This is wholesome as hell.
Young people interested in tech always existed but there was half a generation long phase where it was just “people being raised by their parents to work at google one day.”
Computers don’t inherently mean “corporate” in peoples head and are becoming a hobby again.
Hope that some part of the world will continue to be like you? And if it is, that means it’s good for humanity? That’s…existential ego?
Some cynical bastards in here had no passions of their own when 10, I guess.
I could see myself as that 10 year old; just with regular ol’ IBM compatible machines and software around in the 90s. I literally begged to get online because I read about the internet in the encyclopedia when I was eight.
I had passions as a 10 year old, I just didn’t have any adults in my life that I saw regularly, with any expertise in a skill to help me flourish. I had to stumble and struggle through those beasts all on my own.
We used RM Nimbus at school, we moved onto Apple Macs in Year 5 and up to year 8 in secondary school. The first time I used Windows was win 95 when we got our first PC when I was in year 9. I just missed out on Netscape: (
I was used to ClarisWorks and MS Office wasn’t as intuitive and took a few sessions to master. Although if they’d been using the ui they have now, I’d have thrown in the towel. I use libreoffice at home and hate when I have to use ms office and its stupid ui at work.
I did teach myself HTML, php and a bit of JavaScript. I coded a forum software when I was 19 from scratch using php just to see if I could. Coding was my special interest at the time.
I am autistic so I’m excluded from this study.
No but there are studies that indicate early exposure to computers leads to high tech literacy.
Now that first exposure is a phone or tablet this no longer holds.
The few households that still have a normal computer, the kids will probably have a higher tech literacy if they use the computer.
Hope for the future = nerds exist?
Unironically yes.
I actually envy that 10 yr old. I had passion for tech at a very young age but I lacked the environment. My middle school and high school didn’t have computer / electronics classes so I was mostly self taught (had a lot of knowledge gaps/ had a hard time understanding). I didn’t start taking tech seriously till college.
Yep. I’m an 80’s kid. First PC I ever touched was a C64 in grade school, this was in 1991. At the next school, we had a single DOS PC and my high school only had a few DOS PC’s. This was in 1995. A year later our family bought our very first home desktop with Windows ‘95.
I absolutely would’ve loved it if my schools had good computers and actually taught tech at that time. But back in those days, computers were seen as something nerdy and generally useless.
I basically had to discover and learn about tech on my own. Which I did enthusiastically. I carried a Palm Pilot through college and even wrote software for it.
I know people will go “and everbody clapped”/ “never happened” but I did meet tech nerds at both middle and high school. I wasn’t deep into tech stuff by 13, but I already had growing passion by then, and when I was 16 or so I went to a program (public and free) school that focused on tech, where I met a bunch of people who had been tinkering with stuff since elementary school. So a 13 year old who works with raspberry pi and Linux is very believable. Have faith people.
For sure! Raspberry Pi started as an education foundation and a big target audience is kids/the classroom. There’s BEST Robotics which in my area was hit pretty tragically by COVID, but there is VEX as well. And did you know you can probably dual boot Linux from your school issued Chromebook so that you can program Lua for your Roblox mod? I didn’t! A kid taught me.
did you know you can probably dual boot Linux from your school issued Chromebook so that you can program Lua for your Roblox mod? I didn’t! A kid taught me.
Funny that you say that, cause our school locked our Chromebooks down so much that we literally couldn’t use the terminal or change 90% of the settings. Schools basically force kids to be tech illiterate by disabiling and crippling our systems.
They do a poor job of it too, security-wise. They put in all this effort and there’s still kids watching porn on their computers and downloading random .exes and running them.
And everybody clapped.
When I met my now wife’s 13 year old, his first question was “So I’m building a Linux machine, which file system should I use?”
We had a good discussion about the pros and cons of the different file systems.
He’s gone on in the AI space, speaking at conferences and delivering papers and such.
He’s gone on in the AI space, speaking at conferences and delivering papers and such.
I’m sorry for your loss…
I know, right? 😂
And that at 13 years old? /jk
Maybe he’ll grow out of it?
Lies, all these words and you didn’t say which file system was the best. I bet your wife goes to a different school.
It’s ext4, always ext4.
ZFS would like a word
Oh, isn’t the question a wordplay? btrfs…
And then there was me that at school we were still using 286s with turbo pascal during the windows XP era
Edit: it was hilarious that the computers didn’t have an hard drive and every student had to have a bootable floppy with dos 5 or something like that, on this way the teacher didn’t have to worry about viruses and hard disk corruption lol
My flagging faith in humanity has been partially restored.
I want to know more about the school. Public? Private?
FOSS
I like that it’s free and open source, but I’m not sure how much I’d trust a school that’s software only…
The second S is for school
Depends on your area. In my public school area we had two schools related to tech, and I actually ended up attending both. I feel like the more selective one did have a far better program, but it was completely free. Other nearby cities had public school CTE programs too, but idk how good they were.
But I definitely did meet Linux and coding freaks at both, but more at the better program school.
The nature is healing!
The reason I got into coding was because my primary school teacher had us playing around in Logo on a ZX Spectrum. That fucker.
Now teach the kid about salvaging old hardware, repurposing old laptops as low-power servers. It’s a lot easier to justify for a kid than the expense of buying stuff, and greener.
Well, certainly that wasn’t in Germany.
