computing

I wrote recently about the search for a new machine for my daughter. She asked me for a computer of her own so that she could write LOGO programs. I'm helpless.

I considered a lot of machines -- Android tablets, Microsoft surfaces, convertible Chromebook tablets, Windows 10 portable all-in-ones, and traditional macintoshes. I finally bought her a 12" Macbook and a Raspberry Pi.

I had originally hoped that a $150 Chromebook would fit the bill but Chrome OS lost on several fronts. The $1299 Macbook is not eight times better than the $150 Chromebook but it is probably four times as good as the $249 ASUS C100 convertible Chromebook. I bought one of those and returned it with prejudice about a half an hour later. (Computer value estimations may be oddly non-transitive).

We're not really birthday people. I would normally have spent somewhere between $5 and $75 on a birthday present for a child. I did not buy a $1299 laptop because computers are important, or because STEM is important, or because education is important or anything like that. I bought it because computing is deflationary. I'm trying to ensure that good computing seems as accessible and affordable to my children as it will later be.

A mac does a lot out of the box but it's not a turn-key computing environment for children. I'm about a dozen hours into the configuration of the machine and I still think I'm in the wilderness.

My first step was to make an account for my daughter. That was easy until I got to the password. My daughter opens her bike lock with a four digit number. Does she really need an eight-character mixed-case password? No. A four digit pin number? That doesn't seem right either. Auto-login using a password she doesn't remember? This is harder than setting up the Commodore 64.

I moved on from authentication into what Apple calls 'parental controls'. Apple wouldn't let me tweak the parental controls until I made a parental account. Now I'm in double authentication purgatory. I have an authentication system for a child that makes no sense and a second credential and account for an adult that serves absolutely no purpose except for managing the child's interface.

People appear to have lots of different ideas about how to manage a child's interface. For lots of people, this seems to have a lot to do with steering kids away from Wikipedia and into the tamer wasteland of auto-playing videos at PBS Kids. That's not my deal. For some, it has to do with replacing parental supervision with an electronic screen time limiter. That's not my deal either.

I want to use the available knobs to turn the Mac environment into the kind of environment that I wish I had as a boy. The Mac desktop started out simple in 1984, but a stray click on the menu bar today brings up a translucent gray screen that tells my child that GOOG 621.35 and AAPL 112.57. Amiga Guru Meditations were more helpful. After dozens of fiddly interactions, 10 percent of the finder has been stuffed back into its bottle.

With hotkeys, gestures, and the rest all turned off, I could begin to take this machine from day planner on crack to computer. I actually think Safari is a pretty great computing environment. This
mac would become a Safari-book if Safari supported webrtc, web midi, packaged web apps, and a few of the other user-facing features that make Chrome not Safari.

I downloaded Chrome, enabled 'Developer mode' in the extensions menu, and loaded up a few
of my favorite web apps as 'unpacked extensions' from the local filesystem.

Life is now pretty good. My daughter gets many of the benefits of Chrome without a Chrome sign-in. She has local printing. She and I have a software development environment that requires only a text editor. She has, in the Macbook, one of the best computer terminals available at any price.

The fly in this ointment is bad interaction between Chrome and network restrictions in parental controls. I have beat on a dozen Chrome settings to try and get it to stop contacting Google. Every time it tries to contact Google, I get a pop-up informing me that a series of random IP addresses in Google space are blocked.

In the end, I wrote a shell script that opens Chrome at login with a command line flag that specifies a PAC. That file that steers all traffic into a nonexistent proxy. That shut Chrome up.

I went a little further and built a Chrome extension for her that overrides the new tab page with an interface built just for her.

Our prototype computing environment is a variant of the simple LOGO I built her last year.

She is very happy with the machine. It's a good size for her. It's a good weight. The USB C charging cable is easy to use. Printing works.

The machine doesn't support Common Core. It doesn't run any dedicated educational software. It doesn't eliminate paper textbooks. It is not configured for remote administration. It is not rugged. It is not synchronized with the cloud. It has no collaboration features except for a wide viewing angle.

Seymour Papert said, of computers and children, that if the child is not programming the computer then the computer is programming the child. He was right in 1980 and he's still right today. Every child deserves a personal computing environment.

I would challenge Google and Apple and Microsoft and Donald Trump and anyone who can hear me take a 'computes out of the box' pledge to build devices that offer a useful computing environment on par at least with the ROM BASICs of the 8-bit era straight out of the box without the installation of any software, without a single credential, without a wifi password, without a software update, and without a click-through EULA. Let's call it the 'RUN 2020' pledge. By 2020, we could get every major manufacturer to offer at least this much computing out of the box. We could get a computing environment available from every lock screen by 2020. Every machine would be ready to compute on Christmas morning and on the first day of school. Every new machine would be useful before the packaging was cleared away. Every working donated machine would be useful for something immediately.

This idea is hardly outlandish. Support across platforms for ephemeral 'guest' accounts is growing. RUN 2020 pushes guest a little harder and ensures that guest mode is useful. I admire and support the One Laptop Per Child. I want Every Laptop to be for Every Child next.