Re: Agile education and pragmatic schooling

Greg Vaughn wrote:

>It's good to meet some other homeschoolers. I'd be curious to hear what 
>age you introduce your children to computers. We've mostly been holding 
>off thus far, but I'd expect by the age of 6 to have some educational 
>games to let her play by herself at times.
>  
>
My wife and I homeschool our oldest two (7 and 6). One game I ran across
a couple of years ago which turned out to be cool was Chip's Challenge
-- a game included in the Windows 3.1 (?) Entertainment Pack or somesuch
-- originally for some older non-MS system that MS redid. For those not
familiar, each level is a 2D grid, and you have to move Chip through a
combination of barriers (walls, doors with keys, toggle doors, etc) and
"monsters" (bouncing balls, blah blah), gather all the chips and then
get to the exit. Very fun, and pretty heavy on logical thinking compared
to reflexes.

Well, it comes with something like 150 levels, but only the first
tutorial levels were easy enough for my boys when they started out. I
found a freeware level designer so I could make additional easy levels
for them, and soon they started wanting to play with the level designer.
The first ones were mostly "how many green key doors can I paint on the
level!" of course, but as they've gotten better able to grasp the
concepts, it's a very cool way to teach logical design, and the
importance of quick feedback. It's easy to think up a great idea in the
designer, but then playing it yields the typical, "Oh, didn't think
about that!" that makes it unplayable, or too easy, etc.

-- 
Chris
http://clabs.org/blogki




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