[TriLUG] How young is too young for linux-ish training?
Kevin Hunter
hunteke at earlham.edu
Wed Aug 31 11:48:38 EDT 2011
At 10:33pm -0400 Tue, 30 Aug 2011, Paul Szabady wrote:
> My 7 year-old grandson has been asking me for close to a year to
> teach him to build a website. Not knowing how to go about teaching
> someone that young, I finally just put up a site for him. He loved
> it for about a week, then started asking me to show him how to make
> changes.
At almost any age, and on almost any topic, I find the types of
questions someone asks is the best measure of what they're ready to
comprehend. You've already got his interest, which in education is a
good 90% of the battle. Let his questions guide where you go from there.
Put differently, the computer is a tool. Nothing more. (It's an
expensive and powerful tool, but it's still just a tool.) Thus, the
first question should not "how can I make it do /this/?", but rather
"What do I want to do?" The latter question should temper the former
into something more like "How can the computer /help/ me do it?"
If you start from the premise of "What would you like to build?", I
suspect it will engage him in words he understands, and enable him to
better articulate to you what he's ready to accomplish.
Cheers,
Kevin
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