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Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

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Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#32

Post by zasdffaa »

flobosg wrote: post #27
zasdffaa wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Font and font contrast are entirely orthogonal.

Are they? Font contrast is a multifaceted concept that encompasses not only color but other properties as well. For instance, stroke weight and its modulation, which are inherent to a typeface.

Can you give a visual example where they're not? (other than anti-aliasing round the edges)

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#34

Post by throwaway47292 »

EdSchouten wrote: post #28

I'm not saying that this isn't a great way for people to familiarize themselves with basic Unix shell commands. That said, why would you want to teach this to kids ?

Now with everything on the cloud, kids are growing more and more disconnected with their computers, instead of the kid making the computer do something, they do some magic sequence of actions and sometimes things work, sometimes they dont.

Being able to type a command, give it some input and see its output, I believe is the most fundamental way to interact with the computer.

The basic concepts of files, folders, programs and processes are getting more and more murky with every new iOS and windows release, and yet, those are still the building blocks of everything, they are just hidden by some obscure interfaces and menus or are just plain inaccessible to the user.

UNIX Pipes are the most pure and useful way I know of how the user interacts with the programs and how the programs interact with each other passing their output to the other program's input, and I think it illustrates how more complicated things can be built.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#35

Post by throwaway47292 »

avsteele wrote: post #17

Nice. Was trying to print out the programming set for my son, but its too hard to read. Can anyone get these to printout larger, and where the grey comments are less washed out?

You can just generate the tiffs yourself with different colors, border_color is the color of the border and the comments https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/8d14a24...

(if you are talking about the programming time game)

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#36

Post by OakNinja »

throwaway47292 wrote: post #15
dlg wrote: post #2

Is the creator thinking of doing another printing? If not can someone recommend a service that will print a high quality card deck given the PDF?

I print with some professional card printing companies, the pricing goes something like 10 decks, 500$, 50 decks 800$, 100 decks 1200$, and 300 decks 1500$ and then it continues to drop Since I printed only 50, I think the price is too high, so I would rather to give them for free than to charge unreasonable price. If you are willing to pay the shipping cost send me an email to b0000@fastmail.com, I still have few le…

Maybe you could run all the decks as a kit on kickstarter?

I would love to buy all of them as a set, and I believe a lot of others would as well.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#38

Post by throwaway47292 »

OakNinja wrote: post #36
throwaway47292 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I print with some professional card printing companies, the pricing goes something like 10 decks, 500$, 50 decks 800$, 100 decks 1200$, and 300 decks 1500$ and then it continues to drop Since I printed only 50, I think the price is too high, so I would rather to give them for free than to charge unreasonable price. If you are willing to pay the shipping cost send me an email to b0000@fastmail.com, I still have few le…

Maybe you could run all the decks as a kit on kickstarter? I would love to buy all of them as a set, and I believe a lot of others would as well.

I am halfway done with the C deck, as we are switching to C soon, and I will setup a kickstarter after, should be done around December.

I want her to know why x[3] and 3[x] are the same thing.

    int x[3];
    2[x] = 5;

    printf("%d %d\n", 2[x], x[2])
A lot of people struggle with

    x = 5
    y = 6

    y = x

    x = 7
    print(y)
and

    x = [1,2]
    y = [3,4]

    y = x

    x.append(5)
    print(y)
There is something magical in understanding how the computer uses its memory, its almost as if you walk out of a mist.

I think it will be very valuable to have a set of 4 decks: python, machine code, unix pipes and C, so that the decks compliment each other. In the machine code deck there are few cards that have pointers (e.g. https://punkx.org/4917/play.html#43), and they can be used to help with the C deck for example.

Then its LISP.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#39

Post by throwaway47292 »

1MachineElf wrote: post #37

The photo at the bottom appears to be some small ergonomic keyboard (maybe an Atreus?) built into stained wood along with a screen. Perhaps it is a cyberdeck? Curious to know more.

Ah! I didnt mean to show it off, just my desk is a mess..

Yea its a cyberdeck I am building with hardwired Atreus directly connected to pi zero gpios and using libuinput to make a software keyboard, which works amazing btw.

I am making it to init directly into getty without login (with busybox init), so it boots directly in usable /bin/bash in only 2-3 seconds, and all the available programs are simple python programs (ls, cp, mv, a basic line editor, touchtyping game, hangman etc) and the keyboard itself is a simple python program that basically scans the matrix and emits events to uinput. The frame is from plywood.

And I am trying to make it like a 'scavenger hunt' experience for my daughter, I will put special codes in various places in the programs or on the file system with different difficulty, and I can challenge her to find them.

The goal is to have This is just the prototype to see how it feels to write code using line editor, and also to test the effect of thinking of the keyboard as a program with a nested for loop, on her thinking about 'what happens when you press a key'

    for r in rows:
        send(r, 1)
        for c in cols:
             v = read(c)
             if v == 1:
                  # (r,c) is pressed
        send(r, 0)
I just uploaded those to show you how it looks, but again, its just to test the software and the screens size:

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/... https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#40

Post by flobosg »

zasdffaa wrote: post #32
flobosg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? Font contrast is a multifaceted concept that encompasses not only color but other properties as well. For instance, stroke weight and its modulation, which are inherent to a typeface.

Can you give a visual example where they're not? (other than anti-aliasing round the edges)

See https://medium.com/alex-couch-s-portfolio/type-hierarchy-and... for some of them. The “blurry eye test” mentioned there is related to the typographical term of color (see https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2015/04/... and https://practicaltypography.com/color.html) which is affected, among other things, by the actual shape of the glyphs. Font contrast has little to do, if anything at all, with anti-aliasing.
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