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In This Issue
- Should I Teach My 5-year-old How to Program a Computer?
- Advice for preparing your little ones for the working world.
- Adding New Computers this Holiday Season?
- Are the kids getting another computer as a gift? Be sure ComputerTime is on it! Check out ComputerTime Family Pack.
- Easily Recover from “gds error” in ComputerTime
- If you see this error, getting things working again should take just a couple of minutes with the instructions we provide below.
Should I Teach My 5-year-old How to Program a Computer?
How much technology is “too much, too soon”?
Opinions on this vary so much and most parents make their decisions from the gut anyways, or they just leave it up to the kids to decide. If the kids like computers, video games and gadgets, they just let them have at it without restrictions.
My friend Brett pondered this question recently as he noticed his kids being more interested in real gadgets instead of toys. I noticed this with my kids too. My daughter, when she was two-years-old, couldn’t leave our TV remote alone. So we bought her a flashy toy one. Instead of black and gray, it was bright red, blue, green, and yellow, and each button played fancy sounds and made the device flash. In no time, she became bored with it and kept wanting the real TV remote again.
Like most parents, Brett spends a lot of time thinking about the welfare of his kids and what he can do for them now to prepare the for the real world. He wants them to have an edge in the real world. Who wouldn’t. And the tools of the real world contain computers, cell phones, PDAs. Brett comments:
“One day a computer will be the single most important tool in their lives.”
Hold that thought.
I met a neighbor at a soccer game once, and we chatted. I told him about the product that I was developing, ComputerTime, and how it would help parents limit the time that their kids would spend on the computer because some kids just can’t get off of them without a lot of effort on the part of their parents. His response was, “Oh! I don’t think I would want that on my computer. If I could get my kids to use it 24 hours a day, I would!”
Huh? He wants to raise a sedentary, anti-social, sun-fearing, introverted nerd?
But this notion that you have to put a huge emphasis on training your kids in technology as a very early age is quite prevalent. As somebody who has worked in a high-tech (software development) industry for the past twenty years, let me give you a list of just some of the skills that are required for success:
- Problem Solving
- Creativity
- Ability to Learn New Things
- Motivation
- Conflict Resolution
- Public Speaking
- Leadership
- Persistence
- Listening Skills
- Imagination
- Teamwork
- Designing Complex Systems
- Doing Computer Things (writing code, Googling, creating documents, email, etc)
Kids need to learn all of those skills. And they are not going to do that by sitting in front of a computer for large amounts of time. They will learn those non-technical skills by playing with other kids, getting involved in group activities, playing alone, reading, talking, helping Mom and Dad around the home, being left alone for a while with a problem with real objects in our real environment, walking the dog, helping cook dinner, building a dog house, helping fix the alternator on the car, and sure, using electronic devices once in a while.
I did all of these things growing up and I didn’t start using a computer until I was 15. And look where I am today! Steeped in technology, being successful, and yet always struggling to keep up with the constant change!
A job in the computer field can be lucrative for your children, but only if they learn how to do all of those other things on the critical skill list above. And maybe your child isn’t going to choose to go into the computer field. All of those skills are still valuable and transferable to any other field.
If you teach them a lot of technology when they’re young, who says that it will be the same when your kids hit the workforce?
Compare DOS to Windows 3.1 and to Windows Vista. Compare a Fidonet BBS, to AOL, to the World Wide Web 1995 to the World Wide Web 2007. Do you think what your kids learn today, technology-wise is going to matter when they’re coming out of college in 20 years? The landscape will look quite different than it does today. I’m sure of that.
So what’s going to be the single most important tool in your kids lives? Their brains — properly equipped with a broad range of problem-solving and social skills!
So Brett and the rest of you concerned parents, don’t worry too much about your kids falling behind in the technology learning curve. I think they’ll do great. Focus on the basics and raise wonderful, creative, well-rounded adults who can problem solve in a team environment and persist at things and be really fun to work with, and they will prosper. Those skills never become obsolete, and in a tech industry, they sometimes seem so hard to come by these days.
Adding New Computers this Holiday Season?
You’ve enjoyed peace and quiet with ComputerTime on one computer. When you get another computer, the ComputerTime Family Pack lets you activate ComputerTime on all of your computers.
You can choose the Family Pack at the time of purchase, or if you already bought ComputerTime for a single computer, you can visit our Buy ComputerTime page, and buy the Family Pack Upgrade. You’ll need your ComputerTime Product Key, which you will find by clicking on ComputerTime Admin Help menu, and clicking on About. The product key looks like PK-XXXX-XXXX-XX, and can be found on the About window.
If you have any questions or need help, simply contact Customer Support.
Easily Recover from “gds error” in ComputerTime
If ComputerTime starts to misbehave and you see an error that says something like “internal gds software consistency check (can’t continue after bugcheck)”, it indicates a problem with ComputerTime settings and they must be cleared.
We believe this error is caused by the settings file being corrupted by improper shutdown of the system (just turning off the power to the computer or other attempts to end processes via the task manager rather than shutting them down in a safer way.) It is important to do a proper shutdown through Windows to avoid corrupting files.
Here are the simple steps to resolve the issue:
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If you are reading this on the computer running ComputerTime, click this link. Note that you may be prompted to launch an external application and you must allow ComputerTime to launch.
If ComputerTime is on another computer, then on that computer click the Windows Start button, select “Run...” type:
ComputerTime:ClearSettings
and click OK.
You will be asked to confirm the clearing of your ComputerTime settings, and for your ComputerTime Admin password.
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Now, recreate your ComputerTime Profiles and set the time limits.
Our development team is busy eliminating the cause of this issue. In the meantime, the method above should get you back up and running with little effort, should you run into the problem.
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