This is Brendan, not Kelly, i.e., I’m the communication-challenged one of the pair. But Kelly says some of you have expressed curiousity about the software we’ve put on our computer for the kids. One of our first great finds, one that has really opened up the ‘computer world’ for our kids, is a free program called TuxPaint.
I remember the first time I showed Chloe Google Earth. She started typing “great pyramids” into the search box, and as I started to tell her that, no, you needed to actually type an existing place, I realized that I was wrong, and Google Earth was zooming into Giza, Egypt. My cousin tells a similar story of his three year old using Google Search for the first time, and typing in “bob the bilder”, and getting a google response, “Did you mean bob the builder? Whereafter his son was hooked.
Kids, unaware of the limitations in earlier iterations of computers and software, approach modern systems without preconceptions of what they can and cannot do. I consider myself pretty computer-literate, but Chloe and Paul have taught me that I expect too little of the latest stuff.
At the same time, they just seem to know what to do. I don’t know if it’s really a consequence of the age they’ve grown up in. We actively prevented our children from coming into contact with computers for several years. I’m more inclined to think it’s evidence of a human ‘hive mind‘.
At any rate, Paul had the least exposure to computers, but TuxPaint seems to have done the most for developing his comfort with the basic computer interfaces available to us. He shows me how to do stuff now – literally.
The program was developed (poor, semi-factual history follows) in the Linux community (Tux is the name of the Linux mascot, a penguin), but recompiled for Windows, among other platforms. It’s free, and award-winning. And it seems that an exceptional level of thought was given to how kids might use computers, and what would make it easier for them. For example, there are lots of really fun sound effects – no, really, they’re actually fun. We have toys here that I would happily consign to the darkest depths of toy h*ll (it’s a family blog) to punish them for their regular, monotonous, digitally torturous sonic assaults. But TuxPaint has survived.
It also has some genuinely helpful instructions below the colour palette for each tool as you select it, a close/save dialogue that makes it extremely easy for kids to make sure their art sticks around, and a set of ‘rubber stamps’ that help even the artistically deprived (i.e., me) have fun.
When (if?) you install it, be sure to grab the optional ‘rubber stamps’ package. We run Vista (mostly yucky), and I found that to keep TuxPaint going, the stand-alone zip installer worked best (the link for it appears in tiny, tiny letters beneath the Windows XP,2000,Vista link on this page.) The difference is that TuxPaint only needs to be unzipped into a directory to work. If you use the normal installer, it will create all the wonderful Start menu entries, etc. If you use the zip installer, no dependencies on Windows are created, and you just run it yourself (find the .exe file within the unzipped directory). G(r)eek? Let me know if it doesn’t work. Vista is known to cause trouble with lots of programs, so I don’t imagine this will be much of a consideration if you’re using XP or similar.
I recommend it for kids aged three to seven – not having any seven year olds yet, I’m going out on a limb.
*Added* I should really have put in a few of the kids’ creations. Here’s a person Paul made out of food:
And here’s a picture Chloe made of her great-grandmother:
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