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Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

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Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#221

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

brailsafe wrote: post #90
credit_guy wrote: post #76

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft. Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder. On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" yo…

I've been programming for 15 years and had to google what NAND was. Had a sense of XOR

If you want to learn more about logic gates, you might like the book "Bebop to the Boolean Boogie". It's aimed at kids but someone with a CS background could fly through it pretty quickly.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#222

Post by dhosek »

lumost wrote: post #145
dhosek wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being shocked to discover that a recent CS grad could not implement a factorial function using recursion. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do that, but to not be able to do it?

a lot of CS undergrads compress out recursion knowledge. They learn that most recursion is best skipped in favor of iteration/dp, and they learn that they should implement things efficiently. It’s possible the undergrad assumed you were referring to an efficient recursive algorithm or simply forgot most recursion.

No, I was quite explicit, and seriously, is it really that hard to write something along the lines of

    if (i
It wasn't meant to be a trick or trap, it was the simplest recursive function I could think of and it’s not like I was asking him to implement a stack.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#223

Post by brailsafe »

dpz wrote: post #209
anon84873628 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that you can be a successful computer software developer and not need to know much at all about how computers work. Or even how things like compilers work. Some of us never even studied in a CS program - gasp!

i also never studied CS but find it quite odd they didn't even stumble across them in 15 years

I've stumbled across and used them, but it never occurred to me to actually check what NAND stood for.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#224

Post by iainctduncan »

There has never been a better time to be a self-guided music learner. When I was 11 I would have flipped right out over the possibilities available in tools like Max, an interactive visual programming environment for making audio, visual, and music programs and installations. And combining it with Arduinos is also amazing for kids (ok, for anyone!). You can try max out for a very low monthly subscription now ($10 or something similar) and there are tons and tons of wonderful online resources for learning it.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#225

Post by herewulf »

abrax3141 wrote: post #167
credit_guy wrote: post #76

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft. Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder. On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" yo…

Redstone is fun, and some people do amazing builds with it, but it gets tedious fast; like building your own computer from transistors - fun … once! :-) But Minecraft has an incredible amount of richness once you get into modding and command blocks (although it’s a shame that they don’t have a proper lua built in.) Speaking of which, there’s powder toy, which DOES have built in Lua.

Well, there's Minetest[1] if you want a voxel block game with Lua built in.

[1]: https://www.minetest.net

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#226

Post by cben »

Akronymus wrote: post #213
credit_guy wrote: post #76

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft. Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder. On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" yo…

mazbe this could be to your sons liking? https://nandgame.com/

also https://echa.itch.io/pocket-robots-test-chamber

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#227

Post by cben »

ArnoVW wrote: post #123
rawbot wrote: post #117

Maybe the rest of HN has a similar, better option, but I could recommend LEGO Mindstorms. Eleven would be a good age to start getting curious about robots and automation. You should of course, help her with it, as it may be too complex for her to handle alone at the start. It is pricey new, but you could get an older version used for cheaper. There's also Nintendo Labo, for a similar, less expensive version.

LEGO Mindstorms is great, but it's amazingly expensive. They recently released LEGO Boost, which has some limitations wrt Mindstorms, but you won't notice it unless you're doing advanced stuff. Moreover, it has a great app. And it's one third of the price of Mindstorms.

Due to price, when you buy motors/sensors/hubs, you'd want them to be compatible with future buys. LEGO used to have several systems but now pretty much converged to one "Powered Up" interface: https://brickarchitect.com/powered-up/.

The app is indeed neat & powerful. Performance is limited by official firmware being "dumb", it reports sensor values and takes commands, all computations actually run in the app. However, what's cool is an essentially unbrickable bluetooth bootloader letting you try alternative FOSS firmware — see https://pybricks.com/.

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