Are You Keeping Up with the Commodore?

[Thorin]

Kids these days have a very short attention span.

That's a label I'd like to try and avoid.  For instance, my oldest sat and learned how to crochet a scarf, and worked at it for nearly two hours straight last night (he's making a scarf for his baby brother).  I'm sure that somewhere there's an exact opposite of this, a child that cannot sit still for more than five minutes.  I haven't read about any significant scientific evidence that supports the theory that kids really do have a shorter attention span than in the past (and we probably should define what we mean with "in the past").

If you had qualified that statement with the word "some", as in "Some kids these days", I wouldn't have bothered responding...

[Darren Dirt]

Same thoughts as Thorin ... My ten year old son (who loves video games and keeps bugging me to buy him a PSP (!) ) will read for a half hour or more at a time, even in the same room as when the girls are watching a movie... yes it's hard for him to ignore distractions especially "blinking lights", but if he's motivated he's a normal kid, can be immersed in an activity that is fun/interesting to him. Guess kids today are wired the same as 20 50 or 100 years ago, just a lot more stimuli around 'em to notice that

[Tom]

I think it gets down to, "Everything is always worse off than it was last year". Kids are always worse misbehaved, shorter attention span, violent, etc.

[Darren Dirt]

Neato find I just... found... re. the whole "retro programming languages" topic:

Check it out, "runBASIC", an online web BASIC interpreter! (with learning tools to boot!)

http://www.runbasic.com/seaside/go/runbasic?_s=AOlfoKeZvVGWKUsn&_k=ifNjlEIj

Welcome to BASIC, an easy to learn programming language. This crash course of short lessons is designed to get you started fast. For our first example, let's learn how to display something to the screen. We will use the BASIC's PRINT statement. Look at the simple one line program in the editor below. Click on the Run button to see what the program does.

The learning stuff is exactly how *I* learned BASIC (and then other languages) -- there is a chunk of working code that does something "cool", and they suggest you just change things and see what happens!

one very cool (more advanced) example snippet: http://www.runbasic.com/seaside/go/runbasic?_s=AOlfoKeZvVGWKUsn&_k=fmiEIPaG


MORE INFO (i.e. "Help") http://www.runbasic.com/rbhelp.html#differences



And for the uber-geeks: "tinyBASIC" written *in* runBASIC


I'm totally gonna show this website to my son...

[Mr. Analog]

Great find DD.