[OT] Child development, was:Re: [plug] wow.. hell got a bit cooler today...

[Gavin Chester]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 16:34 +0800, Adam Davin wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2005 16:21:57 +0800 (WST)
> Shayne O'Neill <shayne at guild.murdoch.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Thats why they absolutely kill us with there learning curves. Total
> > lack of fear, along with no wrong misconceptions to saddle them down.
> > Even I still get nervous everytiime I have to reconfigure a package I
> > havent dealt with before. I figure kids just do it.

-snip -

	... on this recent swing in the topic to talk about educational games:

Is it a possible for someone to point to a list, or find a way to create
a list, of games and educational apps divided into high resource users
and low resource users?  I may not be looking hard enough, but it seems
that few gpl apps state the minimum hardware requirements.  
  
I ask because in my small home Terminal Server (LTS) network my kids
have fallen in love with supertux (I know, that's not very educational, hehe),
but just one session uses up to 40% of my CPU and two sessions end up
being "veryniced".  Other examples are tuxpaint and tuxtype that suck
up heaps of CPU or network resources such that very few concurrent 
sessions are possible.  Another educational app, Childsplay
(python-based) is even greedier than supertux and I find that only gcompris is 
well behaved, using only around 5-10% CPU - possibly because it's well
written in C++.   

My trouble is that I have only a PII 450MHz as my LTS.  I'm not able or 
wanting to upgrade yet because I believe in wringing all one can out of
old hardware instead of dumping it.  My hardware is "antiquated" yet 
happily runs a few concurrent sessions of OO.o and many productivity apps,
while many of the educational and gaming apps make it struggle (I know, 
that's explained by rate of screen refreshes and all that - but I want
to know which would be good for my h/ware before the kids get hooked into it). 

(PS:  I posted this twice to the K12LTSP list, but both times it met with
deafening silence.  Couldn't figure that 'cause if anyone would be interested
those people should have :-/ )

Gavin