Our son has a new favorite activity: typing. He loves typing. I’ve written before about his love of all things technology. One of my proudest moments as a father (and yes, this is sort of strange) was the day I caught him trying to plug the cord for a keyboard into the back of a monitor. He knew that the two went together and that the keyboard made the monitor do things. A proud day for Dad. Ever since then I’ve known that our son loves technology. I suppose it is no surprise that he does. I’m not very old at all… but I took a typing class in high school. I have no idea if those classes still exist… but I doubt there’s much need with the prevalence of computers in schools, libraries, homes, businesses and on small phones (though maybe the phone thing would require re-education to use fingers other than thumbs for typing). Our son loves saying “type type type” and pointing at the keyboard. I don’t think he’ll wait until high school to learn how to type.
I’ve installed a lightweight Linux distribution on an 8-year-old laptop. While it has a graphical component for when he wants to “draw draw draw” in a digital way, I’m also able to let him “type type type” in the terminal (or command line). Those of you old enough to remember “green screens” will know what I’m talking about. The days when you didn’t drag and drop windows and even the mouse was not heavily used. You typed commands into the computer and arrowed or tabbed your way through fields. At any rate, for “type type typing” there is no need for a mouse (at least not at this stage) and he happily types away at the keyboard like Dad does. I think the next thing to do will be to put music on his computer. I’ll save that for another day. Right now he’s happy typing.