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".