Comment It's all about discrimination... (Score 1) 935
My 5 y.o. daughter has as much access to a Powerbook as she likes, providing I'm not using it at the time, and I'd usually defer. She has learnt to get to a couple of sites on which she plays games, many of them educational; print stuff out; launch iPhoto and iTunes and use them in a limited way. Quite a bit of it is self-taught. She's exploring.
And I bet she's both learning and having fun. I also think she's learning to discriminate between good and bad/useful and not so useful, and OK, it's baby steps at the moment. But it's already clear that she has some goals - she particularly wants to learn how to read and so she prefers stuff which is geared to that end. She also likes numbers and very basic arithmetic - so she doesn't actually spend that much time playing games which don't have that sort of content.
We live in the Tropics, so she spends most of her time outdoors with her friends, when not at school. Playing with your mates v/s playing with a computer - sounds like it's about learning to make choices. Yes, she does spend some quite lengthy times in front of the computer, mostly unsupervised. It's not hard to find out what she's being looking at - after all I'm curious! And if she learns nothing else other than how to discriminate for herself between good and bad stuff, be it from a computer or anywhere else, I think it will be all worthwhile.
