Looks pretty sweet. Steam on sale 80%. Got full. Game and all DLC for $2.58. Thanks for the tip.

Thanks for the reply. I got started with RTS pretty young. They just rereleased the Warcraft Battle Chest!

What kind of stuff are 5yo supposed to be learning? I just hope it’s not to the detriment of those things. Like how people who skip too many grades never get a chance to learn social skills because they’re too busy with more theoretical stuff.

Listen every kid is going to go at a different pace, and they’re going to follow their own interests. Right before covid lockdowns started, so he spent his formative years at home with Mom and Dad, who worked from home, and who are both highly educated with masters and doctorates, and you don’t get that kind of education without being able to teach. So he was around adult language constantly and had two parents that knew how to take complex subjects and boil it down to its most basic forms. Like one example of teaching him logical operators was with a little plug-in night light/ flashlight that he has in his room. He could figure out no problem what the circuit must include. A power source, a light sensor, and a three-way switch, and so he can understand that that light sensor was checking to see if there was light and if so it would stay off, else it would turn on. I did a big project over the summer with installing PVC piping into a raised garden beds and ended up with a ton of extra parts. Splitters and valves and what not. And with that I was able to teach him some of the more advanced operators, and, xor, and nor. Like We would plumb one pipe from the water source and then split it and then put a valve on each side and then connect them back so it had one outlet. And from that or with some other connectors you can teach basically all the operators and even binary. Plus we would read books with him every night, and still do, four or five books a night, and often we talk about the books to develop critical thinking. We also encouraged transcendental thought (tell your brain what to do, ask your brain what you should do), and abstract thought. There was one awesome book for abstract thought that I can’t remember the name of, but every page was like a picture of a tree but each leaf was a hand. And the text would say something like, “what if leaves were hands? Then the tree could climb you.” And for a while we would make up his own all the time. There’s also a series of books called like Astrophysics for Babies, Optical Physics for Babies, Relativity for Babies, so we would read those and combine them with little experiments we would do with my telescope or my big laser. Also spend a lot of time reading the dictionary and going through an encyclopedia, each written for kids, like “my first encyclopedia.” He’s been in Montessori school for a year now and has a wide range of interests; they teach meditation, yoga, karate, and all sorts of practical and life skills. Stuff I never even thought about at his age. It’s pretty cool. We know that every child will experience their own heartbreak and letdown, and will internalize things as trauma no matter what we do. I wish my brain was still soft and as hungry as a kid’s. They suck up whatever info you give them.

There are 5 year olds on this planet that are more capable of certain things than grown ass adults. Waiting until 10 is to sacrificed their spongiest brain years.

You’re wildly under-estimating what a 5 year old is capable of, let alone a 10 year old.

I like the idea of setting them up with his own profile so he has to log in and then Go through the steps of opening the browser and starting a game. Thanks for the reply…

RTS, yes. Another poster suggested that, related to my own start in computing with Warcraft I, and on from there.

Yes, yes, yes. That fishing advice hits close. I think him seeing me go fishing and seeing all my hesr and stuff has given him a real interest in it. I take him with me often and we make a trip of it, I do most of the fishing and we walk the river. I take a few casts, then he gets to throw rocks. We also spend time finding cool rocks and learning about whatever cool plants and bugs we find.

I like the idea of building one together.

I agree with the idea of trying lots of different things, especially physical activities. If you’re kid falls in love with computers early that’s awesome but it can also lead them down a road of bad health habits.

Can the kid ride a bike yet? Kick a football? Swim?

I love reading now, but when I was 5 I only wanted to look at the pictures in books, not the words.

I was writing code in first grade, which I guess would be 6 or so. And I didn’t have a home computer back then, had to do so on what time I could scrounge up in my limited windows of time of access to other people’s computers or computers at institutions, which raised the bar. Today, computers are cheap and plentiful enough that it’s pretty easy to get ahold of one.

I could definitely write software before I could ride a bicycle. I still don’t know how to kick a football.

It’s definitely doable.

I think that a lot of what we set our expectations around is around when schools choose to teach things. Like, I remember — as an American — being shocked when I discovered how young people in the UK and some other countries started being taught foreign language. In the US, our school system doesn’t really do much by way of foreign language education until…I guess high school? 9th-12th grades, so maybe around 14-17 years old. But in the UK, you can (or used to, dunno if things have changed) take Latin in primary school.

kagis

Yeah, sounds like they made it mandatory recently:

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/school-year/subject-guides/languages-at-primary-school/

The 2014 Primary National Curriculum once again made learning a foreign language compulsory at Key Stage 2 (Years 3 to 6). Schools are free to choose whether to teach an ancient or a modern language; it is much more about language learning skills than the particular language on offer. Your child could therefore learn French, Spanish, Mandarin, German, Arabic or even Latin — the choices are endless! However, once your child begins secondary school the teaching of a modern foreign language is compulsory.

I thought “that seems like an incredibly-advanced topic for a young age”. But…really, that’s just my expectations set by convention here in the US, not that there’s an inability to learn language at a young age (and in fact, there are some strong arguments that learning language is easier the younger you do it).

If he has support, he’ll be fine. My issues learning stuff growing up was no one in my family to teach me anything, so frustration and giving up was common. Imo fishings just boring af most ppl would hate it, especially if you don’t like nature. Learning code is way easier younger, your brain just makes associations related to language easier. Coding itself isn’t particularlly hard, easier the younger you learn.
There are coding related games on iphone like human resource factory that might help.

Id introduce them to scratch on the tablet and see if they like that.

Shit, Minecraft is a great game for adults. I will follow up on some of these suggestions for sure.