interface for the One Laptop Per Child project. From the > article - "Unlike more traditional desktop environments, it does not > use a "desktop" metaphor and only focuses on one task at a time." > > Looks like it's easy to install on Linux. > > Patrick --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
