[ale] my 3 year old hacker

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Sun Jun 13 10:37:49 EDT 2004


On Sat, 2004-06-12 at 10:14, Jim Philips wrote:
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> My daughter has one of those interactive toys that try to teach spelling. She 
> has discovered that if you press a certain combination of buttons, the toy 
> will spell out the word for her. This is clearly not an intended "feature". 
> So, which skill is more valuable? Spelling or hacking?

Spelling. It is part of the foundation for communication skills. Without
communication skills, all knowledge becomes closed-source, proprietary
material. (If you can't tell some one else, how can they share in the
fun?)

Besides, which is more fun: 

1) Cuddling up with a goofy, bright 3 year old and a book to turn the
pages together and reading together.
2) Cuddling up with that same kid and trying to juggle a laptop so no
one gets their lap burned by the bottom of the case while they push
buttons to turn the page.



Both of my kids have loads of books from Dr. Seuss to Audubon Society
insect identification field guides. The day my daughter found a bug she
couldn't find in the Audubon guide and then found it on the web was a
good day!

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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