williamedwardscoder:

My two girls - 3 and 5 - got a computer for Christmas! Its just an old desktop running Qimo but it is theirs and they’re thrilled.

I haven’t shown shown them how to do anything; they have worked it all out from themselves. Early on, though, I started paying attention to what they had worked out; they were building little mental models of how computers work.

One of their favourite programs is TuxPaint. It is a nice painting program for kids. In it there is a button that creates a new canvas. As it does so, it asks you if you want to save your current picture. The girls had been clicking the ‘yes’ button (not that they can read the button text at all; just from trial and error they know the green button takes them forwards).

The other day they discover a button that lets them load a saved picture; so, clicking on it, they see every picture they have ever done!

I didn’t witness this, but I’d have loved to see their faces.

Anyway, I did look in on them a while later. And they were systematically opening each saved picture… and erasing it. I asked them why…

So they could reuse the paper, they said.

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