My friend George is 11 and grew up on the south side of Chicago. He’s a CPS student just finishing off the sixth grade. I’ve been friends with George since his birth—his parents are two of my best friends. George is an avid online gamer so we chatted about his favorites (and to his credit, he did not roll his eyes at me while I told him my GenX stories about playing Ms. Pac Man and pinball at the arcade).
The first one that I worked on was . . . I think it was my father’s. He owned a laptop (which he also broke later). It was sitting in a corner of our house on a chair and I always used to wake earlier in the morning than anyone else to get on that computer and play stick figure games.
How did you know how to do anything on a computer then? And how did you know that there were games on the computer?
Afterschool care, which is like an extracurricular activity: you have special classes after school ends but it’s still in the same building. I heard about games from older kids that played games and then I’d also try to play those games and then I’d talk to them about the games.
Is that something that you learned about in school, safety on the Internet?
I study and research things a lot, writing papers.
