BA>I don't know how I missed Ron's message, as I've been nervously
BA>watching the echo sense the plot was posted. But miss it I did
BA>I hope he reposts his responce.
It has scrolled off, regrettably.... I'll see if I can hit
the high points, however.... 
RM> While these would no doubt be useful, I don't think I'd go
RM> too deeply here, as graphical interfaces are supplanting
RM> text.... Learning text commands could chew up a lot of time
RM> in relation to the benefits...
I was suggesting here that working with the CLI (command line
interface) is probably pointless since so much is now done
using a GUI... The GUI also helps prevent "accidental" damage
being done which is all too easy using CLI...
I went on to suggest that it may be overkill to hit all the
GUIs around, as they function in much the same fashion...
BA>Yup, old donated 286s and 8088s to learn on.
This pretty much kills any ideas of heavy-duty graphics..
Might make desktop publishing a difficult task as well.
Just not enough horsepower!  Also limits you to Windows 3.1, 
as there isn't enough horsepower for Win95, OS/2 (except for 
the 1.3 version), NT, UNIX, etc...
BA>Wonderful idea. This brings up another point though,programing.
BA>The utility of batching in dos is self evident, but what about other
BA>kinds of programing.....say in qbasic, or, logo?
Serious batch files are not all that self-evident!  They can
get quite involved!  Imnsho, programming is useless unless
it is structured, and if you're going to teach structured 
programming, you have a year's work right there!    ;-)
BA>Should they be exposed in the 6th grade?
RM> The rest looks real impressive (and LONG ).......
This is the gist of what I wrote; you have enough in mind to
keep them occupied through high school!
For what it's worth, here're my suggestions.... You want the
kids to learn, but also to continue to view the computer as
"fun"...  If you get tied up in things that are abstract,
you're going to lose them.... Let them "play" with a GUI..
Any formatting, etc, let them do from the GUI.  Forget
programming; if one out of 200 goes anywhere with programming
it'll be a miracle... Communications is big; learning to find
people to talk to, and from whom to find information will be
both fun and useful down the line (the emphasis here is on
the down the line aspect, imo; I don't think looking for some
immediate gain is practical or adviseable).... Wordprocessing
is big; they're going to need it, and it's easy enough to get
them to write a report on what they did on a given day...
The average kid is not going to use a spreadsheet for 
anything that is remotely fun, so, sans fun, not worth doing
at this point... As to using the Internet as an encyclopedia
, maybe some kind of a scavenger hunt; awards to those
who find the most "stuff" online; or maybe looking for 
updated drivers for hardware or software (let them "help"
you get things up and running well)?  Have them hunt around
and find the "neatest" stuff they can (one of my current
"neat" spots is www.id4.com - Promotional stuff for the new
film: INDEPENDENCE DAY)....
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