Computer Education

Two weeks ago, Randy switched our operating system from Windows Vista to Freespire which is a linux based system. Colin has spent every spare second learning his way around the new system.
The first week was spent learning the necessities: Music, pictures, and account management. It took him about a day to find L Songs - the program to download his CDs. Then he worked on his account to create 10 different desktops which each needed a different background. It took him a while to figure out how to upload pictures. Monday morning at about 6:30 he burst upstairs to announce that he had figured it out. He could now upload photos from the camera. He and Robyn spent all day Monday taking pictures of random things and uploading them to his account. Then they created different backgrounds in different styles for each desktop.
On Tuesday, the thing that I have been dreading happened - he discovered the games on the new operating system. Up to this point in his life he has spent his computer time doing "educational" things. The games on Windows Vista were great. My personal favorite was one called Purble Place where you could play logic games similar to Master Mind. I liked those games. However, Freespire has real video games. They are very similar to the Nintendo Games from my childhood - Tetris, Super Mario Bros.... His favorite is a game called Super Tux - it is very similar to Mario only instead of Mario, the guy is a penguin. He has been very preoccupied with Super Tux - always thinking about it no matter what he is doing whether at the computer or not. He has spent the last four days figuring it out. The good news is that I was able to impress all of my children with my video games skills thanks to the limited time I spent on Jensen's Nintendo working my way through level 1 of Mario Brothers. I actually taught Colin a few things after he showed me how to get started - like that if you kill the square guy (like it's a turtle in Mario) and you jump on him again just right, he will slide and kill all the guys in your way. And that to jump over really tall things you have to run fast and jump at the same time. I even passed three levels without dying before I had to leave to get the bread in the oven. Yeah Mom!
I started to get a little concerned about this video game obsession yesterday, but decided to not do anything yet to see what would happen. I know Colin well enough that I know he doesn't like to play by the rules - he likes to figure things out and modify them. Sure enough, this morning he was programing his own levels of Super Tux. It came with a feature that you can create your own game and he made two different levels today. What a relief! I was afraid for his brain for a bit there.
He showed me how to program a bit. It's a lot of fun to play your own game.