Programming and Shaping Minds?
J_McQuade: I'm going to go against the grain a bit here and recommend that the parents try to pick up an old 8-bit micro for the kid.When I was a young'un, I also had a major fascination with computers (guess it didn't wear off...) and managed to badger my mum into getting me a ZX Spectrum 128 from a car boot sale in the run up to a birthday (perhaps my 10th?). This was already old technology, then - we had a Windows 95 machine at home - but I didn't care. It was MY computer and, with the help of a few yellowed books and the first two volumes of INPUT magazine, I could make it do what I wanted!I think that this was a very powerful introduction to programming - a good few years of PEEKing and POKEing and dipping into assembly every now and again is perhaps the most natural way to develop intuitive ideas as to how computers work and, although BASIC is frowned upon, it's always good to find out why the hard way! A lot of these ideas sound scary now, but on a small machine a kid can really go wild with them, and that freedom can be the best learning tool of them all.And another plus with this plan - the kid gets a cool new gizmo. ;)