Comment by petemill
19 hours ago
I'm currently in the "misguided" group as I parent 3 kids under 10 but I appreciate your viewpoint. I had similar experience and want my kids to learn that sense that they can accomplish anything by just learning how to do it from others on the internet. But still, everything today is offered on a platter. There's little resistance to overcome. No installing, no files, no configuration. I think that's what we accomplish by giving the technology step by step, starting with offline machines with CD ROMs. If they can just Google any game ever made and play it in-browser in a JS emulator then where's the learning and the struggle before the reward?
Why does there need to be the same learning and struggle that you went through? Making games has never been more accessible - you can fire up something like Scratch and have things moving almost instantly, then when you're ready for it make the jump to Godot or similar which is still accessible but also has enough power to build commercial games.
There isn't actually any inherent value to knowing how to get through an installer and edit a configuration file in vim. Those are just ancillary skills that people pick up alongside the actual thing they were looking to achieve (in my case it was building stupid websites in PHP). I'm pretty sure there are no end of things that you use without having been forced to learn the fundamentals first - if I take this to absurdity, can you take a pile of sand and turn it into a working CPU? If not, what right do you have to be sitting here using a computer?