[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



More information about the TriLUG mailing list