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Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

#92

Post by sebastianconcpt »

em500 wrote: post #54

I think this is a lost cause. Other have already mentioned this, but I'll state it again. The computers themselves are the trivial part, both the hardware and the software. You can buy a budget 11- or 13-inch laptop, new for $300 or used for $100, load them with emulators of all the 1980s and 1990s machines, and have literally the same software and much better hardware than we did back then. If you give that to them,…

Good observation. This generation has the problem of abundance of resources and attention competition which we didn't have in the Apple II years.

Worst, you have TikTok kind of content contaminating them with futility that makes them get dopamine shots in exchange of "short exciting things" that will make them A) loose time and B) raise expectations on what will make them trigger dopamine hits in the future.

Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

#93

Post by morphle »

bigiain wrote: post #5

I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic (and assembler and peek and poke). I remember being amazingly proud of myself for getting an ascii version of Space Invaders working. I could, as a 10 or 12 year old, make something for myself that kinda looked like and was way more fun (for me) to play that _lit…

I would start a kid on Etoys from Squeakland.org, first show her some video demo. And show her how to script Minecraft from Etoys. Also Microblocks for hardware. Then Thonny and a $4 Raspberry pico led blinking and temperature with ADC, then have her measure her skin voltage. Then look at Squeak Morphic (Lawson English tutorials on Youtube).

Indeed, maybe only 10% of kids like it. The rest should go play with World of Goo. Then the Powder Toy.

Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

#94

Post by branon »

Former kid here, one of the toys my parents provided me with early on was Snap Circuits: https://www.elenco.com/brand/snap-circuits/

Not strictly programming-related per se, but they were a very educational toy. Messing around with these from a young age probably helped to cultivate an interest in electronics, how things worked, and later computing/programming.

Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

#96

Post by hakko »

There's lots of great stuff out there if you know where to look and that's cross-platform to boot. As other posters had said, don't focus on looking for hardware as any Windows/Mac/Linux machine will work fine. Also, my unpopular opinion is it doesn't really matter if kids are on a locked-down machine like ChromeOS when it's now easy to start up a Linux container, either locally or via one of the web-based IDEs. replit.com now has pygame which is pretty nice. The coding train channel on YouTube has a lot of nice videos on P5.js, physics simulation and generative art. Xojo (paid) is an easy way to make desktop apps.

Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

#97

Post by bloopernova »

Just don't do what my father did: buy a bunch of assembly / machine code reference manuals, sit me (aged 11) in front of a ZX Spectrum, and said "off you go!" and didn't help me understand anything in the books at all.

If you want your kid to learn, I think you should sit down with them, and learn alongside them. Start super simple, get something like a STEMMA/QT connection Trinkey and a gas sensor from Adafruit, plug them together and write a python loop to display the gas levels. You can call it a fart detector to get the kid interested.

That's a simple example that someone might say is too complex. Thing is, a kid generally has zero interest in loops, IO, libraries, etc etc. They may need to see and hold something for it to take priority over Fortnite or whatever. Other projects might be a do not disturb LED for their bedroom door. Or get a strip of LEDs and have them light up based on what they do in Fortnite or Minecraft (if that's possible)

Good luck, so many children have serious attention problems due to their saturation in social media.

Re: Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

#98

Post by JKCalhoun »

vnorilo wrote: post #36
bigiain wrote: post #5

I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic (and assembler and peek and poke). I remember being amazingly proud of myself for getting an ascii version of Space Invaders working. I could, as a 10 or 12 year old, make something for myself that kinda looked like and was way more fun (for me) to play that _lit…

My 7yo is absolutely thrilled by scratch on Lego Mindstorms Robot Innovator [1]. The physicality of it is engaging. Granted, I'm generally a very restrictive parent about mobile/console gaming. 1: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/robot-inventor-51515

The appeal to me is the "low level programming". I know, the language is not low-level, but: "write code, make thing move" is what I mean by low level.

We used to look sideways at the engineers that "wrote drivers", but I see the appeal now. Even a programmer as jaded as me still gets a thrill when code I write for an Arduino is able to talk to a device like an air-particle measuring device.

My advice: go Arduino + peripherals. A "sound board" that can generate synthesized sounds would be fun to program — any kind of sensor that measures heat, humidity, air quality, etc. Motor controllers + robot platform of course....

Stuff is fairly cheap and there's so much out there.

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