Build a Raspberry Pi setup for children aged 3 to 6
In the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, we invited Dr Andrew Lewis, a specialist fabricator and maker, to explain why, in a world where we are immersed in technology, there are still some young people who struggle to use a desktop computer. Here, he also explains how you can help break that trend by introducing the next generation to skills they might build their future careers on.
In the modern world, desktop computers are increasingly rare. Laptop computers, mobile phones, and tablet computers with touchscreens are ubiquitous, while the traditional mouse and keyboard are less easily discovered. Learning to type and use a computer is a valuable skill for kids, but you can’t just sit a young child in front of a laptop or desktop computer and let them play unsupervised. Aside from the obvious security issues, a desktop computer is not designed with the needs of small children in mind. This article covers some of the issues you will encounter if you decide to make a real computer for a young human, and offers some potential solutions.
In the context of this article, when we talk about ‘young children’ or ‘small children’, it mostly means children around the ages of three to six. Unlike in a Bethesda game, children in the real world are all different, and what’s appropriate for one child might not be appropriate for another. It’s up to parents to decide what is or isn’t safe or appropriate for their own children.
A small computer like Raspberry Pi 500 is ideal for older children to learn with, but for young children (around four years old), there are certain factors that make rolling your own machine from a Raspberry Pi a more attractive solution. So what exactly are the issues you should consider when thinking about making a computer for younger children, and what sort of machine are we looking to build?
Firstly, little hands are very good at pulling cables they’re not supposed to, and delicate plugs and sockets like USB cables are likely to get pulled out. Securing these plugs using cable ties and sticky pads will go a long way towards keeping the machine running. The same goes for SD cards, which small fingers are very adept at removing if they are accessible enough. The most sensible way to deal with this is to hide everything inside a box of some description; whether that’s a pre-made project case or a custom 3D-printed enclosure that supports the monitor is up to you.
A static address
Making a computer that’s too large to be easily portable is a great way to prevent unwanted access and enforce a schedule. With a small tablet or smartphone, a child can walk away from you into a different room or position the screen so that it’s difficult for you to see what they’re doing. A desktop computer does exactly what its name suggests — it sits on a desktop. It provides a fixed location where your child can sit down and use the computer. If you ever took typing classes, you’ll know that posture and position are important when using a keyboard.
One of the biggest advantages to using a Raspberry Pi 5 over a Raspberry Pi 500 for younger children is that you are not tied to using the stock keyboard. Young children are more familiar with lower-case letters and usually have less fine motor control than adults; the small keys and upper-case lettering on traditional keyboards can be confusing to some children. Additionally, it’s very common for children to be long-sighted. It makes sense if you think about it, since a child has smaller eyes than an adult. The eye simply isn’t developed enough, and the lens focuses light behind the retina instead of directly on it. This means that while they might be able to see a monitor or projector screen in a classroom, objects closer to them, like keyboards or books, are more difficult to focus on. A purpose-built children’s keyboard with a large font and larger keys takes care of this issue, and can be swapped out for a regular keyboard as the child grows.
A standard computer mouse is far too big for a small child to use comfortably, so it doesn’t take much thought to solve that problem: use a smaller mouse instead. However, learning to use a mouse properly takes time, and until they master the skill, children are likely to get frustrated every time they use the computer. For this reason, it helps to have a computer monitor with a touchscreen matrix. If they are struggling to do something on the computer using the mouse, they can just touch the screen and then carry on using the mouse when they are more confident. In that case, you don’t want to give the child a giant monitor unless you want them to get a sore neck and arms. Although young people these days no longer sit in front of a glass vacuum tube with an electron gun firing at their faces, a large monitor can still be overwhelming and uncomfortable for a child to use.
The idea that less is more is carried through from the monitor to the speakers. Ideally, you’ll have a monitor with a small set of built-in speakers. If not, a very cheap set of Bluetooth speakers will do fine. When it comes to children, you really don’t want them to be louder than necessary.
With all these considerations in mind, you should be able to assemble a suitable Raspberry Pi setup for a child to use. The last practical consideration is to hide every plug, socket, and cable as much as possible, in a way that is still attractive to the child. 3D-printed covers for the monitor sockets and stands to make a portable monitor look like a desktop monitor go a long way towards achieving this.
Some children may have never seen a real-life desktop computer, but they’ve probably seen them on TV or in books. They’ll expect their computer to look like the representations they’ve seen, and might be a bit confused or disappointed if it doesn’t. A great way to engage them with the computer is to let them decorate the outside with stickers and choose their own desktop background. If you’re designing a custom 3D-printed case, it’s worth adding plenty of flat surfaces for them to get creative and decorate.
Control the internet
You don’t want to unleash your child onto a completely open computer, so let’s deal with some of the big software and networking issues. At the fundamental level, young children do not need access to the internet at all. Preventing access to the internet can be done in several ways; the easiest is to provide no access to networking. No Wi-Fi passwords, no cable connections. This is a 100% guaranteed way to prevent children from accessing something they shouldn’t. A 2 m ‘air gap’ leaks no data.
There are of course other methods of limiting access to the internet, such as changing to a child-safe DNS like the OpenDNS Family Shield, or using a Pi-hole or Squid proxy in your home network. The sad reality is that filtering technology is not a perfect replacement for parental supervision, and you’ll never be able to shield a child completely from the shadier side of the web without a Faraday cage. However, if you are set on providing some internet access to young children, then a combination of these technologies, as well as close supervision, education, and logging, are about as effective as you will ever get. If your four-year-old is secretly an elite member of an underground hacking community, your results may vary.
The safer air gap approach doesn’t necessarily mean starving your children of knowledge or access to everything the web has to offer. Some people forget that the internet is relatively new, and for all the streaming content it provides, there are generally offline methods for presenting the same information. For example, the Kiwix project provides a way to view websites offline. There’s a whole list of pre-packaged sites to install, including Wikipedia, Vikidia (a children’s encyclopaedia), children’s story books, and even curated collections aimed specifically at children. If you can’t find what you need in the Kiwix library, there are tools to package your own sites. There’s also nothing to prevent you from augmenting the static information on their computer with DVD, CD, MP3, or streaming content provided from your own tablet or mobile phone. In fact, the distinction that “this is your computer for working, this is a tablet/TV for watching videos” can be a useful one for younger children, stopping them from becoming fixated on a specific device.
The ever-popular Tuxpaint is an excellent application for young people to experiment with, for multiple reasons. It’s a fun drawing app that helps teach fine motor and mouse control, but it also has a huge selection of buttons and menus to navigate through. Once your child starts clicking through the dozens of options and exploring the painting application, any fear of exploring other apps on the computer will diminish. In fact, Raspberry Pi itself is part of this idea. Let your child loose on the operating system. The worst they will do is break it, and with a Raspberry Pi and a backup SD card, it’s only a few minutes’ work to get things up and running again. You could create a new user and lock down the desktop to only the items you want your child to access, but because a Raspberry Pi can be reinstalled very quickly, it might be less effort to keep a backup SD card ready and let them break things.
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