Last time we talked about getting to know all the characters that one can type using the keyboard. Today she wanted to get on with that, so we skipped the turtles and went for vim.
She typed vim merkit by herself. In vim she instantly knew she has to press i to start writing text. Then she wrote something like
numerot 1234567890©@£$...
and so on. We went through the numbers, then numbers with the shift key, then with alt and finally with both shift and alt pressed. We discovered a host of fun characters that I had no idea were hidden behind the number keys.
Then the same excercise for all the letter keys. There was a lot of discovery and she managed to save the document after each line of text to make sure we won't lose our work if the battery goes out. That's an important lesson for you too :)
So, even though we hadn't used vim for a week, she mastered it. She also remembered that cat is used to print file contents and, with some assistance, that we can pipe it to say to have the computer speak.
All in all, I noticed she had improved writing skills and general confidence in her own abilities. And it seems that my fears about her forgetting all the learnt skills in a day were without foundation. Even though it sometimes feels that nothing seems to "stick", a lot does indeed.
We did similar exercise just the other day with my girl. We are using nano instead of vim, which was really easy for her to remember since it's almost the same as sano (which is the alias I made for "say" with finnish lang).
ReplyDeleteShe really liked CapsLock so she could type capital letters, because she is more familiar with them. And I too was surprised that she remembered all the stuff even though we hadn't used the computer for a week or so. Even the pipe symbol with AltGr came easily.