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Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

doudoulinux.org

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Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#31

Post by badminton1 »

oever wrote: post #24
badminton1 wrote: post #7

Reminds me a bit of the One Laptop Per Child project, which according to some people is a little bit defunct. They produced a distro called Sugar ( https://www.sugarlabs.org ) that might be worth looking into. Now tablets have largely overcome laptops as an inexpensive computing device for children. EDIT: not defunct as people let me know. thanks for pointing this out.

> which according to some people is a little bit defunct The blog is active. http://blog.laptop.org/ > Now tablets have largely overcome laptops as an inexpensive computing device for children. Children get exposed to horrible devices a lot. The One Laptop Per Child project gives children a device that is sturdy, energy efficient, easy to repair, and comes with full editable source code and no ties to brainwashing da…

Agreed. And tablets are very opaque too, UIs hide all the internals and don't leave much to learn... as opposed to early home computers like the ZX Spectrum, which exposed people to programming right away.

Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#32

Post by vanderZwan »

willvarfar wrote: post #18

I tried Doudou, and then Qimo, and finally gave up and gave my kids xubuntu. The sad truth is that the childrens games like Childs Play are sad stale games with hopeless UIs and glaring bugs like mislabelled animals in quizzes and things. I have lots of feedback from watching my kids learning to use and play with Doudou and Qimo; even though it is several years ago now, I think - from looking at the screenshots - tha…

I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery. You know, like the "low barrier to entry, high ceiling" principle of Smalltalk? Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe.

Also, I started out on DOS at the age of six, with the left-over computer my parents had after they upgraded the server at work. It had two hard drives of a whopping 40mb! Anyway, the neighbours next door had a slightly older son who explained to me how cd, copy, mkdir, del, etc. worked and he gave me a bunch of games via floppy disks. I didn't understand everything (this was before I spoke English, so no idea what the "park" command referred to or why it was important), nor knew why everything worked, or understood why some games didn't quite work when copied to the hard drive (because I didn't copy the sub folders) but I managed. Wanting to play games is a good motivator to learn any interface.

Based on Sugata Mitra's experiments, I'd say as an individual I wasn't exceptional in any way; give a group of kids a computer without an artificially low ceiling and watch them go! The circumstances I was in might have been unusual at the time, but that's different.

https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_...

We shouldn't underestimate the abilities of children to figure out how computers work.

Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#33

Post by kwhitefoot »

memsom wrote: post #17
saalaa wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doudou [1] is French for a kid's favorite, day and night, bring everywhere teddy bear. You can see further francophone influence in the use of SPIP (the CMS used for the website). [1] http://dictionnaire.reverso.net/francais-anglais/doudou

But in English, a "Doo-doo" is one of a kids favourite pass times before they are capable of doing much other than drinking milk and sleeping. If Google "doo doo", and you get a lot of pictures of excrement (NSFW, probably).

American English.

Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#34

Post by eric_bullington »

badminton1 wrote: post #7

Reminds me a bit of the One Laptop Per Child project, which according to some people is a little bit defunct. They produced a distro called Sugar ( https://www.sugarlabs.org ) that might be worth looking into. Now tablets have largely overcome laptops as an inexpensive computing device for children. EDIT: not defunct as people let me know. thanks for pointing this out.

My kids used Sugar as their primary OS until they were about 4/6 respectively. It was great, and they really got a lot of enjoyment out of the games.

When they reached elementary age, I then moved them to Ubuntu, which they happily use now to play online games, do their homework, etc.

Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#35

Post by Sykox »

mhd wrote: post #8

Where does this mention home schooling?

Sorry buddy!

I am member of group called Alt India (Stands for Alternative Education in India) And focus on home schooling

I got the mail from them titled home schooler OS and i thoought to share it here. Here is the original text:

This is a homeschooler's must. Every homeschooler should have a copy - and use it!

It is the future of computing...

Download, burn a DVD, use and distribute freely without the fear - and embarrassment - of stealing software and passing it around, unethically!

​It also teaches our children not to e-steal...anything!​ from: muriel&mario' anothergoa@gmail.com Reply-To: alt-ed-india@yahoogroups.com

Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#36

Post by keithpeter »

vanderZwan wrote: post #32
willvarfar wrote: post #18

I tried Doudou, and then Qimo, and finally gave up and gave my kids xubuntu. The sad truth is that the childrens games like Childs Play are sad stale games with hopeless UIs and glaring bugs like mislabelled animals in quizzes and things. I have lots of feedback from watching my kids learning to use and play with Doudou and Qimo; even though it is several years ago now, I think - from looking at the screenshots - tha…

I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery. You know, like the "low barrier to entry, high ceiling" principle of Smalltalk? Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. Also, I started out on DOS at the age of six, with the left-over computer my parents had after they upgraded the server at work. It had two hard drives…

Low floor, high ceiling activities (or low threshold, high ceiling in US) are a thing in Maths teaching as well.

http://www.mathematicalresilience.org/

http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/

and

http://www.bowlandmaths.org.uk/assessment/index.html

Latter has example activities and sample student responses.

Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#37

Post by pjmlp »

vanderZwan wrote: post #32
willvarfar wrote: post #18

I tried Doudou, and then Qimo, and finally gave up and gave my kids xubuntu. The sad truth is that the childrens games like Childs Play are sad stale games with hopeless UIs and glaring bugs like mislabelled animals in quizzes and things. I have lots of feedback from watching my kids learning to use and play with Doudou and Qimo; even though it is several years ago now, I think - from looking at the screenshots - tha…

I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery. You know, like the "low barrier to entry, high ceiling" principle of Smalltalk? Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe. Also, I started out on DOS at the age of six, with the left-over computer my parents had after they upgraded the server at work. It had two hard drives…

Fully agree with you.

I was a bit older at the age of 10, but on those days the Spectrum and C64 were the more advanced machines we could get hold of anyway.

So for the first two years it was mostly LOAD "", or trying to type-in listings from magazines that my father used to buy, mostly without success as they tended to have print errors we could not easily understand.

But eventually the bug stuck inside, and around the age of 12 I was already getting into Z80 Assembly.

Also it was great that back on those days, at least in Portugal we even got listenings on newspapers.

Many might remember the "A Capital" computer section on Fridays. :)

Re: Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old

#38

Post by pjmlp »

badminton1 wrote: post #31
oever wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which according to some people is a little bit defunct The blog is active. http://blog.laptop.org/ > Now tablets have largely overcome laptops as an inexpensive computing device for children. Children get exposed to horrible devices a lot. The One Laptop Per Child project gives children a device that is sturdy, energy efficient, easy to repair, and comes with full editable source code and no ties to brainwashing da…

Agreed. And tablets are very opaque too, UIs hide all the internals and don't leave much to learn... as opposed to early home computers like the ZX Spectrum, which exposed people to programming right away.

True, but in this regard iPads are actually quite good when compared with the alternatives.

Granted, kids will need their parents to install them the apps, but there are quite a few to play around with programming.

For example Pythonista.

And Apple now even is investing into it with the Playgrounds, of course not out of kindness, but also to get children hooked on Swift.

Then I would put Windows tablets on second, because most of them are hybrid computers, so there are some options there.

On Android parents are stuck with AIDE or apps that feel like people bundling text input fields with an eval button over the weekend. So nothing really appropriate here and 100% in sync with your remark.

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