When is your kid old enough to use a computer? Even "wired" moms are leery of letting the little ones go at it lest they beome addicted, but now comes The Laptop Club, a bunch of 7-to-9-year-olds (mostly girls) at a North Carolina Montessori after-school program, who draw their own keyboards on construction paper and wear them out with constant use. These kids came up with this idea without adult coaching.

"Parents may want to delay their children’s computer use, but here they are drawing their own designs. It reminded me of taking away toy guns and seeing the kids make guns out of sticks instead," says blogger-mom Amy Tiemann, interviewed on TMN by Rosecrans Baldwin. The paper laptops have keyboard buttons assigned to “Barbie.com,” “best friends” next to “friends,” “HP [Harry Potter] trivia,” and “werd games” as well as “rily werd games.” Says Tiemann: "Having your name on your friend’s keyboard is a little like being in someone’s 'Top 8 friends' on MySpace. And yet these kids most likely don’t even know about MySpace yet." How much do we really know about "creativity"?

The Laptop Club:

   

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