Need advice: Teaching computers to 13 yo non-geeky girl

[LisaM]

Hello!

I just ordered a Dell mini-9 with Ubuntu for my 13 yo daughter. While she's very comfortable with chat, yahoo mail, youtube, and web surfing, I want to use this as an opportunity to really teach her about computers.

The thing is, I have no formal computer education myself. I mostly know what I've soaked up during the past some years of computer use (starting with an Apple II+ at age 20) but it's just a mishmash of knowledge.

Any recommendations for learning resources appropriate for a fun-loving, but definitely not geeky 8th grader will be greatly appreciated. Right now, I'm thinking of starting with the manuals that come with the mini-9, the ubuntu pocket guide, the help docs on the ubuntu.org site. But there's so much more she ought to learn to consider herself competent with computers.

Please help. What do you recommend?

Thanks,

Lisa

[bapoumba]

Not really a recommendation. I have 3 kids, all using Ubuntu. I just wait for their questions. They have to _learn_ stuff everyday at school.. When it comes to the computer (games, edition of documents for school, internet searches or other things) I wait they have a need to discover something.

[hypatia]

Please help. What do you recommend?

Thanks,

Lisa

Hey Lisa,

The two most important things, I think, are the following:

* show her how to look online for help with stuff she might run into. Then again, at 13, she probably knows that googling for "ubuntu followed by whatever the issue is" is how to find the answer to everything :)

* give her room to make mistakes and mess around with her system without fear. Help her back up her settings and documents to a USB key or something, and make sure she has a way to reinstall the machine, so that no matter if something gets screwy on her machine, she can just start fresh and go forward.

Those are the big ones in my books - where to look, and soft landings for mistakes. Fail early, fail often is my mantra :)

-Leigh

[cprofitt]

I am with bapoumba - I let me children use the computer for fun -- though they do learn while doing it. My daughter has learned quite a bit about computers since she started using them. She is just eight and can move music on to her MP3 player, get pictures off of her camera and she uses OO to write short stories. As she gets older I will teach her more as she asks, but I like that the computer does not have a stigma of forced learning attached to it.

[sub.mesa]

Just an idea.. Maybe you should install Virtualbox and let her experiment in virtual machines. Like setting up a webserver and creating her own blog on that, or something. Anything that lies in her interests, should work out fine as long as she has the motivation and knowledge how to search about problems. Fortunately, google works well for searching on problems related to Ubuntu, so if she can do that i think she can do it.

Her age might not be a disadvantage, as long as she has motivation, she has the capacity to learn extremely quickly. The problem seems to be that girls find other areas in life more interesting than technology. While technology isn't the most important thing in life, its use is becoming increasingly popular and our society increasingly relies on it. So i really hope girls will be motivated and find computers, technology and science as interesting as most boys/men do. Maybe they need to be treated differently; also the fact that many technology was created by men might be a threshold; it might be difficult to 'fit in', i can imagine.

Anyway, best of luck. Hope she has a nice experience with Ubuntu. :)

[doas777]

the only way to start out, is to want to do something, and to have a problem doing it, and to fix it. if you're weird enough to enjoy that experience, then you join a forum and hang out with us.

interest is key. no one will ever be interested in exactly how a hard drive functions when they start out. one of the things i find amusing, is that many of the people drawn to computing professionally, started out just trying to get free stuff off the Internet.

I don't know if you wanna be sneaky, but I'd break her IM, and see how long it takes her to fix it. send her a video with a codec she does not have installed. point out email hoaxes when they arrive in your inbox (look for spelling errors to get a laugh at the spamers expense), that kind of thing.

the first major step, is to learn to learn. point her to google, and give tips on good queries, and how to find the results within the listing. it's important that she realize that no genius is required, and that it is completely possible (unless it isn't. thats lesson 2). it is once she can fish, thats all she needs unless she chooses to make a career of it.

best regards

[stimpyjcat]

i think that Teaching, computers, 13 yo, non-geeky and girl does not matters (most of them for the age)

Let her "play" with the system (make a secondary no sudoer user if she thinks that will be safer )
When ask for something say what you know about the subject
If she ask something and you dont know the answer come here to ask or search with her at your side

that is something in general useful at anything that you want to theach to a young person aside of gender or knowledge

[SuperCadence]

My son is four. He has never been in a household with less than three computers. They've all run on windows and he had become fairly proficient at it (for a four year old)
He knew how to open files, how to get paint up, how to browse the internet by clicking picture links. He even knew how to type (from memory) addresses like pbskids.org and things like that.

I recently got a computer running successfully with ubuntu (I've tried several times on past machines with different distros and they always ended in failure...ultimately scaring me away from linux for about a year)

Really, I just set him up with his own name, wrote down the letters to type to log in, and he figured out on his own how to run the games i installed for him. He's even made(several) openoffice documents containing jibberish on his desktop, without my encouraging.

What I'm trying to say is, I think if you just let her be, she'll find her niche. That's what my parents did with me. I dont remember what kind of computer my first one was, but I do remember using 5 1/2 floppies and having to utilize the 'copy' program. (not to mention waiting for what felt like hours for my dad to pirate a ninja turtles game for me from my neigbor) I hadn't had any formal training untill just a year ago, but I can now run circles around even my professors on any windows machine.

If she doesn't have interest, then I wouldn't force it. (although the whole breaking her IM thing is kinda a good idea) I'm sure she's already proficient enough to be able to make a document, spreadsheet, or presentation. And I'll bet if you give her a couple hours with a flowchart program, she could figure that out too (if she has any reasonable understanding of structural logic) or at least HOW to use it.

[LisaM]

I appreciate everyone's good will in this thread, but I feel frustrated that I haven't explained myself very well. My daughter is thoroughly competent using a computer. She's not a technophobe. But there is a huge gap between using a computer and knowing on what's going on 'under the hood'. I feel it myself, and I've been using computers practically since they were invented.

How does one learn the 'under the hood' stuff? I have a house full of Ubuntu books, haunt the internet, read the man pages, and I'm still coming up very, very short. Do you have to take CS courses at university to pick this stuff up? Because I know for a fact that using a computer alone isn't going to do it.

Give you an example. Something breaks. You write the question to the forum, and somebody in the know tells you to type in some lines of code somewhere. Where did that knowledge come from? How can I make sure that my daughter (and I) can tap into that and really understand what is going on?

Thanks!

[jimmyhacker]

Im not geeky and i have 14.i had 12 when started with Ubuntu.I loved Orange Gnome desktop and now i know any command from "]" to "zgrep".You should switch to Winslows if your girl doesn`t like this wonderful OS.Today`s girls are so ****,excuse me please.So you must take it easy.my 6 years old sister just loves Ubuntu.And she`s a normal girl with fashion blah blah :))
so leave her to discover.Be sure that she doesn`t screw hardware how i screwed my Video Card with wrong drivers.

[kelvin spratt]

No amount of books will teach you, useing your computer is how you learn.
I'm Dyslexic books don't mean nothing to me I can't copy paste from a book but I can by googleing to find answers that how most people do it leave it to the developers to solve the problems then leech their knowledge thats what Linux is all about.

[SuperCadence]

I appreciate everyone's good will in this thread, but I feel frustrated that I haven't explained myself very well. My daughter is thoroughly competent using a computer. She's not a technophobe. But there is a huge gap between using a computer and knowing on what's going on 'under the hood'. I feel it myself, and I've been using computers practically since they were invented.

How does one learn the 'under the hood' stuff? I have a house full of Ubuntu books, haunt the internet, read the man pages, and I'm still coming up very, very short. Do you have to take CS courses at university to pick this stuff up? Because I know for a fact that using a computer alone isn't going to do it.

Give you an example. Something breaks. You write the question to the forum, and somebody in the know tells you to type in some lines of code somewhere. Where did that knowledge come from? How can I make sure that my daughter (and I) can tap into that and really understand what is going on?

Thanks!

I think it takes a real geek spirit to fully understand the under the hood parts. I can't tell you how many times ive stayed up all night going through trials and errors, faqs, tutorials, and the like just to figure out something. I think I was probably around 13 or 14(I could be wrong, but it was around there.) when I first started fiddling around with QBasic. I would spend hours asking myself, "ohh, I wonder how I can do this?!" and then look it up (this, of course, was before google ruled the earth) I would find the steps, then look up each step, then further research what that did, annd spiral down untill I had a full understanding of what it was telling the computer to do.

Try starting her out with how a computer works. Break it down to software, and hardware. This is a hard-drive. This is flash storage. This is volatile memory, this is non-volatile. RAM, Motherboard, Graphics Card, Drivers. A computer thinks in binary and there are middle men that translate up a series of steps untill it's in plain english, japanese, french, german, spanish, whatever.

Teach her what an operating system is and then why you use ubuntu, linux, fedora, red hat, etc. If she follows you up to that point, then there may be hope. I'd say teach her some of the basic commands, and tell her exactly what they mean like sudo (super user do) it made a lot more sense to me when the commands were broken down into english for me. Then set her up with a project..maybe..uhm..something simple like going a day using the terminal instead of the menus, to run programs. Don't tell her HOW to do it, just let her find it out on her own. Then move up in difficulty, tell her to download a certain image from the internet using just the terminal. Keep making it harder. Make sure she understands all of the comands that she's using. If she finds a solution on the internet, have her take each step, and research the command. If she does this, I'll bet she'll develop a good understanding on what's going on.

If she doesn't have the will or spirit to do it then... idunno.

[Little Bit]

I'm 13 too and consider myself "non-geeky." But like any other appliance you use, you need to learn to use it responsibly. My Daddy has a way of helping us do that.

When my sister got her first car (yay!), before Daddy let her drive it, she had to learn to change a tire, check and add oil, brake fluid, tranny fluid, and battery water. Then he taught her what info to provide and gather in case of an accident (and made her practice on him while he pretended to be a belligerent jerk driving the other car). Daddy is an awesome coach!

When we all got online Daddy put us through the internet paces the same way. In simulated chats he tried to entice us into giving something away (anything that a predator could use to track us). I actually failed the first two times and had to wait another month before I was ready, lol! We had to learn to manually update, scan, defrag, and run CCleaner and had a schedule of "computer events" to use as a checklist.

When I told him about Linux and how all that scanning and registry cleaning and stuff is unnecessary, I think it scared him a little. Like I was being corrupted by a boy or something.

He's still not convinced, but he lets me run my Ubuntu my own computer as long as it isn't connected to the internet. He's paranoid of the Matrix or something, or that his little baby girl messing up her whole future because a gorgeous boy got her using Linux instead of Windows, lol!

Anyway the point is that Daddy made Heather do all that car stuff before he would let her drive; he made us do all the internet stuff with him before we could go online (no Myspace, no Facebook, nothing like that yet - just wait 'til I'm 18 tho); and he has this big computer course he made us take and pass before we could even use the computer.

The result is that Heather is the awesome, safe driver of a well maintained car, us girls are safe online and have trouble-free computers for school and stuff.

I wish I could get Daddy to let me go online with my Ubuntu computer though. I bet it's alot safer online than the Windows one he makes us use for the internet.

I don't know if I've helped or not, but being super-involved with your kids on the computer is a really cool thing. We use it very confidently and safely.

Amy

[SuperCadence]

When my sister got her first car (yay!), before Daddy let her drive it, she had to learn to change a tire, check and add oil, brake fluid, tranny fluid, and battery water. Then he taught her what info to provide and gather in case of an accident (and made her practice on him while he pretended to be a belligerent jerk driving the other car). Daddy is an awesome coach!

When we all got online Daddy put us through the internet paces the same way. In simulated chats he tried to entice us into giving something away (anything that a predator could use to track us). I actually failed the first two times and had to wait another month before I was ready, lol! We had to learn to manually update, scan, defrag, and run CCleaner and had a schedule of "computer events" to use as a checklist.


Wow, when I got my first car, my dad did the same stuff for me, but as for my computer, by the time we got online, I was already teching HIM about it. Granted, this was even before ICQ and all that was about. On-line predators weren't that big of a deal.

It's kind of interesting, people's perspective on technology and how children should be introduced into it. I just got lectured by my pop (who is somewhat of an adopted grandfather to my son) about how he thinks my son is too involved in technology at his age. My son had said something and I mentioned, "well you can tell his mother is a programmer" and it bothered him. He thinks my son is going to be bored when he gets into school because the games and programs are so below his level. I figured that was a good thing, but Idunno.

Anyway, I'd better quit before I start a whole new discussion.

Tell your dad a cute little man in a tuxedo seduced you into linux. Its kind of silly that he doesn't allow it to be hooked up to the internet though. I'm guessing he doesn't know a whole lot about operating systems and whatnot? I've seen a lot of places where you can download "sit down with your kids and talk to them about online safety" speeches. Was it one of those?

[Little Bit]

Its kind of silly that he doesn't allow it to be hooked up to the internet though. I'm guessing he doesn't know a whole lot about operating systems and whatnot? I've seen a lot of places where you can download "sit down with your kids and talk to them about online safety" speeches. Was it one of those?

I know... Ubuntu is safer online than Windows! It's just new and unfamiliar to him, but if I can get him to use my computer a little, playing with Linux himself, maybe it will reassure him a little.

Oh, and it was much more than a speech, lol. He made a simulated chatroom and tried to get us to give something away. He's paranoid of technology and is scared for his "little girls" to get in trouble. I'm surprised he lets us go online at all, but it's cute that he cares so much. God help any boy who comes calling!

Oh well, one thing at a time. I keep trying to get him to read about Linux and viruses and stuff to put him at ease, and I'm sure that in time he'll come around. He might even be proud of his little girl for using Linux because it's soooo much better and safer.

Then he'll hopefully spoil me with a new computer, lol!

Thank you,
Amy

[Elfy]

Get him to look here - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=510812

[MelDJ]

i am 17. i did not learn anything about computers till my big brother left home to college. After he left, i was left in charge of the computer. I learned the hardware bits from my dad and about software from my brother. I then researched about computers myself and now am better than my brother. I now help my friends repair their computers. I think giving your child her own computer is good. Teach her the basics and show her some basic sites for getting programs/help.

[macogw]

Very good (online) book for kids to learn to program in Python: http://www.openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/

It's true I didn't *really* understand how the code I write is compiled and run and exactly how different things affect performance until I implemented a CPU and wrote a compiler, but that's not necessary to get under the hood. Teach her what the main parts of the computer do. The memory hierarchy is a good topic to learn about since it teaches you why the 2GHz CPU with 2MB L2 cache can be slower than the 1.5GHz CPU with 4MB L2 cache, for example.

SuperCadence: Yes of course it's a good thing if your kid is bored in school. It means you did a better job than the average parent at preparing them :) The pace they teach in elementary school...ugh, it's only fit for kids whose parents never even bothered to teach them the alphabet or how to count.

[col48]

Being bored in school is not necessarily good - it depends why. The subject matter may be too easy, he/she may just not be interested, there may be no avenues to coach those in the class who need help, teacher may present boringly etc etc.

Learning anything is partly a matter of character and partly personal chemistry. Some learn best from textbooks even if badly written, some need pictures to help them grasp concepts. Also some need a person who can teach them, and the style of teaching matters too. "Chalk and talk" is OK for some, others need hands-on to cement what they have been told, some need to experiment first. One much derided method which is very pragmatic and may point in other directions once begun used to be called "sitting by Nelly" - ie find someone who knows how to do what you want to do and watch them do it while asking them questions, gradually learning to do it while they oversee; it is similar to on-the-job training. You'd need to find someone you could trust and the 13-yo would respect.

This particular male learnt programming (Fortran II) from a manual alongside other people's programs but anything under-the-hood only by 1-to-1 question and answer. One or two of the female programmers had started in the days when programs were set up on boards like an old fashioned telephone exchange. Now that's real pioneering!

[macogw]

Being bored in school is not necessarily good - it depends why. The subject matter may be too easy, he/she may just not be interested, there may be no avenues to coach those in the class who need help, teacher may present boringly etc etc.
Ah, I was referring to "subject matter too easy due to student actually *gasp* taking initiative and learning things outside of class."