My mom sent me a photo of me when I was about 8 years old, playing on the home computer. It was very expensive to have a computer in Brazil at that age, and my parents used it for their work. I used it for games. I grew up using computers. Just getting the games to run, was something that needed knowledge back then. That lead me to at my teenage years, to try out programming, cause I wanted to make some changes to the open source version of a mmorpg my brother and I played. That lead me to choosing computer science. That lead me to being a FAANG engineer. I had a leg up agaisnt every single one of my peers during all my teenage and university years. When my peers were learning to use a computer, I was already programming. When they were learning to program, I was already good at it. You say that computer for young kids have no value? Useless? That computer usage was the single most valuable thing that has happened to me in all of my life!

Yeah keep scrolling down until you see that comment from a teacher who thinks it’s a distraction.

In general Just because you had a clear purpose for and interest in computers doesn’t mean it’s gonna be the same for other kids

Which open source version of an MMORPG was that? If you don't mind me asking.

Tibia.

Not to be antagonistic, but this story makes it sound like your advantage came from the fact you had a computer early and your peers didn't. If everyone gets one, there is no advantage. You've just created a new necessity instead.

That's an odd takeaway but even if you're right, people who don't use computers suffer a massive disadvantage. Even more so if all their peers used computers. Doesn't change the fact that GP's "parents, teachers, and students [...] should never have been using computers in the first place" is nonsensical flamebait

The advantage came from being better at it sooner in life. That’s an advantage for a productive society.

> If everyone gets one, there is no advantage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking

That's exactly the kind of experience kids with chromebooks issued by a school are not going to get. An old Commodore would be more helpful.

Similar experience. Having one in the 90's was a pivotal point in setting my life.

You don't use gdocs to learn gdocs. You use it to write an essay or something. It is a tool, like a pen.

Which is only needed at the end of secondary school, and only at higher levels. Before that, essays are very short, and should be handwritten, or they not even part of the curriculum.

If we want schools to reflect useful skills, we'd be better off introducing typing and computer skills younger and dropping the requirement for cursive penmanship.

This has already been done (in many cases, 15+ years ago) at most American grade schools -- touch-typing and computer skills instruction now starts only 1 or 2 years after handwriting instruction. This means it is introduced in 2nd or 3rd grade. (Most essay-writing remains on paper until 6th grade, though)

ah yes of course why should a school teach kids not relevant knowledge like computer?

Perhaps to make sure that poor kids can never learn it or what is your logic behind this?

I am married to a teacher who teaches 8-9 year olds. This is her perspective from many years with that age group.

Computers and screens are introduced too early. The kids just use them to zone out and mess around.

The kids all forget their passwords, so login is a pain. To solve this the school made the same password for all. Some brat sets all the girls avatars to boobs. The various ways kids look up porn is a continual frustration.

It doesn’t add to the learning, it makes lazy teachers lives easier. Some classes play Minecraft - I’m unclear how that’s teaching. Some use iPads to take creative photos. It’s not creative and is a waste of time and lazy.

Computers have a place in schools, and it’s with older kids than 8-9 and needs to be way more prescriptive when used with <10 year olds.

>Some classes play Minecraft - I’m unclear how that’s teaching

There are definitely ways to teach within Minecraft. Redstone springs to mind, but I imagine there are others.

> The kids all forget their passwords, so login is a pain.

I really wish Google would make fingerprint sensors standard for Chromebooks.

I'm not sure collecting kids biometrics makes anything better. Fingerprints are easy to find, capture, and replicate using things students have readily available like glue or gummy bears (https://it.slashdot.org/story/10/10/28/0124242/aussie-kids-f...). Once a fingerprint is compromised the user is screwed forever because it can't be reset.

You have a point, but I don't think a thirteen year old slashdot post is the best way to illustrate it. Fingerprint authentication has to be implemented correctly, or else it does face the problem you mentioned, and other ones as well. Which Apple did. You can't steal the fingerprint out of an Apple Secure Enclave and compromise it like you're thinking. So it would need to be done right, which Google is capable of mandating for Chromebooks.

As far as Gummy bears are involved, my read of the Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence group report*, vs the competency and resources available to 13-year olds (who are not to be underestimated, tbc), is that the gummy bear trick no longer works.

* https://blog.talosintelligence.com/fingerprint-research/

How many of us learned about computers first because we were playing video games, such as minecraft? How many of us learned what a "frame" was, and learned that "RAM" and "HDD" were things?

That familiarity builds over years to give you a half decent mental model for a computer - one that is a massive aid to college freshman learning CS.

Perhaps screens are being introduced too early, certainly there is a point where a game like minecraft is not teaching, but I wouldn't dismiss the concept outright. Familiarity with computers is why some kids soar through CS degrees and others feel like they were missing some secret pre-college class.

The thing is that most schools use platforms that are mainly meant for consumption: tablets and chrome books. You're right that many people in the previous generations picked up useful skills, but that is because we were using platforms that were primarily intended for work and creation. They were also a lot less streamlined so understanding the underlying tech was a requirement to get to the good parts.

I would love to here about how Waldorf education impacted your and your wife's adult life compared to the average bear. I am so close to moving so that my child can go to a Steiner school...

Waldorf schools are dangerous anti-vax strongholds https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/nyregion/measles-outbreak...

It’s certainly there but my experience is that it isn’t that different to what goes on at the school (non Waldorf) where my wife teaches.

That said, I’m in New Zealand, which was quite highly vaccinated and also mandated vaccinations for teachers.

I rate the system for getting kids to want to learn - not just at school, after finishing schooling too.

Waldorf school have a nazi like base idea that you can evaluate people/kids based on their head forms (no joke)

Pls try not to support something like this :(

They really should just print the password and tape it to the inside of the lid...

I tend to agree.

One counter point is that I learnt how to touch type at that age at school, admittedly on an Apple II which limited most of the problems you listed. It has been a handy skill to have.

I like the idea of kids robotics with Scratch. I want to believe that there is an opportunity with children to experience the excitement of blinking an Led with a microbit for example and suspect it would be more difficult for teenagers.

Mostly I want my kids to have an understanding of what computers can be used to create earlier than later.

That's exactly what they're not going to learn. There's nobody to teach software engineering. The only thing they learn is to copy-paste from wiki into gdocs. They'll leave school with the same computer knowledge as they entered.

Writing papers in a word processor is a far different experience from writing papers on paper.

Thankfully. Handwriting caused me massive hand cramping until much later in life when I re-trained myself to hold a pen differently. A lot of my school essays were optimized for the fewest number of words that met the base requirements.

That in itself is a useful skill, but I don't recommend it as a coping mechanism to avoid physical pain.

Yeah, writing on a word processor is a million times better (at least it is for me).

Don't get me wrong, I do think it's bad that writing things by hand is becoming more and more rare all the time. In particular, handwritten letters and notes have an extra bit of "personal touch" to them that can make them very valuable to the recipient.

However, from the time I was in High School to today I would never want to be required to write a paper, well, strictly on paper (from the beginning). I want all of that ability to quickly edit at my fingertips.

As someone who has physical problems writing by hand, papers I wrote by hand in school where better. Being forced to slow down gave me mental time to edit before I committed to page, by the time my pencil made a mark I was already on the 2nd or 3rd revision of what I was going to write.

I also have physical problems writing by hand, and it led to me handing in a lot of unfinished essays after running out of time in exams. If I hadn't gotten a special dispensation to type my exams later on, I wouldn't really have anything to show for my education. Before my issues were diagnosed, my teachers and parents felt that it was due to a lack of effort on my part and that they could punish me into writing properly, and I feel that having access to Chromebooks is worth it if it even spares one kid from having to deal with that.

On a computer I can easily rewrite the same phrase 10 times, reorganize a sentence for the best sounding flow, move or remove whole paragraphs multiple times, until I am satisfied I have said what I wanted to say in the best way I know how.

I can save off any number of possibilities and compare them side by side.

Also, none of this prevents me from spending 30 minutes beforehand thinking about what I am about to write. Although, I will admit, even if I do that I am likely to have at least a text editor open to jot down a few notes as I think about it.

I do agree, however, that the up-front thinking is a very good idea.

Okay, and? Hand written papers haven't been a thing in nearly 2 decades unless it was some form of punishment. Also, teachers don't want to have to context switch between reading each paper, adjusting to each student's handwriting

Handwritten essays are still widely used in testing environments (including those arguably most important to a student's future, AP tests).

You listed the one exception to the rule. Most AP tests (physics, math, econ, etc) don't have that. Even the SAT essay is gone. That one AP test the final stronghold for an obsolete medium

The ones you listed still have FRQs that require critical thinking. Econ is writing a paragraph and drawing a graph, as I recall, and Physics has a question where you have to reason out an experiment. And all of the history and english ones require long form writing.

Weird, I don't remember writing paragraphs for any of those tests. I took almost all the AP tests available, tho that was a decade ago. At most I labeled some axes and that was enough for perfect scores

> Okay, and?

You seem to be violently agreeing with me that there is a point to giving kids computers to use gdocs.

For me it's the lack of context switching that would get to me. I'm many years out of school (for now) but I do remember having a blank page in front of me as being somewhat inspiring. It was a new, fresh invitation to write something. Ctrl + N in a word processor just opens up a new window, and for whatever reason, doesn't carry that same weight of inspiration.

My boss always loves it when I write the documentation for my code on a wide-ruled paper in cursive instead of in our Wiki system.

I mean you can apply this kind of comment to literally any technology. Cars, carpentry, electricity… computing is part of the fabric of society and making it totally inaccessible won’t help anyone. Imagine this:

> Who should never have been using electricity in the first place. There's really no point. Using power tools and washing machines doesn't teach anything of value. A lot of the other appliances are pricey and sometimes even detrimental to the school result.

The weird thing is: arguments change their meaning when you change the words. But indeed, washing machines wouldn't be very useful in a school.

> Who should never have been using computers in the first place.

Is... is this comment in good faith? Are you sure about that, bud? Parents and teachers shouldn't be using computers in the first place?

What a concerning and confusing view of the world.