For Christmas this year, my daughter's big gift was a computer. PCs aren't cheap however, so I took an old laptop that had struggled with Windows XP, installed the Ubuntu-based Qimo OS, made sure that the browser had a good content filter in place, and wrote her a good-looking custom html start page.
I tried out a few Linux games on the machine, and found that they run. Barely. For many of them, the lag is too much. World of Goo runs, Air Forte runs well in netbook mode, Ticket to Ride seems to run passably, but Minecraft isn't really playable at all. This was never intended to be a heavy-duty gaming machine. As long as she can get online to do her homework, we should be good.
Qimo comes with a game called Laby which looks very cool. On the surface, it's a game in which you issue commands to an ant to help it navigate a labyrinth. But those commands are laid out just like python programming instructions:
Forward()
Forward()
Forward()
Right()
I haven't spent much time with the game, but I imagine that it's a lot like Floyd the Droid, which I loved as a kid. I've also discovered Scratch, and spent some time playing with it while I was on Christmas vacation. It's another programming language for kids, and seems like a relatively powerful one at that. I'll have to introduce Lia to it soon.
But the thing that I've put the most evenings into is a custom webmail app that I've developed for her. My thought was that I'd like to give her an email address so that she could send messages to her mom and I, and to her grandparents. But I didn't want to have her using it to register for iPad games and have her email address spread around so that she starts getting viagra spam.
So I set up her email address and piped it to a php script. The script checks the sent from address against a list of approved senders, and emails me for approval. If I approve the message, it shows up in her inbox. When she responds, the message once again requires approval. There will only ever be 6-8 people she can receive emails from and send them to. When she goes to send a new message, she just clicks one of the photos - she never even sees an email address.
There are plenty of services out there that offer this kind of functionality and more, but all for a monthly fee. And you've got to use their domain. Now, Lia has her own email address at her own domain, and it's completely safe. She'll never get inappropriate email, and as her dad that makes me happy.