My nephews & nieces aren’t currently allowed much computer access because their parents worry about screen time, inappropriate content and the like. But their mother was sharing concerns with me that they won’t have the basic computer skills and understanding that we learned growing up in the 80s and 90s. Having to make computers work before you got your reward of a game was such a big motivation for me as a child. We learned to program in BASIC on spectrums and Amstrads (typing code for a game out of a magazine didn’t require much knowledge but taught me a lot) and about memory management by fiddling around with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS to get DOS games running, and so on.
Are there any good educational computers / distros / OSes? Searching online mostly shows simplified GUI to access educational “games”. But I was wondering if there was a Raspberry PI or linux fork or something, that was geared to create a challenging but supportive environment for learning the fundamentals.
Any suggestions?
Let them have as much screen time as they want, just disable the GUI and force them to operate it via terminal.
I agree with this but with the caveat that you both point them in the direction of some educational resources and also offer support. Otherwise they’ll just think they’re being trolled
It’s all fun and games until the kids bust out
:() :;:
No YouTube until you figure out yt-dlp, child.
The PI is always a good place to start, but they’re not cheap anymore. You can still do some useful things at the command line (not sure how fun, but a great education), python is there and very accessible. - get a camera and you could do some great things with open CV. Not sure what packages are out there though. Think you’d just have to follow some web tutorials.
As an alternative, have you considered an Arduino kit? Lots of great projects, all very well documented. Playing with LEDs, sensors, motors etc may keep their attention longer than a bash prompt.
The way I learned was by setting up Minecraft or GMOD servers for me and my friends. I would say this is a very good way to learn the basics since it is a project with a concrete end product.
I also played a LOT of Minecraft, which has commands to “cheat” with the game, like setting the time of day or giving yourself items. That also helped me massively understand the way commands and arguments work.
Setting up an old PC with linux and just not installing a GUI as already suggested might be a fun project to do together and exploring various command line programs (maybe ncurses based programs like mc, ncdu, etc.) and I just read about a cute text adventure called bashcrawl which teaches unix commands as you play (“cd” into a room, “ls” to show the items there, etc.). There are so many bash programs (and games) like gnugo and chess that are interactive but without a GUI. Here was where I read about bashcrawl (I haven’t tried this myself): https://opensource.com/article/19/10/learn-bash-command-line-games
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Shortcuts in iOS is a great way to introduce kids to programming. Obviously you would have to put together some “exercises” or gather outputs for them to brainstorm that they would like the phone be able to do automatically etc.
Its colorful and immediate feedback and doesn’t really require “coding” skills or syntax but still requires them to think algorithmically and naturally debug and understand control flow.
