A minute fraction of kids will use the ability to install downloaded software to flourish. The vast majority of children will just download games, malware, and porn. Society should be more honest with itself about the simple reality that the vast majority of children are not and will not ever be special.

Maybe controversial, but I first got internet access in 1999 as a 15-year old. And yes, that meant games, malware, and porn. But I did flourish, not despite all that, but also because of all that.

Games are now a rich part of our culture. They can tell great stories, and are not "better" or "worse" then a book per se. If you enjoy them in moderation, and go outside enough, games are a great thing. And LAN parties were a great pastime.

Malware, hacking tools, warez were one gateway for me into serious programming. I downloaded Visual Basic or Visual Studio and proceeded to write a trojan, to make friends' CD tray open and close on LAN parties.

And porn? Grown ups and parents don't like to hear it, but as a teen I of course enjoyed that there was porn on the internet. It didn't hurt me, and I've had healthy, normal relationships in my life.

> A minute fraction of kids will use the ability to install downloaded software to flourish.

...and a minute fraction will play on the football field or perform in the school theater.

and that's why we don't assign ballet shoes and football pads to every single student and instead have try-outs.

But some schools do mandate some form of athletic participation.

> The vast majority of children will just download games, malware, and porn.

They'll just use the browser for porn, no need to install third-party software.

For the vast majority of kids these machines are replacing textbooks, and aren't supposed to be tools for learning computer science. That said, you can also learn programming with nothing more than a browser.

And in the absence of computers (or any other tool to stimulate their curiosity; computers are just an excellent tool), the "special" (I hate that word) kids will just be miserable. If 90% of the kids who are given one of these computers squander them and 10% of kids use them to find an outlet for their curiosity, then it's worth it.

Unless you actively try to stimulate the smarter kids and give them something to sink their teeth into, it's extremely difficult to tell the difference between kids who are bored and miserable because the material is below their level and kids who just don't give a shit about learning. In both cases, they'll be goofing off, not paying attention, and possibly disrupting class, but one group can flourish under the right conditions, and the other group is a lost cause.

The games got me into coding- I had to know how it all worked.

Without games, there wouldn't have been any point to dig deeper than word processing.

Similar story. I learnt how to code because I wanted to become a hacker. Somewhere along the way... I learnt that it was far more satisfying [and legal] to actually make things rather than just break them.

I learned about batch files to enable extended memory in dos.

> The vast majority of children will just download games, malware, and porn.

Learning to avoid malware is an important skill for kids to learn. Shielding those kids will just create a bunch of adults that get infected.

It was cracking bootleg games that forced me to learn how to use hexadecimal editors, binary and computer programming. The skills I learned going off the approved curriculum are the same ones that actually pay my bills today. Hell if 13 year old me was exposed to computers today, I probably would never go past light user. Computers today have too smooth of a surface area. You actually need to be shown the curtain nowadays whereas before it was right in front of you and you needed to get past it to do anything useful

This is a great point. I work with exceptionally bright kids, so I push things like computer literacy and exploration, but for most Americans computers are simply tools. "With great power comes great responsibility."

Except that having each kid able to brick their computer leads to significant problems for IT in debugging everyone's computer. As well as letting them move away from educational material extremely easily.

I agree that great things can happen when kids can truly explore their computer and take away the 'magic', but just handing all kids a laptop and having them go wild is not the way to do it. I don't what is, to be fair.

Handing them a laptop and having them go wild is exactly the way to do it.

If they brick it, they have to work out how to fix it.

As one of the kids who was lucky enough to get a BBC Micro, I had zero support. No-one else in my family even knew how to turn it on. No teacher at my school could support me because none of them knew how it worked either. If I broke it, I had to fix it. And no Stack Overflow, so no code to copy-paste. I had to go back to first principles every time and work out what went wrong and how I could make it go right.

Best education you can give anyone.

You're not average. Get out of your bubble.

We had laptops at my high school 10 years ago, some of us learned how they worked inside and out, most did not.

When the curriculum depends on having a functional laptop, teachers wont want to wait around for kids to figure out how to fix their laptops. 90+% will go go the tech. Little Johnny who's already struggling with math class will not be helped by having a non-functional laptop. Not everyone needs to know how computers work.

EDIT: Probably you are like me and many people on here who found the HS curriculum easy and boring and stimulated yourself by hacking around with computers instead. This is not everyone's experience of HS, some kids legitimately struggle.

Can you install, like on normal Chromebooks, Crouton on school Chromebooks if you know how to ? Because then kids have good opportunities; just for doing their school stuff, doing browser (and server) dev if they want to and dive in deeper with Crouton. All for $100-200.

> As one of the kids who was lucky enough to get a BBC Micro, I had zero support. No-one else in my family even knew how to turn it on. No teacher at my school could support me because none of them knew how it worked either. If I broke it, I had to fix it. And no Stack Overflow, so no code to copy-paste. I had to go back to first principles every time and work out what went wrong and how I could make it go right.

What is this weird obsession that we have with making children do everything the hard way? I understand that we want them to apply critical thinking and for them to grow into self-sufficiency, but why do we suggest these archaic hazing rituals?

We've made strides in many areas of technology. We have the power to troubleshoot a non-working laptop, unsuccessfully diagnose, and then re-image it to a saved state in less than a school day. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be consequences, but I think we can put Timmy's time to better use.

They same reason we teach them basic math that a calculator can easily do. The primary reason for schools it to learn. Learning to type "8 * 7 =" is different then learning what it means to multiple 8 by 7

These are two entirely different things. Is the goal to get them to troubleshoot a computer, or are they being issued laptops to enable their education? If it's the former, then I can kind of understand. Trial by fire and all that good stuff. However you just said yourself:

> we teach them basic math

Keyword here is teach. We do not give them a math book and tell them to figure out what 8 * 7 means. We break down the concept of multiplication into its constituent parts. In that same vein, we should enable the child to learn how to troubleshoot the system.

Like I said: I think we can put Timmy's time to better use.

>but why do we suggest these archaic hazing rituals?

Well, life is an archaic hazing ritual.

Which is all well and good until my students aren't able to - you know - do basic educational tasks because their computer 'is broken'.

If I - as a teacher - can do an immediate 'restore to neutral state' with core educational files and programs retained then by all means open them up.

Otherwise, I have to be curmudgeon and say that the existence of the computer in the classroom is to more effectively complete educational tasks. If having an open system gets in the way of that then the system should not be open.

The Chromebook 'powerwash' seems to fulfill this requirement nicely[1] - you can even let students drop the machine into Developer mode, play with Crouton[2] and so on, and if (when) things go wrong, poof, a single chord at startup and you're back. 1: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/183084?hl=en 2: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

This would have been great for you and me, but 95% of students won't even try. My kids barely know how the TV works, and have zero interest in learning how computers work, despite my efforts.

your kids know how the TV works better then you do. If you don't realize this you're not paying attention. Just because they don't care to write web apps doesn't mean they don't know what they are doing.

I'm sorry can you expand on that? I don't know how could average kids understand AC/DC Power, Signal transmission, different display types, etc better than average adults, especially those interested in technology, maybe I'm missing something from your comment?

I can, see you took my statement of "works" to mean they could explain to you why the Higgs field allows particles to have mass and then extrapolate that up to explain the existence of a TV. I simply meant they know how to use it for its desired purpose, better then most adults do.

If they did they wouldn't ask me to turn it on and find their shows for them. I finally had to put my foot down and now they are starting to do it againthemsekbes and maybe soon will be better than me at it.

But they still won't know or care how their computer works, or how to program.

I had a BBC Micro 10 years after they were being chucked in the bin. I was poor.

Still, that BBC Basic manual and copies of Micro User were mighty helpful - the manual was excellent! I am sure you agree.

It allows some of them to flourish. The rest of them just wreck the computer.

Right its important to protect them from anything bad that might happen to them.

Microsoft developed a solution that would allow you to program a BBC microbit without downloading software . See https://www.touchdevelop.com/microbit

At $189 for the computer they can afford to have a computer that is managed and always works and a bbc micro or raspberry pi for the student to hack on and tear up.

What makes unfettered access a necessary condition? Seems like kids flourish in all sorts of environments.

some kids, and certainly not the majority.