LisaM said: I appreciate everyone's good will in this thread, but I feel frustrated that I haven't explained myself very well. My daughter is thoroughly competent using a computer. She's not a technophobe. But there is a huge gap between using a computer and knowing on what's going on 'under the hood'. I feel it myself, and I've been using computers practically since they were invented.
How does one learn the 'under the hood' stuff? I have a house full of Ubuntu books, haunt the internet, read the man pages, and I'm still coming up very, very short. Do you have to take CS courses at university to pick this stuff up? Because I know for a fact that using a computer alone isn't going to do it.
Give you an example. Something breaks. You write the question to the forum, and somebody in the know tells you to type in some lines of code somewhere. Where did that knowledge come from? How can I make sure that my daughter (and I) can tap into that and really understand what is going on?
Thanks!
I think it takes a real geek spirit to fully understand the under the hood parts. I can't tell you how many times ive stayed up all night going through trials and errors, faqs, tutorials, and the like just to figure out something. I think I was probably around 13 or 14(I could be wrong, but it was around there.) when I first started fiddling around with QBasic. I would spend hours asking myself, "ohh, I wonder how I can do this?!" and then look it up (this, of course, was before google ruled the earth) I would find the steps, then look up each step, then further research what that did, annd spiral down untill I had a full understanding of what it was telling the computer to do.
Try starting her out with how a computer works. Break it down to software, and hardware. This is a hard-drive. This is flash storage. This is volatile memory, this is non-volatile. RAM, Motherboard, Graphics Card, Drivers. A computer thinks in binary and there are middle men that translate up a series of steps untill it's in plain english, japanese, french, german, spanish, whatever.
Teach her what an operating system is and then why you use ubuntu, linux, fedora, red hat, etc. If she follows you up to that point, then there may be hope. I'd say teach her some of the basic commands, and tell her exactly what they mean like sudo (super user do) it made a lot more sense to me when the commands were broken down into english for me. Then set her up with a project..maybe..uhm..something simple like going a day using the terminal instead of the menus, to run programs. Don't tell her HOW to do it, just let her find it out on her own. Then move up in difficulty, tell her to download a certain image from the internet using just the terminal. Keep making it harder. Make sure she understands all of the comands that she's using. If she finds a solution on the internet, have her take each step, and research the command. If she does this, I'll bet she'll develop a good understanding on what's going on.
If she doesn't have the will or spirit to do it then... idunno.