Linux, CLI and xmonad for your two young sons = awesome. You sound like a pretty darn cool father. :)

First, thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it!

Don’t think that 17 is too late to start programming. There’s still a lot of years left and a lot of time to pursue your dream, whatever it may be. I might suggest you take a look at diveintopython.net. It’s a way to help you get started hands-on.

I’ve actually written a number of posts about what they’re doing; you can see them at: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/category/technology/children-computing

Good luck!

My first computer was a TRS-80 CoCo II running BASIC. I haven’t touched BASIC in many, many, many years. The *tool* became obsolete but the *knowledge* and problem-solving skills didn’t. I learned about the fundamental logical nature of computers, about loops and commands, about moving data from disk to RAM and such.

Kids love to explore. They don’t start out with preconceived notions of what’s good or bad. Linux isn’t the only thing, and computers aren’t the only thing. The boys have plenty of other activities and will encounter other operating systems. But somebody that only ever uses a tablet will have no idea how to write software to run on that tablet!

So it’s great that your kids are learning the fundamentals, and I hope to teach my kids some of that too. But just as I know about punched cards but never use that knowledge I feel our kids will probably know about command lines but never ever use them.

It’s a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? They will discover what’s interesting as they go along. It might be computers, it might not. I’ve provided them an option. I don’t see xmonad as being particularly different from Windows in that regard. Everybody with kids that use computers makes some choices for them about operating system and software, and it’s that way here too. I’m not sure that’s precisely what you asked, but I hope it helps.

They certainly have many non-computer interests as well, though.

This is asked out of complete, genuine curiosity, so I hope you don’t take offense: is there no part of you that feels like you are perhaps forcing some interests upon the kids, though? I mean, I can see both sides of the argument here. On one side.. they’re 2 and 5. How do they know what they think is interesting?

Maybe they’ll just grow out of it if they really don’t like it.

Anyhow, thanks for the read!

Thank you for doing this, it was inspirational to me.

You may like this physics game:
http://numptyphysics.garage.maemo.org/

Thanks for the article.

While I made no such claim, nevertheless it seems that in general, people familiar with the command line — any command line — have a better understanding of computing than those that don’t. Causation – maybe not. Perhaps correlation. I don’t intend to withhold GUIs or Windows or whatever from them. Just introduce them to a broader world.

It’s more important to instil the curiosity into learners than indoctrinating them in some mad keyboard only world, in which the rest of the real world don’t live.

Feel free to make your kids different (remember kids can be cruel and always look to the different), but make them different by building on the norms. Let them use windows/mac/linuxgui, and let them experiment with everything else, its a complete non-sequitur that a GUI user cannot be as educated as a terminal user.

They have no problem with running startx. It is a command like any other to them.

It’s hard enough to predict what technology will be like 2 years down the road, let alone children!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses

One question: Which X terminal are they using? The one from Xfce, or something simpler like rxvt?

Also, you should check out the MARY speech synthesizer (http://mary.dfki.de/). It requires Java, so it’s more memory-hungry than eSpeak. But the cmu-bdl-hsmm voice is very nice, and it’s free software. The default client is a GUI app, but it’ll be easy for you to whip up a command-line client once you learn the HTTP interface (you’ll be running a server on the local machine). Too bad MARY isn’t in Debian.

As John states, this way gives a sense of ownership which beats nice user interfaces any day.

You are probably projecting what YOU think is more interesting. AFAIK and have seen, kids do not have a particular fancy for nice graphics, they even pick up sticks from the ground and have a field day.

How do you explore a so called “smartphone” or a tablet if you are 3-5 years old? Those devices reduce you into a consumer, they do not invite to exploration. Especially if you are not tech savvy.

For the record I tried tuxpaint with my 8 month old child, definitely not ready for it. Nor ready for the command line, we are in literal bash (everything with your hands) mode. :-)