11-year-old takes school network by the horns

Jon Penn could boot up his dad's laptop, sign in and open Paint when he was three years old. At age 11, when his mother, the school librarian, was given the duties of maintaining the school's computers when the Network Administrator suddenly left his position, Jon stepped in to help his mom and now, he's got the job and some lofty goals to boot.

Along with school staff, the younger Penn has gotten involved in contributing to school policy on Web access. While blocking access to social networking sites such as MySpace wasn’t popular with many fellow students, he had to agree the school really didn’t need it.

Penn is now the technical support much of the time on everything from printer jams to setting up an external drive to backing up the school’s most important server. He was allowed to give a few lessons to his class about basic computers, having his classmates pull out a few components from old machines.

...[Jon] says he loves testing virtualization software like VMware and wants to obtain “A+ certification” by passing the computer-technician exam by that name developed by trade group CompTIA. “Hopefully, I can do that this summer,” he says.

/3d2n6g

The young man is clearly a computer genius. I wonder if he's as brilliant in his other subjects. I know of several youngsters around his age who were enrolled in college already. I think that would challenge the student academically, but I wonder what it would do to a child in areas such as social development. Jon, however, seems to be able to excel in computers while being just a normal student in other respects.

Originally posted by Sestias
I think that would challenge the student academically, but I wonder what it would do to a child in areas such as social development.

The kid is a computer genius...... It stands to reason that he'll become socially stunted, no matter what his age.