My six years old son is currently learning (fast) to read and write and he already wants to be "hacker"; either "white hat" or "black hat", depending on his mood.
I don't think he sees computers as "magical instruments", though. He is excited by them, by the games he can play on them, by the knowledge he can acquire with them, by the code I write on them… of course. But he is certainly more used to them than I was at his age. To the point where, when coming back from a computer lab organised by his school, he says "I'm not very good with Windows, I prefer mom's computer or yours".
I mean, he is only 6 and he already prefers one platform over another.
I'll wait a bit before his first "Hello, World!" (English not being our first language), but the chances that it's going to be a flash game instead of a small command-line executable are pretty big.
I don't think he sees computers as "magical instruments", though. He is excited by them, by the games he can play on them, by the knowledge he can acquire with them, by the code I write on them… of course. But he is certainly more used to them than I was at his age. To the point where, when coming back from a computer lab organised by his school, he says "I'm not very good with Windows, I prefer mom's computer or yours".
I mean, he is only 6 and he already prefers one platform over another.
I'll wait a bit before his first "Hello, World!" (English not being our first language), but the chances that it's going to be a flash game instead of a small command-line executable are pretty big.