Zvi has many articles on children and education:
Steven Byrnes recommended a few resources on X:
MATH: @DragonBox - A+, whole series of games running from basic numeracy thru geometry & algebra. Excellent gameplay, well-crafted, kid loves it.
.@numberblocks (Netflix) - A+, basic numeracy, addition, multiplication. Kid must have watched each episode 10 times, and enthused about it endlessly.
Counting Kingdom @LittleWorldsInt - A+, mastering mental addition. Excellent gameplay (even fun for adults). Note: not currently available on ipad; I got it on PC Steam.
.@SliceFractions & Slice Fractions 2 - A+, great gameplay, great pedagogy, kid now understands fractions thanks in significant part to this game, 'nuff said.
An old-fashioned pocket calculator - A+, an underrated toy
READING: Explode the Code book series - A, been around since at least the 1980s, still good.
.@MonstersCanRead - B+, gameplay is a bit repetitive & difficulty progressed too quickly, but got a few hours of great learning in there before he lost interest
.@Poio_Official - A-, Good gameplay, kid really liked it. Limited scope but great for what it is.
(General note: For reading, no individual thing seemed to make a huge difference and none of them kept his interest too long. But it all added up, bit by bit, and now he's over the hump, reading unprompted. Yay!)
PROGRAMMING - @ScratchJr - A+, duh
Here are some computer programs that my kids used before they started school:
Tux Paint - a simple drawing program that a 3 years old child can handle (or 2 years old with touchscreen)
Sound Recorder - they enjoyed recording their songs and stories; later we burned the best ones on CD and distributed them to the family
Paint 3D - sadly, Microsoft killed it :(
Inkscape - vector graphics, okay this one was too difficult for them; they made a few pictures but didn't really enjoy it
Pocket platformer - create your own simple platform games
Stunts (in eXoDOS) - a car-driving game from previous millennium, but it allows you to edit your own levels
Sauerbraten - a first-person shooter, but more importantly a very simple 3D editor; my kids only use it to edit
...in hindsight, I wish I replaced Inkscape with Paint.NET and/or Pencil2D, but the general idea was to introduce the computer as a tool for creating your own projects; and when kids start playing games, to prioritize ones that come with level editors. I think I succeeded here. (But I couldn't find enough good games with level editors.)
These days my kids are programming in Scratch; and they find their own games online, so that part is no longer under my control.
We also played The Legend of Kyrandia (also in eXoDOS), but there was no educational goal behind it, only showing the kids the kind of games I used to play.
Second on Tux Paint
tux racer (penguin sledding) and supertux (platformer) are games with level editors, my three year old loves supertux and its level editor but it is a well-put together enough game to start to be addicting to him.
Whenever he sees me working, I'm on a terminal, and he wanted to learn how to use a terminal. I taught him how to type
```
sl
sl -a
sl; sl
sl | lolcat
cowsay hi
```
etc
and he found this very amusing. Often will demand to "make a train" if I get the laptop out where he can see me.
I am curious about your experience/opinion on this thing:
A computer can be a tool (editing or programming or learning), or a toy (playing games). I believe that it is better to learn using it as tool first, and as a toy later... and the social networks ideally as late as possible.
That's because if you don't know about the games, the editors are also lots of fun: a three years old child is excited about painting on the screen. But if you already know about the games, the editors are boring; it's like eating your cake first, and then being given broccoli.
Some people say that if your kids play Minecraft or Roblox, it will encourage them to start making their own levels. Sounds kinda plausible, but in my (very limited) experience, I didn't see such thing actually happen.
Once we organized a vacation together with some other families whose parents also work in IT. Each child had their own notebook there, so we made one big common computer room for kids. It was a lot of fun, the kids showed each other what they were doing. But my children were alternating between playing games, painting, and programming; children from the other families just kept playing Minecraft all the time.
So I recommend teaching your kids to use the computer as an editor before they join school (because afterwards they will take their lessons from their classmates). I'm curious if you agree or disagree.
Agree. Wonder whether one should go a step further: Rather than a specific 'wiki'/series of comments, maybe the domain would deserve an entire tagged (and ideally hideable for those rather categorically uninterested) sub-part of LessWrong, which which I mean: entire LW domain with posts of all LW categories and genres etc., but clearly targetting mostly only parents of children.
I guess that would then become a question of filtering out specific tags for users.
For the moment, the tag system exists. It'd be straightforward to make a Children or Parenting or somesuch tag. Users can filter what posts they want to show up by tag, though not everyone knows how to do it.
(I'm not saying this to imply the subdomain idea is bad, just that the tag version would be easy to implement.)
According to recent surveys, the average age of LessWrong readers is 30±10 years, and about 15% of readers have one or more children. That means that although most readers are childless, there are enough parents here to have a discussion about parenting.
There are various topics that parents can be interested it.
Some advice will apply to children in general. Why should we discuss it on LessWrong, if there are already thousands of websites dedicated to this topic? The other websites disagree with each other, and we may want to separate good advice from superstition.
But we also need advice that applies more specifically to our community. According to surveys, the average IQ of LessWrong readers is 135±10, which means that many of our children would classified as gifted.[1] That introduces specific opportunities, but also requires us to do some things differently from what most parents do. Finally, many of us will probably want to raise their kids as sharing the values of science and skepticism.
There are also different stages in life, and different contexts, so we might discuss e.g.
There are also different levels of rigor. I am interested in what the current science says. But I am also interested in your personal experience and opinion. Both are okay, but require different kind of response. If you say "this worked for my child", I can either try it or ignore it, but I won't assume that what works for one child must necessarily work for another. If you say "this is science", get ready for a scientific debate with lots of nitpicking and quoting contradicting sources. Everyone, please keep this distinction in mind.
In my imagination, a perfect outcome of this thread would be a concise wiki page with advice and recommendations, with links to longer debates. Parents are often busy, and may appreciate if you keep it short. But of course, first we need to have the discussion.
Feel free to post your ideas or advice. Also post links to existing resources (e.g. blogs), ideally with a short summary. If you link a scientific article or mention a popular book author, please provide a summary of the key ideas.
If there is a reason to suspect that the advice is not universal but differs from country to country (e.g. how to navigate the school system) please state your country explicitly.
If you want to say multiple unrelated things, considering splitting them into multiple comments, so that each can be upvoted separately. Don't worry about too many comments; if some subthread becomes too large, we can later have a separate discussion about that specific topic.
I don't really care about the official definition of "gifted"; especially whether your children are slightly above or slightly below the line. (I am saying this explicitly, because there are people who care a lot about this distinction.) Human intelligence is a continuum; good advice for a child with IQ 125 will not be too different from good advice for a child with IQ 135. The individual differences in character traits and interests will probably matter more.