Anyone who has children, or has spent any time watching them, knows that they tend to approach technology and the Net differently than adults. As a result, children are one of the prime drivers of Net growth.

Research firm Cyber Dialogue reports that the growth in the number of children on the Web outpaces that of the general population, with 16 million children online in 1999. Part of this phenomenon can be witnessed in schools, as educators and students everywhere start to employ technology at increasingly young ages.

Emblematic of this trend is a computer class where 500 children of a small New Hampshire town attend kindergarten through eighth grade. As in many public schools across the country, the Net and technology have become an integral part of the learning process.

In a one-week, five-hour daily summer computer camp, students in grades one through five were given the challenge of replicating their favorite parts of town on the Web. This is what the week looked like:

Monday. The students were handed digital cameras and portable keyboards with which to photograph local buildings; they then entered the images onto the school's local area network. They typed in the addresses and signs for the buildings they captured. Using software to generate patterns for individual buildings, including architectural details, the children printed out the patterns and pasted them together to create 3D scale models of the buildings.

Tuesday. The children collected the individual buildings and made a paper-based tabletop version of the community. That afternoon they learned how to scan photos to convert them into digital images.

Wednesday. They learned how to design and build a Web page.

Thursday. The children selected their favorite buildings to put on their pages, and they created links to other school content and their other favorite sites.

In just one week, without reading directions, the students easily learned how to capture and digitize their version of their town and recreate it on the Net for all to see. "It was really powerful to see how quickly they picked up skills they had never used. Because of their age and interest in technology, they were ready to go," said 28-year-old computer class teacher Holly Doe.

On the last day of the five-day computer camp, parents were invited to see the children's work, including the scale replica of the area of the town as well as the Web site. Children showed their parents how to scan photos, how to digitally manipulate images, and how to move objects throughout the network, and ultimately onto the Web.

When we asked some of the children if they learned much, they tended to feel they had not learned anything out of the ordinary. Probably more interestingly, while the teacher found it very easy to teach the children such a wide range of technological capabilities, she was more skeptical about adults having the same facility with the technology.

Several months later, the eighth grade was exploring the Industrial Revolution in relation to the Information Revolution. Like the students in the earlier grades, the older children had virtually no fear of technology or the Net, and were interested in what opportunities the future holds in store for them. In the course of a give-and-take session, the students painted a picture of how they use technology:
What do they do after school? Online chat.
How many have bought something on the Net? Most of them.
How many look at sports sites? Just about all.
Any difference to what the boys and girls did online? Not really.
Typical question? "When I go online, I go through my dad's company network. How do I get information that isn't allowed inside his company's firewall?"
The most pressing question? "How do I get my parents to not be afraid of technology and use the Net."

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