Posted on 08/27/2016 6:10:44 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Susan* bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought ‘why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades—and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits—so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball.
She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“psychotic junkies”.... Wow.
Those are powerful words.
The virtual games are a great extension of the physical games we all loved. As far as Minecraft being “Digital Legos” Lego already brilliantly handled that with their interactive legos. So kids could physically build stuff and then integrate it with programs and functions from the computer. Those functions never came in a “finished form” so the kids had to apply some basic programming to make it happen.
Brilliant. And what happened ? No one bought it. Too tough. Too much work. And this is what you get.
But all of those games.. like Arma. Arma has a mod for it called “Arma city” or something like that. It’s a digital version of cops and robbers. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s addictive. But the problem is not that parents are letting their kids play the virtual games - it’s that their parents aren’t letting them play THE REAL game. Could you imagine a bunch of kids today running around with bandanas and cap guns playing cops and robbers ? The parents would be put in jail !
All of our problems come down to ONE SINGLE THING. Democrats.
Reality is: paper as a medium is passing. Kids are growing up on screens as books. Video & interactivity will be the norm. Digital heroin? yup. Cope.
Receiving a text affects the same part of the brain as heroin and sex do.
Sorry I couldn’t use an example you could relate to.
I can no longer read books. Seriously. If it ain’t on a screen, then NOPE.
Screen? I’m so lazy I get audiobooks.
LOL
Audio? I’m so lazy I get direct RNA transplants.
I put my books on a screen. But I’m thinking of printing out the Free Republic threads and reading them that way.
I refuse to read even on a screen. Nor will I listen to audio. I now directly burrow into another person’s brain and eat their thoughts.
ROFL
She sounds a lot like the guy who was traumatized by firing an AR-15. “The pixels of death just flew off the screen.”
It isn’t just the kids.
There was a guy here, since banned, who tried to tell us his 4-year-old son was “computer literate” because he could push colored blocks around on his iPad.
“I now directly burrow into another person’s brain and eat their thoughts.”
You must be starving.
It definitely taps into the constant demands for attention, especially games with background movement and scenery shifts every fraction of a second. That’s faster than it was even a few years ago of some change in the colors and shapes every second.
This has also filtered to TV, where they bounce between the speakers to keep one’s attention instead of watching the two talk and relying only on their verbal jokes to keep people engaged.
Thanks, Shamu.
I hang around liberals when I need a diet. :)
The way that tablets are used in SciFi movies is great. The expectation / reality is starkly opposite.
And that’s what happens whenever you give the masses an amazing technology. They abuse it and have sex with it.
I’m getting my daughter on a balanced digital environment. I’ve given her an e-reader to start with (removed online functionality, and she uses it for books).
But we only use it together. When we’re done, I take it with me. We don’t set time limits on things, we set tasks on them. Before bed we still read and she has access to her books all day long.
I’m getting ready to incorporate a 21” tablet PC into her life. It’s a windows 10 computer with a kid-friendly interface already built in. But it’s content will be similar. e-books, a notepad, some photos and video capability.
This is what the sci-fi movies have shown me. They have shown me a world where people refer to the computer screen, but then put them down. 5 minutes is usually spent with them.
A computer is not a communication device. It CAN be, but even the video calling and stuff that relatives do diminishes their time together when we travel the several states to see people. It’s having a negative impact.
So the next approach is to build a solid face-to-face relationship with everyone, THEN supplement it with video calling. But she’s two years old, so there is plenty of time.
At 2 years old it seems that the parents are more excited to put tech in front of them than the kids are to adopt it themselves.
“I hang around liberals when I need a diet. :)”
Still not worth it.
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