What is the proper age to start using computers? Are there developmental differences that educators should know about?
This is the big question. What is good for a 15-year-old is not ipso facto good for a 5-year-old. All teachers and developmentalists know this, but the computer industry has missed this point in their barrage of advertisements. Personally, I’ve had a complete 180-degree reversal from my original position 20 years ago when I was stuffing computers into our kindergarten as fast as I could get grant money. Now my feeling is that children under age 7 really do not need to be using computers. We should be putting our money and efforts into the older students who can profit most and who are closer to the job market. The idea of giving a 4-year-old a computer now to “prepare him for the future” is nonsense. When he’s 21, his computer is going to look totally different from what he is using now, and we may be actually teaching him a set of completely maladaptive skills. For example, nobody is confident there will be keyboarding—or a mouse—in 10 or even 5 years from now. The point is that these
