The kid’s grandparents got him an Amazon Fire tablet and I loathe the thing. It teaches literally nothing about computing and the games they have for kids are barely even games, and are more focusing on advertising various IPs.
I’d like to get the kid started, as he learns to read, on something that will be more useful than detrimental, let that soft little brain soak up some actual computer science, literacy. I teach him about basic electrical circuits and how that translates to computing, if, and, or, xor, nor, etc. He’s got some familiar with hex (colors) and the concept of binary (on/off).
But what to get for a first computer? I almost want to get him something Linux based and turn him loose. Is there anything like that, that would require him to learn some command prompt and basic computing skills?
Every time and try and Google it, I get a bunch of crap suggestions and ads.
The kid is five, and it’s an android device. You have options without trashing the thing.
Sideload some open source games through F-Droid, set up a simple emulator frontend/app with a few age appropriate games. Lemuroid is a pretty straightforward emulator frontend with a decent UI for a kid to poke the boxart they want to play and just go, but I’m not sure how much you could lock it down to prevent them from borking the settings.
Lock the kid’s access to the app store the fuck down. Install an on-device-vpn based adblocker like blokada or rethink dns to block ads across all apps on the device. It might break some games but the overwhelming majority will just fallback to “you don’t have an internet connection” functionality at worst.
You can look up how to enable adb on the device, then plug it into your computer and use https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater to remove/disable built-in apps you don’t need. There’s a ton you can do with adb to tweak the device, but uad is the most user friendly way.
If you want to push programming, others have mentioned a version of swift that’s available on the kindle fire. Someone else mentioned Luanti as an open source minecraft clone, which I know is available through F-Droid (but can be quite janky due to not being made for phones/tablets).
I will definitely follow up on some of these. I have some limited experience with ADB. I have a PiHole for DNS; think I need a VPN, too? It definitely breaks some things for me, but when that happens I know I’m better off without it. Thanks for the reply.
Actually, the mobile/touch screen client side has gotten more love lately! I would recommend Luanti, especially with the mineclonia game, since Minecraft is so common they’ll have more to talk about with friends who play Minecraft, and not feel left out. The redstone stuff just recently got redone to the point it feels very similar to Minecraft, and I’ve found it’s actually a fun way for them to learn about programming, although mine, at 6, still struggles with the concepts and I’d be very surprised if a 5yo got a grasp on them properly. But then again it is entirely possible they are less logically inclined than their peers, and maybe they come more naturally to most other kids. But even so, it’s productive fun. It promotes imagination and sticking to a project in longer term. Building up things is fun for all kids I bet, but add to it the need to go gather, search and produce the tools and materials to build, it teaches some important life lessons too, that would not be so easy to convey otherwise. And with all this, it’s still just fun. If they get frustrated, they can just instead go sail across the seas and spelunk in some caves.
Screen time has to be enforced a lot more though, since it’s so easily addictive. If one doesn’t put boundaries on it from the start, it’ll get unhealthy and hard to shake. A lot of grumpiness is bound to follow, unless really carefully keeping limits from the get-go.