You pretty much had the answer in the query there is think. Just present it as toy to be handled.

To get more into detail, you probably would prefer those you can indeed pull apart and handle like toys than the “modern” slick ones. I see people mentioning raspberry pi. It’s hard to fear it looking at its guts with bare eyes. After they fried a few chips pressing soldering iron for too long they will have zero respect for electrical computers.

I’ve been using computers longer than that and when I started I had to type commands into DOS to play games. It was never scary. My dad showed me how to do it and wrote down the commands for me and I took it from there.

(Warning - yes, I know they won’t understand fully anything of the following, but they will understand some and will remember it’s not magic.)

First, show them how to make a paper animation (quickly changing pictures, lots of paper and two pencils are enough, don’t even need two pencils, but eh).

Second, show them how to make a paper computer (look it up, there are even ready books for children ; that is a bit more complex, you’ll need to cut some for registers and the “windows” to indicate current values and you’ll do the operations manually, and you’ll need more turning pencils).

Third, find some book about microprocessor design - I’m serious, you just have to show them in it the pictures about what is a decoder and what is a datapath and ALU, and what are interrupts, and what are registers (program counter and two-three other ones, suppose), and explain how this relates to the paper computer. Not much more.

Then you tell them that a computer is just many microprocessors running their programs, some run small simple programs to control dedicated devices, and some run big long complex programs. After that you show them some of the devices - like hard drive, RAM, video, audio, network card, thingies on the board. And tell that they work with other devices, like keyboards and displays connected electrically. And tell that this looks like a city.

For 6 years old this is not so good (but just like people normally do with airplanes and trains, you still should try, just this shouldn’t be your only try by far), but when I was 8-9 years old and wanted to learn, someone explaining step 3 to me would have helped.

Step 1 my dad had done, step 2 I think he did too, and it was in some book for preschool education I read, I didn’t know it was sky cool back then. Step 3 is more of an encouragement when you can’t quite mentally make the leap, from small elements which you know can be combined into complex things, to complex things themselves.

This is not an advice to teach a toddler computer design. Just like people don’t teach toddlers railway design or civilian engineering or automotive or airplane design. They still tell them various things of how those work, and build models, so they don’t have ideas from medieval bestiaries about these being magical monsters.

Maybe my https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/BuildingAComputer could help.

I also answered your question in https://lemmy.ml/post/38363131/21987482 but it’s intertwined.

I wouldn’t “teach” them what a computer is, I would co-explore with them instead.

Get or build a PC instead of getting a console. Introduce to kid to games. After a while, say “you know, computers can do other stuff besides play games” and introduce the kid to that as well.

Tell them to keep their personal life completely separate from their online life. NO personal info shared online.

Recommendation

I think the Raspberry Pi has a suit of prepackaged games and things like that, which you could use. Give your Raspberry Pi a good casing, and it will be indestructible.

Tangent

I would still warn them from the dangers of the modern digital world, in the sense of surveillance and censorship of social media, what is posted on the internet stays there forever, how proprietary software tricks the user and is oftentimes malware (Gmail, Windows, etc.) and things like that.

I mean, computers are cool, but the mainstream computer world is filled with so much nonsense or outright malice. And if I had a child, I wouldn’t want them to be harmed by that. Like, I don’t want my child to be indoctrinated into the sexist manosphere, just because the Instagram Algo said so and will do literally anything to keep them on the platform as long as possible. Software and computers are cool, but there’s so much vile and genuinely dangerous stuff even for adults. For a child it must be hard to navigate. If you say, for example, that Apple devices literally scan every single picture on your device and send the result to Apple, you’ll sound like a crazed tin foil hat lunatic. But this is quite literally what happens with MediaAnalysisD. In the USA, a young family got harassed by police because they sent a picture of their sick child to their doctor via Gmail.

Edit: typo.

Start with building a very cheap computer with your kid.

You can buy parts for cheap or sometimes get them for free from e-waste processing places. You can do the screws to the case, but let the kid put the parts in place while you explain what they do.

Parts are easy to handle, just make sure to not damage the components as they look cute and are a bit malleable, but put too much pressure you can destroy it (not sure a kid will be strong enough for that).

It is as easy as building Lego, or putting a cartridge on an old console. This will help to make the computer less scary.

Make sure that you can do it yourself and test the parts first before involving your kid, so they do not get too frustrated if it fails.

This will cover hardware.

You can also help them to install the OS.

After, make a list of the programs you want your kid to be aware of: calculator, place to write text, anything you think it will be useful. Take some time to explain them, and do some exercises with each - let’s write a letter to a friend, etc… Let them play around with it without judgment. (remove things you don’t want them to use).

If you want to give the child some background in how software works, Logo was very popular with kids at the school.

Logo is this little turtle that you give orders, similar to imperative programming language used in most softwares.

Change colour to green, walk forward 50 steps.

And the turtle would draw a green line on the screen.

There are plenty of options for software that provides that, here is an option https://apps.kde.org/kturtle/

And, of course, try to break these in multiple days, building a PC, installing OS and playing with programs can be overwhelming for some kids.

The BBC Microbit was designed for exactly this scenario: https://microbit.org/

If you want them to have a more desktop-like environment, the Raspberry Pi has kid-specific projects: https://www.raspberrypi.org/learn/

Or you can get a Pi Kano kit and it has everything you need: https://www.kano.me/

I think kids find ways to play and tinker with stuff. I’d give them an office suite to practice writing letters or advertisements or whatever they come up with, something to draw… maybe not Gimp because that’s not easy to use… I’ve seen people give their kids an instant messenger which connects to their dad/mom so they’re incentivised to type something. And then of course we have games. From Supertux, PlanetPenguin Racer, Tuxkart to commercial games. There are some kids games in the repos. Kartoffelknülch, drawing programs. Programming languages to learn coding with puzzle pieces and blocks or animate Turtles. There are educational games, at least my local library has some and I played some as a kid. But maybe at least try to balance the gaming. There’s so much more interesting stuff in computers. And then of course you could put some content into some directories, I think unrestricted internet access isn’t great at 6yo and the computer will be empty without, so idk. Maybe put some templates there, ideas what to draw, music or audiobooks or whatever fits the purpose…

Just some idea: archive.org (and ruffle) for old flash games

an apple 2 or c64 and some type-in-the-program magazines

Old computer no wifi, as a kid I just explored the computer menus and played the few offline games, drew in paint, by like 10 I had swapped to adobe flash off some piraxy yt videos, maybe load it up with software that could be fun for kids to use

Scratch is a good one, might be too young, but learn to think like a coder while playing around

When we got our first computer it was a Win 95 machine, with a copy of Encarta, Atlas. I don’t remember what word processor, but it wasn’t a full office suite.

It was cool. We did lots of typing and using ms paint.

Then we got a shareware cd. Hundreds of pretty useless games + 4 or 5 big ones like doom and transport tycoon, but it changed everything. Every day we’d try a new one. We’d mess around in DOS trying to get those ones working.

Then 3D Movie Maker - the full version. It all really started to come alive.

Then a microphone. Just messing around with sound recorder was like when we used to make “funny” tape recordings of ourselves, but without the hassle of tape.

These are the basic concepts of what I think made computers fun.

I guess the direction I’ll probably go shortly is the old AMD 2400g mini itx I have laying around. Put on an opensuse slowroll. We have a microphone handy. We have 900 games on our GOG account. I have an old intuos drawing tablet that might work. Add some of those education flatpaks - solariums and stuff. I think you can definitely do a modern version of what we had back in the 90s when computing was more than watching youtube.

Keep it disconnected from the internet is the first thing I thought of.

I installed gcompris for my 5 year old. FOSS childrens educational software and games from KDE.

I also bought her a cheap, pink, 65% keyboard and mouse set that make it “her computer”.

There’s also a few free resources to teach typing once your kid can read and write enough to understand what they’re typing. I’ve heard good things about Typing.com and typingclub.com but we’re not ready to start typing yet so I haven’t used them.

Also, if my kids ask a question that’s a little tricky to explain I’ll show them how I use a computer (or phone) to look for answers. One of the few practical applications I’ve ever found for AI is “can you explain [abstract concept] in a way that a 5 year old can understand”. This isn’t explicitly teaching computer skills, but showing them a practical use case and how to dig into their curiosity.