I've heard that at 12 months Duplo's and Visual VHDL/Verilog editors become suitable for the child. You can get them started on very simple PLDs, move on to FPGAs along with some more palatable Assembly. If the child cannot solder BGAs by age 2, you may want to consult a child psychologist to check for development problems. They may suggest Agile or Kaizen, or a number of other frameworks to keep your daughter on her milestones.
Your comment gave us a lot of food for thought, so thank you. But the truth is we’re a very traditional family and this is our first child. We are trying hard to make the right choices for her.
So although your suggested milestones are most reasonable, we’re ultimately going to stick with analog for the time being. I’m saying this fully aware that she might not be able to lift her creations the better she gets, but we all have slight scoliosis from carrying too many school books. She will survive.
Once she’s comfortable with the basics and hopefully frustrated with the limitations, she’s going to be ready to embrace digital.
/switch to serious for a second. Do you have any suggestions for toys/games that are more facile than a soldering iron that delop or impart systems logic for 8-24 months?
Perhaps wooden building blocks with different colours and shapes? You can't go wrong with these - worst case they'll learn category theory ;) But to be fair (and completely serious now) I would not get too obsessed about that. Kids have a way of showing you what they find interesting at any given moment and I think it's best to just go with the flow without planning for specific outcomes.
My first-grade son was playing at 'DAP time' where they checked out a kit (blocks, string, whatever) and did whatever they wanted with it for 30 minutes. He had the box of keys.
Now, nobody checked out the box of keys - it was boring. Nothing you could build; no clear categories (too many kinds of old keys of too many shades of color). But the teacher noticed him taking them one at a time, dropping them over his shoulder, picking them up again and putting them in a row on the table.
She didn't disturb him - that was a rule of DAP time, nobody gets to interrupt you. But when he was done and had put them away, she asked "What did you find to do with the keys?"
He answered "I was putting them in order by sound". See, he was constructing a scale of sorts, by the sound they made when they hit the floor.
Wasn't another year when we discovered he had perfect pitch. Went on to master the piano and the cello before junior high; played in every school orchestra and event. He was playing professionally in High School (City orchestras; Orchestra Iowa) and competing at the national level.
Anyway, never underestimate the use of simple toys.
There's these very nice swiss wooden blocks that have pathways for marbles carved into them.They're a lot of fun, and dead simple to put together, but also quite expensive, at about 150EUR for a set of 50. I had some of them as a kid, and now I'm a competitive minecraft player, so there's that.
Since we're switching to serious, here's my thoughts on development. Totally unqualified, but here we go:
It doesn't really matter whether your kid can program at 5 or 15, whether he can read at 4 or 8. Nobody who puts in the effort doesn't get to a stage where they can do either of those things.
From my own observations (a limited set) what mattered is what you got up to when you already learned how to read, and you had vast swathes of time to spend either on reading things that you needed to know, or play video games (which you need to do as well, mind you). It's the kids who dedicated themselves to getting good at something who eventually did so. Academically and sports. And everything else.
