[ubuntu-uk] The problem with Bug #1

[James Tait]

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On 10/05/13 15:59, Byte Soup wrote:
> On 10 May 2013 10:02, James Tait <james.tait at wyrddreams.org 
> <mailto:james.tait at wyrddreams.org>> wrote:
> 
> On 09/05/13 23:04, SuperEngineer wrote:
>> just one final word (sentence)- my word "educate" was
>> deliberate... get the kids using Linux, let them think it's
>> 'normal'.
> 
> I'm sure my boys' response to that would be "Why, isn't it?"
> 
> Kids are impatient, they dont want to wait for things to happen,
> and generally they dont want to be bothered with installing a
> package or searching out equivalent application to get what they
> want, so when they google "how to do <something>" invariably the
> answers will all come back based on the most widely used operating
> system so they will say "why cant we just have a windows machine
> like our school / my mate steve etc"

And therein lies the opportunity for education.  It's not an easy
conversation to have with kids, admittedly, but it is one worth
having.  My point was that, in a household where all the computers run
Ubuntu, Windows would be considered the oddity - though I totally
understand your point.

> I can only speak from my personal experience, my kids are no
> strangers to different interfaces but they are not interested in
> bringing up a command shell to solve a problem and as this is not
> something seen commonly in the schools, so we'll end up with a lot
> of the next generation being more technology "consumers" than
> "creators" ... thats only my thoughts though.

My youngest (6) totally surprised me the other day.  My boys got into
Minecraft on my wife's Android phone, and wanted to play it on their
computer.  He looked it up on the Software Centre and it cost money,
so he came to me for help.  I ended up installing Minetest, a
GPL-licensed game of the same ilk, and we've been playing that.  I set
up a network server for us all to play on, but sometimes they play
single-player on their own machines.

My eldest (9) has created a world which he's called Nyancoaster, and
the youngest wanted to play on it.  Unfortunately there was a bug (now
fixed - we're using the daily PPA - which was a conversation in
itself) in the GUI that starts up a network server, which was causing
a segfault.  So I said I'd look into setting up a server for
Nyancoaster on the one machine that they could both connect to once
I'd finished work.  He went away and Googled for "Minetest server",
found the instructions and came to me to ask: "how do you get that
thing where you do your programmy thing?"  He meant the terminal, of
course, and once I showed him that he was quite happy to try the
commands himself.

Kids are impatient and demanding and want to do all the stuff their
friends do - but they're also inquisitive and fearless and sometimes
like to do something a little bit different to everyone else, and then
share it and have their friends say "Wow, that's cool!"  It's just a
matter of finding that thing that sparks the imagination.

JT
- -- 
- ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------
James Tait, BSc                        |    xmpp:jayteeuk at wyrddreams.org
Programmer and Free Software advocate  |        Tel: +44 (0)870 490 2407
- ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------

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