I was driving my youngest son back from Beavers this evening and we were talking computers and games (he's 6). He reminded me that some of his games won't run on Vista which is why I'd installed dual booted XP on the kid's machine. He asked me if I'd played "Age of Mythology" when I was young. I had trouble explaining to him the concept of an audio cassette tape and how my Sinclair Spectrum took 15 minutes to load games. I tried LPs as a starting point to try and explain cassettes and he said "oh yes, one of our teachers bought one in once". To him it was a piece of ancient history.
The interesting point we reached was me trying to explain why I'd even upgraded the kid's PC to Vista in the first place. I couldn't come up with a good reason at all (so I made up some lame excuse about future support).
Perhaps we should explain all of our upgrade/purchase decisions to our children and try and justify it with them - it might help us to understand it ourselves!
Monday 8 December 2008
Testing Out IT Principles - With Children
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4 comments:
Awesome Chris, I wish every IT project needed to be filtered through a 6 year old before being approved; they tell it like it is after all. :)
Andrew, it was certainly refreshing having to go back to basics and explain technology in simple terms!
On a slightly unrelated topic, I made my children watch Carry On Doctor at the weekend so they could appreciate how good TV is now. When Kenneth Williams said "Ohh Matron!", my wife and I were on the floor with laughter. The kids thought we were on another planet.
My kids still tell me how cross they are that some old Windows 98-only games don't run on our XP machine (the 98 machine having gone to the hardware graveyard).
Dave
Yep, had those comments too - some old Win98 games we had couldn't cope with *more* than 256 colours! Fortunately the boys have outgrown those games.
We played a Wii racing game recently. Both the boys couldn't keep the car straight on the track. I played it and had no problem. They tried to claim I'd cheated somehow!
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