Not a parent, but sharing my experiences as a kid.
GameMaker (https://www.yoyogames.com/get) was my gateway drug to programming. It's an environment for making games that covers everything from programming the game logic, to designing game "rooms", the sprites and sounds in one package.
I was introduced to the software by my father at roughly the age of 9 to 11 and we did the introductory tutorial together. After that, I continued messing around mostly on my own.
What in hindsight turned out to be quite brilliant, was that GameMaker supports both drag-and-drop programming and scripting. I was able to start off by using drag-and-drop, but quickly realized that scripting was the way to go for more complex logic. The combined environment made it a rather smooth transition, as I only had to add the scripting part to an otherwise familiar graphical environment.
It seems like GameMaker is still around, so that can definitely be something to check out. Making games is fun and I remember having great times in the community, too.
Solving a problem with technology does solve the initial problem, but at the same time it introduces new ones.
There has been a naïve belief that the Internet would be an all-positive force, which it is not. For instance, we used to have a constant lack of information, now there is information overflow. Content consumption used to be synchronous (people watched the same broadcasts, live), now content consumption is asynchronous.
The problem is that our old tools and concepts to navigate the world around us don't work in this new era anymore, not that the development in itself is inherently bad. Real problems have been solved.
Interesting. When I changed my Apple ID region I couldn't do it without canceling my subscription first. Just canceling wasn't enough though, as my current subscription period wouldn't end until later. I had to contact customer support to have them terminate my subscription prematurely to switch regions immediately.
After switching regions I also switched back to Spotify and I haven't bothered using it since. I just went back to check in the Apple Music after reading this—surprise surprise, all my playlists and songs are gone too.
Some of these aspects are rapidly changing. Since a new player, Jio, entered the telco market a couple of years ago prices on prepaid subscriptions have dropped significantly. All the telcos have be forced to offer cheap monthly packages which easily contain over a gigabyte of data per day plus virtually unlimited calls and texts. This for a mere 2-4$ per month which many people actually can afford. With the unlimited calls to all operators there's no need for dual SIM cards any more. Telcos also offer their own video and music streaming services (such as Jio Music) which are included in the monthly plans, reducing the need to pirate music as storing them locally. With extensive 4G coverage and over a gigabyte of data, per day, there's little need to download everything.
In India, the people who can afford an iPhone typically have pursued higher-level education. With almost all higher-level education being taught in English, iPhone owners will also likely be proficient in English.
Salary levels don't say anything about social mobility. Social mobility is about how easy it is to climb to highly paying jobs such as software engineering for people from underprivileged backgrounds.
There seems to be evidence that Americans overestimate social mobility in the US while Europeans underestimate social mobility in European countries. In practice, European countries also perform better in that regard. https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/02/daily-...
I have used the same keyboard, SwiftKey, for the past couple of years. Whenever I write a new word that is unfamiliar to the keyboard it is saved to a personal dictionary. By now, it knows very well what words I use and the autocorrection rarely fails. It is instead quite handy as it corrects my mistypings when writing quickly.
Hyphen -: -
En Dash –: alt -
Em Dash —: alt shift -