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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

Don't give kids a computer, give them a camera. A real one.

A toddler needs manipulative toys to develop patience and motor control. Blocks to stack, puzzles to fit together, balls to throw and catch, books with pages to turn. Nothing electronic at all.

Hard agree. And a lot of unstructured play. Actually, that should all last well into their pre-teens IMO.

...lots of unstructured play I surely did have with my slow as molasses bloated Pentium 4 machine with XP and no internet in my childhood. Developed a LOT of patience when downloading stuff from the Net (on 256Kbps, no less!) on one PC and moving it over to my machine.

256 whole kilobits per second? Talk about instant gratification. You kids and your fancy broadband connections, back in my day all we got was dial-up at 56k and we liked it!

I'm young enough for this 256Kb connection to be in times where the norm was 10Mbps+, so trust me, it was comparable to using dialup when DSL was widespread.

Dial up! We had to type in listings printed in magazines. And we liked it!

I for one am happy to see kids in my neighbourhood (12 at most?) on their bikes going around with fishing gear. And that I grew up in an area where I could walk or cycle out of the city limits and get lost in wooded areas. (it wasn't "wild" or anything, you could walk in any direction for five minutes and be out of the woods; the important part was that it wasn't someone's back yard, there wasn't any oversight, we could climb trees and build shitty huts and try and fail at starting fires, then come across semi-professionally built hangout spots made from wood and agricultural plastic sheets where the older kids hung out at night)

> And a lot of unstructured play.

... which gets ever more hard to provide, sadly. Many people can't really afford an appropriately sized home - but in contrast to "earlier" times, can't send the kids outdoors as a replacement either as they're unsafe due to car-centric culture, the death of third spaces and, in the US, gun and other violence.

I agree. As they get older there is more room for electronic stuff and it can have benefits. I think the first apps my kids used were things like GCompris.

No, let them paint.

No, camera first helps teach them how to observe their surroundings and look for good potential photos in what they see. It’s also interesting to see photos from a child’s perspective on what they find interesting. When they get a feel for that they can move on to drawing and painting stuff from their own mind.

Why not both? It really doesn't need to be one or the other, these kids have tons of free time.

I did that and now they want me to buy film for it, which costs a small fortune. And would be even harder to find someone to develop.

Why does it have to be a film camera? A "real" camera can still be a digital one.

Re: development - I've started shooting film for the first time recently and have been developing B&W film in my kitchen using Caffenol, a mixture of instant coffee, washing soda, and vitamin C tablets, all things you can get at the grocery store. https://www.caffenol.org/recipes/ (I've been using the standard "delta" recipe, I don't do any temperature control, whatever my room temp has been has been fine)

I 3D printed a film development tank, and bought some "glassware" at a thrift shop to mix things up. The first couple rolls I did, I put a towel tightly over the window and closed the door and used my bathroom as a darkroom. I've since gotten one of those little "dark bags".

You still technically need a real fixer, but B&W fixer isn't all that bad compared to the whole slew of chemicals needed for color processing. I'm using the powdered Kodak Professional fixer.

Here's some of the shots off my first roll (Ilford HP5 shot on an Olympus Pen EE2) https://postimg.cc/gallery/fL5HvXV This was my first time using the film scanner I got, and I had the settings ALL wrong, they're too bright and too low contrast. I've since figured it out and scans look way better now, I just don't have any of those on my work computer.

I can't help with the film costs, though...

There's plenty of places online you can mail film to to be developed.

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