Re:Show HN: Programming Time - Playing card game to teach yo...
by keerthiko on Thursday February 24, 2022 @10:21PM
(#30463382)
> I believe typing in early age will lead to carpal-tunnel syndrome so I'm not pushing my kids to learn typing.
Typing extensively and without proper ergonomics will lead to carpal-tunnel and other syndromes. Not teaching them proper posture and typing ergonomics as kids means when they inevitably have to use computers in school/college/work, they will be much more likely to develop a strain-based condition.
Re:Show HN: Programming Time - Playing card game to teach yo...
by antattack on Thursday February 24, 2022 @10:38PM
(#30463461)
I would argue there's no 'proper posture' for child's hands on adult sized keyboards and keys.
Re:Show HN: Programming Time - Playing card game to teach yo...
by throwaway47292 on Friday February 25, 2022 @03:16AM
(#30464834)
backspace and enter are especially an issue, i teach her to use ctrl+h and ctrl+j capslock being control, on windows i made https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/tree/master/... to help with that
Re:Show HN: Programming Time - Playing card game to teach yo...
by mavhc on Friday February 25, 2022 @08:03AM
(#30466798)
Spending half your time dragging with the mouse seems to cause way more wrist issues than typing. For me at least
Re:Show HN: Programming Time - Playing card game to teach yo...
by antattack on Friday February 25, 2022 @08:44AM
(#30467144)
At least pointing devices come in different shapes and forms, including vertical and trackballs. We used to enable chrome accessibility feature [1] to automatically drag-click when the mouse button is stopped. Although, as kids got faster they turned it off. It's a nice option to have.
[1]https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/how-to-make-your-mouse-click-...
One of the reasons why we made auto-clicking mouse is so, when playing games, they don't have to click it crazy fast (besides it being fun project). To increase keyboard ergonomics I am thinking on a custom keyboard with programmable keys to, for example to turn long-press space into backspace, shift space to enter.
In my experience Scratch or SNAP! are great to learn programming. We recently made auto-clicking mouse with microPython and I could see they understood the code well because of their experience with Scratch.
My kids like to follow tutorials by griffpatch on YouTube which I think are superb.