Back to form again.

After all that disappointment, on the second day... Day 3 was superb. Nikhil walked in wearing a bright superman dress. The day started with the now standard "Computer Maadodu" (in short, hitting random keys on the keyboard). Must be the digital variant of Alchemy. The hope is that some magic combination might just produce what one desires. I am reminded of the the story where we calculate the time it takes for a thousand monkeys to create Shakespere by typing randomly. In fact I asked him, who taught him this concept of "Computer Maadodu"... "Ajja"(Grandpa). Oh so this workoholic soul that was haunting this kids neurons was much older than 20 to 30 years :-)))). I am sure Grandpa loves the kid and he only tried to maximize the curiosity of the kid. Once you know the problem, the fix is easy. But I decided not to preach "Computer maadodu!=hitting random keys" but decided that, I will make him realize "Hitting relevant keys" is more interesting than hitting random keys on the keyboard."

I opened Wordpad, turned Capslock ON and asked him to type ABCD. He said I want to make balloons(Draw Filled Ellipses in Paintbrush). I said, "If you type ABCD, I will help you draw the balloons." He agreed. Now I dont need to bribe him with chockolates... The computer is the bribe in itself ;-). He would choose some random character and say, Now will type K. and out came "KKKKKKKK".... then came "MMMMMM".... So I decided more control was needed. So I asked him to find A, pess once. If more than one A appeared... I showed him how to hit back space to remove it. So gradually he went forward. he had some problem with UVWXYZ but overall I accomplised more than I thought.

Now it was time for his reward. 'Paintbrush'... "Balloon Maadbeku". I was still concerned that his small hand struggling to grasp and click the mouse. And there was a scroll wheel which destracted him further. To my surprise, he struck a deal with me. You draw, I will tell you what to do ... Ah outsourcing at its best... how ingenious. Now I was his computer, he had to instruct me every step. So he specified the color and where to daw the "Balloons". So I did as per his instructions. Soon we had a screen full of colorful balloons. And hey pretending to be a computer, I had indeed turned into one I guess... He did not ask me to save the file and I forgot to save it. This masterpiece by our little Picaso has evaporated into thin air... lost for ever... thanks to the stupidity of Sudarshan, the computer.


Then he tried to instruct me how to draw a tank. I was not sure what he was trying to tell me. But mostly failed at the attempt ;-) Yet some masterpiece was born... all I know is that it has water inside coz I drew some dashes there. My camera is not around to capture the moment. But you should have seen him slapping his forehead in frustration...

Then he asked me to create a new sheet. asked me to draw 2 horizontal lines. Then join them vertically. His wish was my command. Now he said "Train Bidsu"... draw a train here. I drew a rectangle. Then he made me draw windows. He made me draw each rectangle one at a time. I thought of copy pasting... but hey I am the computer... So I only obey orders... So the thing went on and on... He also instructed the drawing of the wheels and the train was ready. Some day he will learn the concept of the loop and then will say...

For i = 1 to 10 
    Sudarshan draw bogie.
    For j = 1 to 3
        Sudarshan draw window
    For k = 1 to 2
        Sudarshan draw wheel  

For now he needs to instruct, one command at a time... Anyway, what is the hurry.

He asked me to draw a signal and color it red and green. Then came the bouncer... Make the train move from here very fast. Suddenly realised, that he is now in the shoes of my manager ;-). I don't know... move it.... I want it to move fast. But if it was management... I would have cried... Until you buy me an animation software it wont move... Afterall this is paintbrush... don't you realise it is impossible to do animations here. But here... "Move it was a command". What was I to do. I said the train is confused coz red and green lights were on... I do know how to deal with management don't I ;-). He commanded the red light to be erased. Nothing happened... the train won't move.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. So I selected the whole train with the selection tool and dragged it forward and brought it back. He then complained that the train was bouncing back from the other side and he wanted a new train each time. So I had to drag it outside and bring it back again from the other side. Ah. At last the master piece is ready. A lot of lines & wheels etc were damaged in transit ;-) But hey who cares about accuracy. All that matters is the memories. So I preserved the image as is...

He then picked up a spoilt webcam that was lying around and asked what it was. I said it was a camera. He tried to open it... then asked where was the opening... to put the film in... I said it would connect to the computer. He seemed reluctant to agree... And it looked so different from his expectations. I told him my brother had another digital camera that looked like a camera and when he comes back, he could see it.

He asked me the name of the (other Anna) my partner and I said it was Arun Kumar. When he came back, he asked him his name... He said Arun. Nikhil immediately reacted... No it is "Arun Kumar". We all burst into laughter. Arun asked him when he had told his name... So the response was, you told me yesterday... Arun was scratching his head :-)))) Then I told him it was me who told him and we all burst into laughter again.

He realised it was time to leave the computer so he walked into the other room, picked up a chair climbed on it and switched on all the switches so that the computer would turn on. Ah the old algorithm works again. He really knows how to start the computer. But this time it was out of necessity not a demo. By that time his mom came and took him away. This session was too good. I am happy again.

The AntiClimax

After all that initial Excitement, Today was really disappointing...
1. The kid who was able to discover how to start the computer was unable to reproduce a previous action. I guess he is under some kind of severe pressure. Maybe he hasn't had enough sleep.
2. I showed him some really cool movies and he was saying Wow. Then suddenly stopped and said. "Nanage computer madbeku"... "I want to work on the computer." It felt like a 3 year old kid and a 30 year old soul was trapped in the same body. Would plonking keys on the keyboard to produce 'work' bring any joy in a 3 year old's mind? At least I can't think why. He was adamant and I had to give him wordpad to type. Accidentally he figured out that using the up and down arrow keys changes selections in the start menu. He was excited and I can easily understand why. That is what a child would be excited about.
3. Unfortunately I have switched to preach mode. I had to distract him to Paintbrush... and began to unnecessarily "teach" how to draw. Then came a little delight. He named all the colors in the palette.... The colors were mostly right... At least I did not know any better than him;-). I showed him how to draw eliipses. He calls them "balloons". Fine with me. The mouse is too large for his hands, and controlling is still difficult. He now really likes paintbrush. But my focus is on making him like the process of self learning without preaching. But now I am wavering from it.
4. Towards the end ofthe session, his mother had come... During the course of the chitchat, she reminded me that she was showing her kid how to play games on the cell phone and I could show the same on the computer... Now I am not against, gaming... In fact, I spent half of my engineering playing games like Caesar and Age of Empires and was able to perform to my satisfaction. But I dont want the kid to equate Computers with games. It is always better to present a sober picture of the computer as a tool to do many "interesting" things including playing games. Else these kids will think "COMPUTERS=GAMES" and at about 12 or maybe earlier, his friends will teach him, "COMPUTERS=GAMES+PORN". Rather than using the computer as the tool, they now become Entertainment gadgets. At least that is how it appears to me.
On the extreme you have multiple occurances of children starting malpractices ranging from online gambling, porn, cults etc. to the other end where parents track children's every movement using GPS. I hate both extremes.
5. By the time the session was over, he was so attached to Paintbrush, that his mom had to bribe him with a "Happy dent"... In fact he warned me that he would carry the computer home and never give it back.
6. Another funny observation... the kid knows only Uppercase. I was wondering why the kid knew everything on the keyboard but few things on the monitor. Poor Kid... not his fault. He knows more than he is expected to know. Problem is that I am dumber than I thought I was :-))))

First Encounter.

Nikhil marched into the room in his own characteristic style and declared "Nange Computer Maadbeku". I want to work on the computer.

For starters, I had the computer switched off. I asked him to read out alphabets from the keyboard. Off he went "ABCDEFG...." maybe someone had previously told him that he will find abcd on the keyboard. I muttered to myself, oh God! If he can't identify the keys, he is tooo young for anything other than maybe a racing game with 3 keys and reflexes. But my concience was hurting. Should I make him equate computing with games??? That way, I believe, I would be doing a disservice than a service.

Then I asked him to search A on the keyboard. And suddenly to my surprise, he started reading out "ASDFGHJKL". He was brilliant. Soon he read out the whole set of keys... mostly correctly. In fact he was not sure how to pronounce Z. So he said Zebra. Wow, that was cool for a toddler. I had brought a couple of chocolates, in case, I needed to bribe him to do things ;-) But hey this child was progressing fast without bribery ;-). All I said was he had won the competition and gave him the cockolate bar. He told about a game which he had played where only winners got prizes and I told him he had really won the game...

We were waiting for the great question and at last it popped up... "Why cant't I see anything on this TV". We told him it was not switched on. Then we asked what he watched on TV? Cartoons? Then came a big list, Superman, Spiderman, Shaktiman... We asked him if he would find it on "this TV". He said no. He said it was a computer. We smiled, but decided not to "preach". He happily started banging on the keyboard. We asked him what would happen if he continued to do that. He said, the paint on the keys would go off. Our Jaws dropped in amusement. Then we reminded him that nothing was coming on the TV. He soon realised that pressing keys on the keyboard was of no use. He tried dragging the mouse, pushing the scroller, clicking, nothing worked. He looked at the switch board and said "I think that switch must be turned on". He then asked, which is the computer switch?" We said we dont know. So he came up with the idea, that we would turn all switches on as that was the only way. So we let him do that. After he turned everything on... still nothing on "TV"!!! So we said, "Maybe more switches need to be turned on."

I had told myself... "No Preaching". He started scanning for buttons. The monitor button did not produce any results. He tried to squeeze the microphone pull... push..., nothing happened. Then he switched focus towards a cordless lying around, and asked if it had a remote!!! How chweet. We said no. And asked him about the box on the left. He said he had seen somewhere that the box was full of worms :-)) We asked him not to bother about the worms and he said how brave he was and boasted scaring other kids in the class ;-). Then he spotted the great blue button, the power on. He pressed it lightly and the system just blinked nothing happened. He pressed it hard again and volia, the thing began to grind. You must have seen the sparkle on his face.

As he saw Win2k loading, he exclaimed look something is written there. He was hoping that some banging on the keys would change what was written there. But no such luck. We told him that the computer is just waking up from its sleep. He will have to wait. So he waited. He exclaimed that the speakers were there in his house also and they were next to the TV. And that they were much bigger and sound would come out of it. And at the end sound came out indeed at startup.

It was my bro's comp and had some weird Galaxy or Supernova as has wallpaper as usual. He asked what it was? We asked him if he thought it was a flower. He said it looked more like a fruit ;-) I am still wondering if that was a back answer or a true opinion...

The keyboard was easy. Now came the tricky part. Teaching him the mouse. We asked him to move the mouse and see the pointer on the screen. After some moving he realised that the movements were co-related. But was not interested enough. We told him that if he carefully moved the mouse pointer to a certain place, then he would get a chockolate. He somehow suspected that the chockolate he had already earned for reading out the keys was now somehow at risk. He quickly pulled it closer to himself :-)))). Tried some more, but was soon bored and demanded some toys to play with. He did not get the second chock. Myself and arun shared it. By that time, His mom turned up. It was getting late for us also, so we bid him good bye for the day.

Today, he did not learn a lot of Three and Four Letter Acronyms... In fact none...
1. Discovered the process of starting a computer.
2. When the computer is waking up, banging keys makes no difference. or so he thinks ;-)
3. Got accustomed to different parts of the computer, though he knows only 3 words keyboard, keys and mouse. He even said "one key,another key, so many keys". He visually knows everything that belongs to the comp. "Thinks" a comp has no remote.
4. Moving the mouse around moves an arrow on the screen.
5. Knows that keys on a keyboard are arranged in a weird pattern not taught to them in school.

Bringing a 30 year old to this state would have been 10 times harder. In about an hour, so much happened and he did not even realize he was being "Educated". Hope some day, education becomes this painless to every kid on this planet. Hope I can get children to appreciate logarithms, calulus, trig etc this way some day. Hope I can automate this some day, so that 800 million kids could do this without teacher assistance. My dream is big. Hope it some day works out.

I guess if this kid were asked to start a Martian's Computer he would go plonking buttons around, while our Phds would scutter around searching for documentation or peer reviewed martian journals and our managers will setup Commitees, SubCommitees and task forces and what not to "explore the problem".

How it all started !!!

If you are not aware of it, I am a teaching freak. Recently stumbled across a concept called Socratic Method of teaching. It is about teaching without preaching. The instructor mainly asks questions and the student discovers his own answers. The primary role of the instructor is to merely prevent the student from straying too far from the right track. Once the student discovers this thrill of discovery, he becomes independant and is capapble of finding solutions even in the absence of the instructor. I tried this method on some of my friends and everyone was impressed beyond belief. My adventures with other friends is described in my blog called Socrates2. Due to the huge volume, I had to spin off a new blog.

This was most unexpected. I was sitting and cooly chit chatting with my friend Arun, and kinda getting some work done. Out of the blue, my neighbour popped up with her 3 year old son asking me to teach him computers every day for 15 mins. She asked so polietly, that I could not refuse and the kid was chooo chweet that I thought maybe I can play with this kid to relax...

But a 3 year old kid... computers!!! Where do I fit in. The first question I asked myself was... does he understand cartoons at 3. else he cant even play a game... And what is the hurry to learn computers anyway. What ever it may be, I decided that I would use the socratic method.