Our observations may be useful to other librarians who plan a similar project. Computer skills Children have short attention spans. The instructor has approximately a half-hour to present the material. If the full class time goes beyond this limit, the attention of the class soon shifts. Several short classes retain the children s interest far better than fewer longer ones.
Children tend to have minimal typing skills.
The Internet experience is designed to require only hunt and peck, or two-finger typing, which is satisfactory for these educational experiences. Most children want to learn Internet skills. However, the educational motivation is different for each child. In addition, some Internet concepts are difficult to visualize. To help the children understand abstract concepts, we used boxes and string to show how the request for information was transported to the information server and back to the child at the personal computer.