You might try something from the lego mindstorms series, tho it might be too early for the child. It allows you to program your creation from both the device itself, as well as from a pc or tablet.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Code combat. It's a video game they have to program. It starts at a no code level where you build simple movement and progresses from there. It's a great start for a kid who's 5 or 6
you are wildly overestimating what a 5 year old is capable of understanding. wait another 5 years and see if the kid is even interested at all. if so, get him a mid tier pc and call it a day.
You're wildly under-estimating what a 5 year old is capable of, let alone a 10 year old.
buy him an automation game like shapez. its style relates to children I think and it is easy enough for them to learn how to think methodically
Looks pretty sweet. Steam on sale 80%. Got full. Game and all DLC for $2.58. Thanks for the tip.
Minecraft has a ton of potential. So many ways to develop creativity, problem solving, redstone, and using commands.
Then there's modding. navigating the web to find safe ones, navigate the file explorer to put them in the right spot. Troubleshoot mods that don't work together. (I remember having to manually change hundreds of Item IDs before they changed the system).
5 is probably too young to start with mods, but texture packs would probably go well, open up paint and start scribbling on blocks. Eventually give them paint.net (or anything more complex than Win Paint) and start messing with layers and saving things to the right file type.
Does the kindle fire let you do USB transfer for music and books? Transfer stuff manually. (Amazon taking the download feature away from the store, so books will need to be got elsewhere) I'm a big fan of Standardebooks.org, all free and public domain, not a lot of children's books, but should be good by the time they're 10. Although the LCD screen probably isn't the best for reading, I'd get them an eink for reading time. Also easier to separate reading time from game time. Also if you can go to the public library for physical books. The simple responsibility of borrowing a books, taking care of it and having to return it on time is good. (I'm rambling off topic...)
Install a bunch of easy puzzle games. I've always like Flow, there's also simple math ones, sudoku, jigsaws, word searches, find the object, there's probably a hundred others.
The tablet is only as detrimental as you make it. Find games with an actual story that the kid has to read. 5 might be a bit young for RTS games, but those will definitely make him read and think. When they get stuck, show them how to find the guide online and read just enough while avoiding story spoilers.
Thanks for the reply. I got started with RTS pretty young. They just rereleased the Warcraft Battle Chest!
Well, the amount of comments just going with the premise of a 5yo kid actually understanding logical operators or circuits is a little bit concerning, seeing as mine can barely do the car puzzles with the arrow commands, and they are 6.
Uh oh.
Listen every kid is going to go at a different pace, and they're going to follow their own interests. Right before covid lockdowns started, so he spent his formative years at home with Mom and Dad, who worked from home, and who are both highly educated with masters and doctorates, and you don't get that kind of education without being able to teach. So he was around adult language constantly and had two parents that knew how to take complex subjects and boil it down to its most basic forms. Like one example of teaching him logical operators was with a little plug-in night light/ flashlight that he has in his room. He could figure out no problem what the circuit must include. A power source, a light sensor, and a three-way switch, and so he can understand that that light sensor was checking to see if there was light and if so it would stay off, else it would turn on. I did a big project over the summer with installing PVC piping into a raised garden beds and ended up with a ton of extra parts. Splitters and valves and what not. And with that I was able to teach him some of the more advanced operators, and, xor, and nor. Like We would plumb one pipe from the water source and then split it and then put a valve on each side and then connect them back so it had one outlet. And from that or with some other connectors you can teach basically all the operators and even binary. Plus we would read books with him every night, and still do, four or five books a night, and often we talk about the books to develop critical thinking. We also encouraged transcendental thought (tell your brain what to do, ask your brain what you should do), and abstract thought. There was one awesome book for abstract thought that I can't remember the name of, but every page was like a picture of a tree but each leaf was a hand. And the text would say something like, "what if leaves were hands? Then the tree could climb you." And for a while we would make up his own all the time. There's also a series of books called like Astrophysics for Babies, Optical Physics for Babies, Relativity for Babies, so we would read those and combine them with little experiments we would do with my telescope or my big laser. Also spend a lot of time reading the dictionary and going through an encyclopedia, each written for kids, like "my first encyclopedia." He's been in Montessori school for a year now and has a wide range of interests; they teach meditation, yoga, karate, and all sorts of practical and life skills. Stuff I never even thought about at his age. It's pretty cool. We know that every child will experience their own heartbreak and letdown, and will internalize things as trauma no matter what we do. I wish my brain was still soft and as hungry as a kid's. They suck up whatever info you give them.
4-5 books a night?
Jesus
I mean good for you and them, but that is wild
Everyone’s different, though, as you said, so for sure work with what you have and try and be the best you can for them, so that they may be the best they can
I mean, short kids books. Dr. Suess and whatnot.
What kind of stuff are 5yo supposed to be learning? I just hope it's not to the detriment of those things. Like how people who skip too many grades never get a chance to learn social skills because they're too busy with more theoretical stuff.
Ok, Ive just started doing this with my daughter. Im using windows because I know it.
Find a few of their "favorite" websites with games. Sesame Street, Paw patrol, whatever their poison. And put them in the hotlist.
"You want to play some games?"
Then they have to chose their profile, put in their "password" open the browser, and pick from their hotlist and work on basic mouse skills. Also get a TINY wireless mouse, it will make their life a lot easier.
My daughter and I also played through Grim Fandango, Curse of monkey island and just started on the Sam and Max games. All point and click puzzle games. Those are a bit hit and miss on the attention span but I read the walkthroughs before I suggest we play so I can guide the process along.
I like the idea of setting them up with his own profile so he has to log in and then Go through the steps of opening the browser and starting a game. Thanks for the reply..
Force him to compile his own gentoo system and no desert until it boots
I don't know what Gentoo is but this sounds hilarious.
Maybe not a good start depending on your child's state of mind and level. Simple games like audio surf let your child get used to the controls and respect the PC. My 9yr old cousin just banged on the keyboard like a monkey while my sister was taking and editing selfies before she could walk.
Second thing is RTS. I taught my brother C&C generals at 3 and he learned plenty of advance skills like finances, hot keys, long term thinking. I was really impressed.
RTS, yes. Another poster suggested that, related to my own start in computing with Warcraft I, and on from there.
I have this kid relative. Whenever they visited, I'd take out a portable whiteboard and draw mazes for them. Then I'd have them draw mazes for me. Ofc we'd play lots of tic tac toe. Sometimes I'd write word puzzles, or math puzzles. (i.e. simple addition problems) Then I'd have them write some math problems for me. ofc they'd write huge numbers for me to add and I'd pretend I was confused and bewildered and I'd count on my fingers to solve them. It was just to have fun. It didn't involve a computer but it got them thinking, and now that they're older they like math. It's important that you emphasize the fun parts.
I'd open up a computer with them and we'd look at stuff together. I'd say: "that's like the part that thinks. that's like the part that remembers. that's like the part that remembers a LONG TIME" etc. Then we'd look at the patterns on the circuit boards, etc. For Science Fair they did a project called "Will it Boot?" We took a computer, they opened it up, and removed the hard drive. Then we asked "will it boot?" and turned it on. Then we replaced the hard drive and removed the RAM and asked "will it boot?" and turned it on again. Etc. I took pictures of them opening the case, we made a table of what the PC could boot without, printed a diagram that I downloaded of the part names, put it all on a posterboard and that was the Science Fair project.
This is your kid, right? Severely limit "tablet time" but don't worry about it being in their life -- back in the day we had TV which was not much better, and it's important that the kid have some knowledge of mass media to talk about with their future classmates. But tell them they can take it apart and put it together again whenever they want. And if it accidentally breaks when they're doing that, then sincerely congratulate them ("your first unsuccessful experiment!") and immediately head out to buy them a new one. Just get an inexpensive box that you can put Linux on. Easily. Like, let them put the USB stick in and boot it, and tell them what to press. (ahead of time, try to make sure it'll work!) (tell them "it's just a toy now, but we'll turn it into a REAL computer!") Then point Firefox to youtube and look up a video or something. Make sure the PC is somewhere public where you can see it too. Hang out and watch what they're doing, watch what they're watching. Talk back to the show. Make jokes about the show and tell the show when you don't like it. Come up with fanfic ideas. Me and my fam came up with this awesome alternate-reality Pokemon world and role-played it, resolving battles with "rock paper scissors" oops gotta go.
Awesome suggestions. Thanks for the reply.
Can the kid ride a bike yet? Kick a football? Swim?
I love reading now, but when I was 5 I only wanted to look at the pictures in books, not the words.
My friend hates to fishing, because he dad tried to force it on him before he was ready.
And if he is interested, it's probably better you build one together than buy one.
imho.
Yes, yes, yes. That fishing advice hits close. I think him seeing me go fishing and seeing all my hesr and stuff has given him a real interest in it. I take him with me often and we make a trip of it, I do most of the fishing and we walk the river. I take a few casts, then he gets to throw rocks. We also spend time finding cool rocks and learning about whatever cool plants and bugs we find.
I like the idea of building one together.
Enjoy.
I agree with the idea of trying lots of different things, especially physical activities. If you're kid falls in love with computers early that's awesome but it can also lead them down a road of bad health habits.
Can the kid ride a bike yet? Kick a football? Swim?
I love reading now, but when I was 5 I only wanted to look at the pictures in books, not the words.
I was writing code in first grade, which I guess would be 6 or so. And I didn't have a home computer back then, had to do so on what time I could scrounge up in my limited windows of time of access to other people's computers or computers at institutions, which raised the bar. Today, computers are cheap and plentiful enough that it's pretty easy to get ahold of one.
I could definitely write software before I could ride a bicycle. I still don't know how to kick a football.
It's definitely doable.
I think that a lot of what we set our expectations around is around when schools choose to teach things. Like, I remember
as an American
being shocked when I discovered how young people in the UK and some other countries started being taught foreign language. In the US, our school system doesn't really do much by way of foreign language education until...I guess high school? 9th-12th grades, so maybe around 14-17 years old. But in the UK, you can (or used to, dunno if things have changed) take Latin in primary school.
kagis
Yeah, sounds like they made it mandatory recently:
https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/school-year/subject-guides/languages-at-primary-school/
The 2014 Primary National Curriculum once again made learning a foreign language compulsory at Key Stage 2 (Years 3 to 6). Schools are free to choose whether to teach an ancient or a modern language; it is much more about language learning skills than the particular language on offer. Your child could therefore learn French, Spanish, Mandarin, German, Arabic or even Latin — the choices are endless! However, once your child begins secondary school the teaching of a modern foreign language is compulsory.
I thought "that seems like an incredibly-advanced topic for a young age". But...really, that's just my expectations set by convention here in the US, not that there's an inability to learn language at a young age (and in fact, there are some strong arguments that learning language is easier the younger you do it).
I think that it's possible to start learning just about anything at an early age if the child wants it.
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If he has support, he'll be fine. My issues learning stuff growing up was no one in my family to teach me anything, so frustration and giving up was common. Imo fishings just boring af most ppl would hate it, especially if you don't like nature. Learning code is way easier younger, your brain just makes associations related to language easier. Coding itself isn't particularlly hard, easier the younger you learn.
There are coding related games on iphone like human resource factory that might help.
Id introduce them to scratch on the tablet and see if they like that.
I agree most people hate fishing and find it boring. I am a diehard fly fisherman and fancy myself as an angler; I'm not fishing, hoping I might get lucky and catch something. I'm working an angle, trying to fool a fish. And given our relative brain size, if I can't fool a fish, I have bigger problems. There's no luck about it.
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It’s great that you want to support your kid and hopefully get them away from the focus-destroying dopamine traps that are many „kid friendly“ apps. But please ask yourself what your kid likes first, not what you want them to be interested in. It’s perfectly fine to restrict tablet time and let him focus on what he likes, be it computer stuff or football or cycling or reading or painting or whatever. If he really interested in Linux and nor, xor etc that’s great, but don’t force it on him.
And that is coming from someone who bought and built his first own computer around that age and wrote his first few lines of very basic basic code not long after. Not because it was expected of me, but because I was interested and given the opportunity to follow those interests.
So, if that kid is interested in computers, Minecraft is a great game for kids. It encourages creativity, problem solving, perseverance and, maybe later, collaboration. It’s also possible to play together and scale their experience to their age: get started in creative or peaceful, then let them discover mobs and mods when they are a bit older, then let them play with friends.
If the kid likes building and Legos, you might want to look into Lego Boost and Spike, although they are rather expensive.
Oh, and paint. Kids love paint, be it MS paint, Paint.net or any other open source alternative. Show them that with a computer they can create, not just consume.
Shit, Minecraft is a great game for adults. I will follow up on some of these suggestions for sure.
Lego robots, those drawing robots, something that you can program to move forward, forward, left... A line follower. I'd be cautious at 5 yo and just letting them swipe on tablets and stare at flashing, colorful videos/games for too long. That just teaches them to mindlessly consume content. So I'd allow them to plat KTuberling, draw something in Paint and program a toy robot, but wait before giving them a whole PC or tablet of their own. And a tablet teaches nothing. That's the reason why lots of people these days don't have a clue how technology works.
The kid is five, and it's an android device. You have options without trashing the thing.
Sideload some open source games through F-Droid, set up a simple emulator frontend/app with a few age appropriate games. Lemuroid is a pretty straightforward emulator frontend with a decent UI for a kid to poke the boxart they want to play and just go, but I'm not sure how much you could lock it down to prevent them from borking the settings.
Lock the kid's access to the app store the fuck down. Install an on-device-vpn based adblocker like blokada or rethink dns to block ads across all apps on the device. It might break some games but the overwhelming majority will just fallback to "you don't have an internet connection" functionality at worst.
You can look up how to enable adb on the device, then plug it into your computer and use https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater to remove/disable built-in apps you don't need. There's a ton you can do with adb to tweak the device, but uad is the most user friendly way.
If you want to push programming, others have mentioned a version of swift that's available on the kindle fire. Someone else mentioned Luanti as an open source minecraft clone, which I know is available through F-Droid (but can be quite janky due to not being made for phones/tablets).
I will definitely follow up on some of these. I have some limited experience with ADB. I have a PiHole for DNS; think I need a VPN, too? It definitely breaks some things for me, but when that happens I know I'm better off without it. Thanks for the reply.
Actually, the mobile/touch screen client side has gotten more love lately! I would recommend Luanti, especially with the mineclonia game, since Minecraft is so common they’ll have more to talk about with friends who play Minecraft, and not feel left out. The redstone stuff just recently got redone to the point it feels very similar to Minecraft, and I’ve found it’s actually a fun way for them to learn about programming, although mine, at 6, still struggles with the concepts and I’d be very surprised if a 5yo got a grasp on them properly. But then again it is entirely possible they are less logically inclined than their peers, and maybe they come more naturally to most other kids. But even so, it’s productive fun. It promotes imagination and sticking to a project in longer term. Building up things is fun for all kids I bet, but add to it the need to go gather, search and produce the tools and materials to build, it teaches some important life lessons too, that would not be so easy to convey otherwise. And with all this, it’s still just fun. If they get frustrated, they can just instead go sail across the seas and spelunk in some caves.
Screen time has to be enforced a lot more though, since it’s so easily addictive. If one doesn’t put boundaries on it from the start, it’ll get unhealthy and hard to shake. A lot of grumpiness is bound to follow, unless really carefully keeping limits from the get-go.
Perhaps a Raspberry Pi 500 (or the older Raspberry Pi 400), can do all the things an ordinary Raspberry Pi can, but comes as a complete device with built-in keyboard. Runs Linux and is rather easy to use.
Linux from scratch
Scratch might be interesting to look at. As for a computer you can't get wrong with an old ThinkPad with Debian
Scratch Jr. is designed for kids, and is available on the Kindle devices. My kid loved making the cat character move around with it :)
I agree with sibling comments about not forcing anything on kids. I hate sports because I was made to play seasonal sports (tee ball, basketball, soccer) in elementary school and middle school. The only sport I’ll play is freestyle frisbee in a field.
Just have a computer available. Agree with the idea of showing how to create drawings and such. Then go full hands off. If it happens, it happens.
I say this as a computer person working in tech.
I can relate to this. Zero interest in baseball, basketball, or football, because it was forced on me. I sucked at all of them. Never learned the basic rules. Although now, as a lawyer, one of my favorite things to watch on YouTube is videos of teams experiencing the application of obscure rules that most of the players don't seem to know. Like a bunch of videos in baseball where something will happen and the fielding team will think it's a dead ball, but someone on the at-bat team knows the subscure rule and for some reason it's not a dead ball, and they nonchalantly tap home base and then start celebrating as the other team all walks to the dugout.
I almost want to get him something Linux based and turn him loose.
I don't have a five-year-old, but if I did, I would. Worse he can do is wipe what's on it. Can just reinstall the OS.
Maybe also hand them a simple programming environment. When I was a kid, starting kids out with Logo was a pretty easy way to go. Pretty sure that current Linux distros have some Logo variant, lets you make pretty pictures. Dunno if that's still considered an effective route to get kids interested today.
kagis
It looks like, in Debian trixie, there's kturtle and ucblogo; the latter was written for university students, though. I've written code for ucblogo myself some years back, when I wanted to generate organic-looking desktop backgrounds.
For a five-year-old, if it's a laptop, I'd probably get something relatively-inexpensive (unless you don't care about the financial aspect). If you can install a Linux distro on it, can probably use any old secondhand laptop, even. Don't think that the brand matters that much, as long as one can get it up and running.
A point someone made before, though, on a Reddit discussion I was reading talking about how "kids these days can't use computers any more, just mobile OSes" -- kids used to need to learn to use a computer if they wanted to play video games, so they had a major incentive. A lot of games are accessible via mobile OSes today, so that may degrade the appeal. YouTube/TikTok are accessible on both.
I teach him about basic electrical circuits and how that translates to computing, if, and, or, xor, nor, etc. He’s got some familiar with hex (colors) and the concept of binary (on/off).
There's a genre of programming video games. Steam doesn't list suggested age ranges, though, so shrugs.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=5432&supportedlang=english&ndl=1
I haven't played much by way of programming games myself -- I mean, I've got enough real-world programming stuff that I'd do -- so I can't recommend much personally. Played some Mac-specific Core War knockoff years back. When I got into programming, it was because personal computers shipped with an actual -- if simple -- programming environment built into it.
Problem is, what you're talking about is really a child-rearing problem, not a technical problem. I don't know how one makes engineeringy-stuff appealing relative to non-engineeringy stuff. I didn't have a smartphone with YouTube and TikTok and a huge library of video games as a kid.
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The kid is five...... don't.
I feel surprisingly insecure in my own parenting style and capabilities, if it is normal for such a young kid to even think about some of that stuff. When I was 5yo, I was eating pebbles outside and climbing on trees thinking I’d surely get to clouds this way.
You thinking back to when you were 5 is similar to what I was thinking. I'm not sure if giving kids tech that early on is a good thing. That said I'm not a counselor and not a parent so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
My biggest question is can your child read and comprehend what they are reading? I would think it'd be rather difficult to have them learn anything about tech if they are missing that skill.
Beyond that, looking back on my childhood (I was around that age in the early 00's) I wish that there was less tech in my life then and that I was bored more often. That said I totally understand why some parents give their kids tablets or YouTube to get a break, parenting from the outside looking in is hella stressful and exhausting.
Yeah, it’s a hard balance to find, trying to maintain your own mental wellbeing, career, social relations like friends and family, household, money with all that comes with it, and then also try and bring up a small human in as healthy and as encouraging an environment as possible.
Sometimes you just have too much going on, especially in today’s world, so I also do get the occasional breaks given by some screen time.
But it can also be productive, it doesn’t have to be mindless and meaningless content. But it’s sort of understandable to default to anything at all that can give them something to do for a moment, if you need to.
But I’m not much of a parent either, in the way that I don’t really know what I am doing. I can’t imagine most do either.
I’ve recently introduced my 5 year old to Luanti (open source Minecraft clone). He loves it, sees me open terminals (Linux only house), use the in-game terminal which I’m teaching him to use, learns what keys are where etc. and personally I’m OK with that for now. Baby steps.
My own computer route was to play games initially (load “”) then move on to coding later. It is much easier to learn coding now than it was then but just moving him off the tablet will already be a huge win. If he shows an aptitude or interest in it, coderdojo or similar will be waiting.
Oh! If you do decide to do something similar, I hooked the laptop up to the TV with keyboard and mouse and it was a huge win both in fine motor control and fun!
Good luck!
Another vote for scratch. Most kids that age want quick results and not to spend ages debugging something. Funnily enough I've seen the same scratch interface used to program industrial robots.
How much time one on one are you committing to spend with the child? This will make the difference.
Alternatively, think about some sort of robotics kit. Doing stuff in software is great but if it changes something in the real world, even better. Have you thought about something arduino?
Just for balance though, make a raft, a treehouse, a tent, make a fire without matches. It's all problem solving but I bet any kid will remember getting muddy more than writing a neat while loop.
A Raspberry Pi. Literally designed for this sort of thing.
Just make sure he has a computer and he’ll learn
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