From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Mar 12 15:57:24 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from femail12.sdc1.sfba.home.com (femail12.sdc1.sfba.home.com [24.0.95.108]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5169837B71B for ; Mon, 12 Mar 2001 15:57:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from europax@home.com) Received: from home.com ([24.12.186.185]) by femail12.sdc1.sfba.home.com (InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with ESMTP id <20010312235720.GKBZ2254.femail12.sdc1.sfba.home.com@home.com> for ; Mon, 12 Mar 2001 15:57:20 -0800 Message-ID: <3AAD626B.CC372925@home.com> Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 15:57:31 -0800 From: Rob X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG" Subject: How do you get kids interested in computers- other than playing games? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org My nephew spends just about every waking moment (other than school) in front of the computer playing games. So this Christmas I thought I'd expand his horizons by buying him a new Imac with SuSE Linux preinstalled by me. I showed him how to use the man pages and other documentation, and tried to explain to him why such a computer might be more interesting than a Windoze box. Well, he was pretty much flabbergasted and confused by this new computer (try accomplishing that with a teenager). He had no idea what to do with it, despite my attempts to explain how cool it might be to do some hacking and programming on it. To that end I showed him Python, and how easy it was to make programs. The computer has just sat unused for weeks. Did I screw up? Are children so used to being spoon-fed information that they no longer have the interest in independent investigation? This is a bright kid who claimed to have an interest in computers. Oh, well thanks for listening to my rant. Maybe it will just take some time. Rob. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message