Today we started with a discussion on typing. She often struggles with finding the letters when typing, and thus types slowly. I show her how cool touch typing is by typing everything she said while she was speaking, without looking at the keyboard. And she got interested. I was afraid her hands are too small for touch typing but in fact she was perfectly able to place the four fingers of her left and right hands on top of the letters ASDFJKLÖ. Then we pracised typing those letters without moving any fingers. Then a bit with her eyes shut. I think we might be able to learn to touch type if we just practised hard. And in fact that might pay off too. If you can type without looking at (or even thinking about) your hands, you'll free a lot of brain capacity for higher-level functions, right? Dunna.
Then we tried changing the keyboard repeat rate using System Preferences. She tried different rates and ended up with the fastest possible, of course. We practised switching windows with Cmd-Tab as well as by pointing at the windows with the trackpad cursor. I tried to convince her that Cmd-Tab is way faster but she didn't buy it.
Next up was writing a Christmas wish list with vim. First we discussed what the file should contain (a line for gifts, another for food, third for company and a fourth for songs). Then I left the room and let her work on her own. In 5 minutes she invited me back and the file was like this:
parpi vauva kemiaa
That translates roughly to "barbie, toy baby, chemistry set". We didn't make it to the second line this time. Instead we saved the file and copied the contents to the clipboard using
cat lahjat|pbcopy
And then sent it to mom in email.
This lesson was fun and relaxed. I pretended to fall asleep each time she did things slowly and that was fun for both. When she succeeded, we did high fives with hands and low fives with feet. That's it!
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