exwm VS Tuxpaint-Android

5. They each have come up with their own personal projects, so I tailor exercises to help them with problems that they need to solve

I wanted this to be a happy experience, so I have never pushed them, but always challenge them to push themselves. I spend a few hours with them every weekend, then a couple of hours with them mid week to help them with challenges. But that is not how I started. I started with 1 hour first thing every morning Monday to Friday to teach them the basics and get them inspired. If they seemed drained, or I sensed that they needed a break, I just let them have a day off.

We also play erion mud [3] and sometimes hexonyx [4] because I wanted them to understand what a mud is all about and to build up interest. I am really into text-based games, so not surprisingly we play nethack (rogue like) [5]. I am also into interactive fiction and started them off on Adventure [6]. If you are interested in interactive fiction, then you might enjoy reading "Twisty Little Passages - an approach to interactive fiction" by Nick Montfort [7].

Full disclosure, I believe that the main reason I am able to pull this all off is that my wife and I home-school our children. It is a challenge though. Very few families where we are from are similar to us in our philosophy of technology and education.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Raspberry-Cooling-Cooler-Heat...

[2] https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm

[3] https://www.erionmud.com/

[4] https://mud.hexonyx.com/

[5] https://www.nethack.org/

[6] https://quuxplusone.github.io/Advent/play.html

[7] https://www.amazon.com/Twisty-Little-Passages-Approach-Inter...

PBS Kids has a lot of games and activities on their website:

https://pbskids.org/games

If your kids watch any PBS shows them they'll recognize the characters.

The activities were fun enough for our twins to learn how to use computer mice at age 3.

Tux Paint is also really fun for young kids and a good way to learn mouse usage:

https://tuxpaint.org/

Tux Paint (version 0.9.30): A drawing program for children.

I can also recommend https://tuxpaint.org/. I see they also have an app for Android nowadays, but no iOS it seems.

TuxPaint

This is going to depend on the age of the kid. I have given a cheap Laptop to my 6-year old and introduced her to Scratch[1] and Tuxpaint[2]. I let her use the mouse and keyboard more instead of tapping on a screen. The school is likely to introduce Scratch from next year. For older kids, they should be on a normal computer. My old MacBook Pro came handy for the elder one. She does the usual Python, games and stuff but she is not really interested in the computer aspect of computers.

The one thing I want to make them learn is to touch-type but it is hard to convince them to do it regularly. Some of the collections about Computer education for kids https://notes.oinam.com/education/computer/

1. https://scratch.mit.edu

2. https://tuxpaint.org

Tux Paint is available for download, free of charge, from the project's website: https://tuxpaint.org/. Tux Paint is open source software and does not contain in-app advertising.