My junior-year physics teacher, for some reason, taught a section on computer programming. To this day, my idea of the perfect gift is a bigger hard drive, or a larger display, or a copy of Riven, Cyan's sequel to Myst. So it may surprise you to discover that I don't think that computers are the next great revolution in education, nor do I think that we have a requirement, as parents, to expose our infants to computers from the moment they can move their tiny little fists. No one can really say, at this point. Experts are still arguing.
Opinions are divided.
A class of bilingual special-education students in an impoverished Latino school district in San Francisco was given the task of counting various pictures that were displayed for them. The July 1997 issue of The Atlantic Monthly reports how the children would touch the pictures on the screen while counting out loud, or making little marks on a piece of paper for each picture they saw, then counting their marks. They still needed that physical connection in order to make it work in their minds. Some studies have shown that various computerized reading programs might cause a drop in creativity. We fill their days up with activities.