When did you introduce your kids to a ___Technology?

When did you introduce your kids to a tablet?

Age 4-6 Tablet Training

They have the best parental settings, and you can Create a Child Profile on Your Fire Tablet and price when on sale, compaired to an iPad.

They where limited to 1 hour screen time.

Later on when the PC’s came in, the tablet’s became a Car Travel tool.

When did you introduce your kids to a PC?

For Context, I have 4 Boys at the time of writting 2024-04-02, They are 12, 10, 7 and 3 months old.

Age 6-8 Start with Raspberry Pi

From the age of 6-8 I started having them work with thier own Raspberry Pi’s.

We used this Kit

Talking with my wife, She thinks our 2ed born was more ready to do the PC starting at age 6, verses our first born wasn’t ready till age 8.

Projects and working time

Each weekend we would set the timer for 2 hours. Set up Thier Desk with a monitor each, and the other parts neeeded.

They had to learn how to compleatly assemble them (From bare bones), Hook up each of the cables.

HDMI
USB Keyboard
USB Mouse
Speakers

This also gave a LOT of opportunity to learn troubleshoot skills to WHY something wasn’t working.

We went through the Raspberry Pi Books that came with the kits to first to learn how to flash an OS onto them.

Early Programming

Then We started on scratch (Drag and Drop) programming to create thier own games.

After setting up the Raspberry Pi’s we started to create games.

We started with DK Workbooks: Coding in Scratch: Games Workbook: Create Your Own Fun and Easy Computer Games

After the workbook we did these flashcards

After about a year Later we tried some Minecraft programming with python, But they pi’s didn’t have the software for arm and the book was for x86.

About this time is when we had them build thier own PC’s.

Age 7-9 Starter PC Build

We went with a simple build,

2021 Boys PC Build Most Games don’t use over 4 Cores, so we went with a basic i3, with room to upgrade if needed.

Case Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L - I love this case because of the airflow and ease of building
CPU Intel Core i3-10100 Desktop Processor 4 Cores - Most Games don’t use over 4 Cores, so we went with a basic i3, with room to upgrade if needed.
Motherboard GIGABYTE B460M DS3H V2 - at the time it was a cheap baord with built in wifi
RAM Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB great bang for buck, and very reliable
Power supply Seasonic S12III 500 SSR-500GB3 500W 80+ Bronze wanted a reliable, trusted brand.

If I was to build a starter PC for my kids today I’d go with this list

Case

Motherboard

MSI and Gigabyte motherboards have been very reliable
Intel MSI PRO B760M-P DDR4 ProSeries Motherboard
AMD MSI PRO B550M-VC WiFi

Consuming or Creating Content

We have the boys record videos, then edit and post them online (after I’ve helped review them).

We aren’t just consuming others content, but also giving them an opportunity to create and learn some new skills.

Teaches them that contribution is equally important as consumption, If not more really.

I took them through a youtube creation seminar, so they start to learn other skills too.

Other Educational Resources we found helpful

https://www.kiwico.com

https://www.crunchlabs.com

If you are interested I can get you a refferal link for Kiwico or Crunchlabs of these, just let me know!

Books

DK Workbooks: Coding in Scratch: Games Workbook: Create Your Own Fun and Easy Computer Games

100 Things to Know About Numbers, Computers & Coding

Codes and Cyphers

Over 50 Secret Codes

To help fund the projects I work on, the links are Amazon Affiliate links. This will let amazon know I sent you, and give me a small kickback if you buy that product. None of these are sponsorship, they do not get to see what I am saying about the products before I post online. Theses are products that I use and recommend!