I have seen my kids do animation and story telling with apps that I think is quite a good use of technology but I wouldn’t deny them the experience of doing art with physical materials which I think in most ways is more foundational.

This reminds me of a time when I was a kid, drawing something in class, when I started drawing little colored dots, mimicking pixels on a screen. I thought computer graphics was so cool. I still do, but I did then, too!

I was fortunate that, for their first home computer, my parents sprang for a fancy 486 machine with a graphics card capable of 24-bit color. Thanks to that hardware and various pieces of graphics-related software, I got a solid understanding of pixel graphics and the RGB color system. I also learned fundamentals of graphics programming thanks to QBasic’s built-in support for VGA graphics modes—I’d imagine a shape, then figure out how to teach the computer to draw it using QBasic’s graphics primitives.

I also had traditional art supplies as a kid, but they went mostly unused. I gravitated hard toward computer graphics. I think it’s because I was fond of pretty lights as a kid, and what’s a computer screen but an array of several million pretty lights?