31–40 of 340 posts
Depending on their age, for young kids best results I've had are Pi's (or old/cheap pc's) that boot straight into scratch. Far better results than an intimidating command prompt. https://scratch.mit.edu/ Alternatively Pi's (or old/cheap pc's) that boot straight into Minecraft Eduction Edition: https://education.minecraft.net This has paths for the very young in minecraft itself to older kids using ide's.
Hear me out here; Apple's Swift Playgrounds on an iPad. I'm involved in an extracurricular thing in Scotland focused on giving kids an environment they can figure out computers. We've seen a lot of different approaches to the problem of "how can we get kids to code", and Swift Playgrounds is consistently where we see youngfolk making the most progress. It gives you a nice, guided framework to get the very basics of p…
Depending on their age, for young kids best results I've had are Pi's (or old/cheap pc's) that boot straight into scratch. Far better results than an intimidating command prompt. https://scratch.mit.edu/ Alternatively Pi's (or old/cheap pc's) that boot straight into Minecraft Eduction Edition: https://education.minecraft.net This has paths for the very young in minecraft itself to older kids using ide's.
Bash is fairly expressive and gets you the basics of programming, and then you can easily use a more complex language fairly easily and have all the abstractions from bash that lets you build fairly useful programs without having to build complex UIs.
The closest thing I've found to this is Pico-8: not a computer, a piece of software, but it's very cool. It has a simple text editor for writing Lua code, a simple sprite editor, and a simple sound editor, all for creating games. It's a nice little sandbox for playing with code and creating things. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Duinomite: https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Duinomite/DUINOMITE-MI... You'll need a keyboard with PS/2 connector and a monitor/tv with a VGA port. And it does "power on to BASIC." Cheap too...20 EUR. There's also a "mega" version with added USB and composite video: https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Duinomite/DUINOMITE-ME...
At a technical level, JSFiddle or equivalent comes kind-of close. Set up a template with a nice big element, then you've got a simple imperative API to draw stuff which really does come pretty close to what you'd get from a BASIC> prompt. That said, I wonder if it's even possible to replicate the C64 (or equivalent) experience. Looking back, I think a big part of the "magic" was that there were relatively few distrac…
Hear me out here; Apple's Swift Playgrounds on an iPad. I'm involved in an extracurricular thing in Scotland focused on giving kids an environment they can figure out computers. We've seen a lot of different approaches to the problem of "how can we get kids to code", and Swift Playgrounds is consistently where we see youngfolk making the most progress. It gives you a nice, guided framework to get the very basics of p…
My kids don't have tablets but this would be the application that would make me buy an iPad for them. Very close in spirit to the old LOGO, but with the added bonus of laying the foundation using a real language—real as in something used in our industry and with concepts that are easily transferable to other languages.
I grew up around a software company and I was exposed to computers and the internet from a very young age; I had my first computer that could be considered "my own" at about five years of age (a little hand-me-down desktop from my father's company) and cut my teeth on that, building little static websites, stuff like that.
It's definitely what lead to my lifelong interest in computing (as much as I can't stand this industry sometimes) and a healthy career in IT infrastructure.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nodemcu+lua&atb=v119-3__&iax=video...
