Teaching my three year old daughter Phoebe how to use laptop.

It has been a couple of days I have started teaching my three-year-old daughter Phoebe to use a computer(Laptop). I taught her how to switch on/off a laptop, how to open/close applications(I have only taught her how to open and close only two applications – Microsoft word and YouTube), how to use a mouse for pointing and clicking and how to type using the typing rules. She is learning alphabets, both English and Nepali, and numbers while typing using a keyboard. We spend around 20 minutes every morning in this teaching and learning process. I let her explore and answer her questions. I simply facilitate her learning. She is doing pretty well in her lessons. Small kids learn so fast by the hands-on approach and I am pretty amazed by her pace. She exactly remembered what I taught her on the very first day about turning a laptop on/off and opening/closing applications and the use of space, backspace and enter keyboard keys. I am pretty amazed by her catch up capabilities.

My initial thought on teaching computer skills to my daughter was not very affirmative. I thought that will simply meddle with my daughter’s learning at her school. I was just pondering on if she is able to learn mobile skills easily why not computer skills? But didn’t dare to try. But I had to give a second thought to my initial thinking when I came across the youngest programmer in Microsoft – Tanmay Baashi while browsing videos on YouTube. I was pretty impressed by his passion and achievement at such young age of thirteen. I went through some of his YouTube channel videos which really amazed me to know that he started to code at the age of four. That was hard to believe for me but it was the fact and the boy had proved it. It was a huge motivation for me to start providing computer lessons to my daughter. And I believe that my daughter will do better gradually. Now I am thinking of making a detail year-long plan for my daughter in this upcoming year 2018 for her computer lessons. Who knows what benefit parents might have when their kids master necessary IT skills at a very young age? One thing I feel optimistic about is that we will be coding together one day very soon.