Learning stories
Please add your favorite stories about learning here.
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Just a simple but amazing application of the laptop as a reading and writing tool. My 2 year old Peter loves his abc books and has extended this love to the computer. Using Google images he types in a word presses "return" and gets to see a picture of what he wrote. At 2.5 years old he goes through the entire alphabet, "apple" to "zebra" and uses the computer with a proficiency that he has learned from trial and error.
I learnt to program a computer at a very young age (around 5 or 6). Like many programmers my age, I first learnt to program in BASIC on a c64. Unlike many programmers who learnt to program at a young age, my family was poor. We received the c64 as a christmas present on Dec 28, as we had to wait until the post-christmas sales for it to drop to a price my parents could afford. Every birthday or christmas, my two brothers and I would receive presents in the form of software (mostly games) to capitalize on the investment in a computer that my parents had made. I remember spending long days during school holidays entering lines and lines of BASIC and machine code from magazines, just to make it play a tune or display some poorly drawn graphics. Through reading other people's programs I learnt to write my own, and shortly after learnt assembler, Pascal, C and many other computer languages.
I always thought that small computers, which even poor families could afford, would be available to help children learn, but around the end of the 80's, this phenomona died and it wasn't until the late 90's, with the arrival of the internet, that the concept of a family computer caught on again. Perhaps the OLPC project can do for someone in the third world what the c64 did for me.. but maybe, just maybe, it can do so much more.