Starting this because I’m impressed by stories about builds, experiments, learning that some people do with their kids.

I remember late 90’s childhood days on my uncle’s computer, playing with Microsoft FrontPage, wondering if I can make moving mechanisms out of those starry shapes. Didn’t know about CAD software. I did use it to create personal kiddie web pages. It was beautiful!

I had been printing stacks of articles from “How stuff works”, TLDP howtos and Phrack magazine on my mom’s office printer. I read datasheets, trying to figure out what those timing diagrams meant. Never had working hardware nor someone to point me around. I just some dead old motherboard with mysterious clear-windowed integrated circuits, those EPROMs that stored the BIOS but could also act as a state machine when programmed accordingly. I remember the Nokia 3310 programmer I put together from schematics in a magazine which I used to change a few characters in the firmware as proof of ultimate hardware hackdom.

There was no such thing as a “hacker community” back then. Not in my small town.

Over the years, having attended conferences like the CCC and its offshoots, I got a sense of how much more one can achieve when growing in a social environment of like-minded people. Those community tables, tents, or villages are so impressive!

It’s awesome to have someone who knows the lay of the land and also knows how curiosity woks.

Below, I’m gathering little stories, little experiments of people guiding and instilling curiosity in the next gen.

Kid mentoring stories from the internets

  • Michael Levin’s tales of things he experiments with his kid, like this https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin/status/1616911750179201026

    I’m doing a home study unit on basal cognition/diverse intelligence w/ my kid. One of the work products is making a survey on relevant topics (which I will eventually beg all of you to take, to give us data). He had an idea of seeing how GPT Chat would answer it. How to do it?

  • The Hacker Way: How I taught my nephew to program. https://stopa.io/post/246

    An alternative method is to treat them with a bit more respect. What if you treated them like an intern? Imagine how a kid would feel if they worked on what the pro adults did. It’s intriguing, and it may even be something their friends think is cool.