I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and xmonad (2012)

Re:I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and x... by TeMPOraL on Thursday November 04, 2021 @06:10PM (#29113108)

> Children pay attention to very small details. (...)

They do. All your examples are correct, for the first few encounters. Then they bucket these things as "leaves", "spiderwebs", etc. and stop caring. Complex does not mean interesting (see also my parallel reply here: [0]).

> A photo gallery in a smartphone is extremely dull in comparison

No, it isn't. Not only the photos in the gallery are likely to be complex, with each showing a slice of the real world, they're also likely to be varied - each one may show a completely different situation, scene, context. And they're unpredictable, surprising.

The one constant of the natural world is that what you see now is roughly the same as what you saw a second ago, or a minute ago. There's only so much of the world around you, it's persistent, and except in emergency situations, stable. Kids learn to tune it out very quickly[1]. Meanwhile, smartphones are those magic rectangles filled with varied, unpredictable, immediate reactions to input.

> and that's why they can learn to use it immediately.

Kids are smart and much more persistent than adults at figuring things out, meanwhile UX designers are assuming users are drooling idiots and designing interfaces that are more trivial than those on Fischer Price toys. It's a perfect storm, so no surprise little kids figure smartphones out very quickly.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29113029

[1] - Not being able to would be debilitating.

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Re:I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and x... by mmustapic on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:00AM (#29118004)

Not my experience at all with kids.

> There's only so much of the world around you, it's persistent, and except in emergency situations, stable. Kids learn to tune it out very quickly

Kids know very little about the world, so everything is new, amazing and umpredictable. Some rock or stairs to jump from, throwing a paper plane a thousand times, playing the sand building something for hours.

With pictures, at least when they are young, they usually want to see the same ones over and over again, and mostly of people they know, but I guess there are kids that like a bit more variety.

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