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Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#71

Post by leoc »

PeanutNore wrote: post #11
gaius wrote: post #8

Why not use an actual Commodore 64? I’m serious, get one for a song on eBay and a SCART adaptor and you’re in business. There are ample books around, they will be cheap too.

I have a Commodore 64 and due to its age it's a rather temperamental piece of equipment, and the 1541 disk drive even more so. I'm planning to replace all of the electrolytic capacitors in it which should help a lot, but that's probably beyond the abilities of most people. Setting up a Pi or something to boot directly to a C64 emulator would be easier and an order of magnitude less expensive for most people.

You could buy a reburbished C64 or (better) C128, and use a SD2IEC https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/shop/commodore/sd2iec-c.htm... for storage.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#72

Post by dharmab »

modeless wrote: post #69

TI graphing calculators boot to BASIC. I don't know about the newer ones but the old ones are extremely simple computers with Z80 or 68k processors and hardly any operating system, fun to program in BASIC or assembly language or C. Modern kids might find them boring but they are great places to learn how a computer really works without piles of modern software cruft between you and the hardware. That's where I learne…

TI-BASIC was the first language myself and a few colleagues learned, by automating our algebra homework.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#73

Post by jchw »

nicolashahn wrote: post #23
potta_coffee wrote: post #3

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

I upvoted this but I need to reiterate my support. When I was a kid, I was heavily into video games and had a burning desire to create my own. However, the options for doing so were not great. One of my middle school teachers tried to introduce us to programming via creating Space Invaders in perl, which went as well as you might imagine. There were a few GUI game making applications that were all terrible and extrem…

And the great thing about today is, there's a metric ton of free software you can move on to. Like, I would've killed for Godot when I was a teenager.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#75

Post by Koshkin »

mstevens wrote: post #9

I found the CG Maximite lately, which powers on to BASIC and has composite video or VGA out: http://geoffg.net/maximite.html There's also the fignition which has a composite out and powers on to forth: https://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition But does require assembly & soldering.

Colour Maximite is a lot of fun [1]! The BASIC environment it has is quite powerful, and it even runs a full-screen text editor.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQA8lowEKOo

Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#76

Post by jpfed »

potta_coffee wrote: post #3

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

Pico-8 was my son's very first introduction to programming. He does much more with the integrated sprite editor and sfx/music editors than he does with actual coding. I would like to get him interested in TIC-80 as a replacement.

Key weaknesses of Pico-8 for kids learning to program:

1. The editor runs at the same resolution that the games do. Maybe this is because they didn't want to make their VM flexible enough to deal with multiple resolutions, or they just wanted to make the illusion that the Pico-8 is its own machine very consistent, but the end result is still a painful code editing experience. When I make example programs for my kids, I need to compromise between descriptive variable names and indenting code blocks.

2. Deviations from the standard lua API/libraries mean that normal learning resources like PIL have to be interpreted with an asterisk.

3. This is a minor thing, but the fixed palette is annoying. In graphical terms, Pico-8 lies roughly between the Atari 2600, 7800, and NES, but all of those systems handled colors more flexibly.

4. Splore allows children to find games that are not appropriate for their age. It's just not designed for kids and parents. My son found a game featuring smoking and thought it looked SO COOL (this was easy to disabuse him of). He also found a game that puts you in the role of a cyberbully, and the subtle psychological effects of that sort of "edgy" game aren't as easily undone with a single conversation. It is possible to mitigate this by putting whitelisted carts into the bbs carts folder and then making that folder read-only.

TIC-80 improves on the first three points. The editor is still running at the same resolution as the games, but uses a higher resolution (and the editor can optionally use a thinner font). The lua implementation is much more standard. And the palette can be changed (even per-scanline, I think). The music editor lets you draw your own waveforms, but in other respects is less intuitive than Pico-8's. (I haven't looked at TIC-80's cart browser so I can't comment on it.)

Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#78

Post by CodeArtisan »

sparkie wrote: post #45

Ludovic Courtes created a Boot-to-Guile image a few years ago, packaged using Guix: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-02/msg001...

There also is Armpit Scheme that is targeting single board computers

http://armpit.sourceforge.net/

Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#79

Post by teddyh »

normalhuman wrote: post #67
swiley wrote: post #35

Just give them a computer running linux without going all the way to runlevel 5. 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.

I too grew up with a "power on to basic" computer, in my case the ZX Spectrum. I don't think that people that did not have that experience at that age can truly get it. I was able to create graphics and play sounds with a very simple language. The text editor, the graphical display, the "OS", it was all the same thing. The manual taught you how to program in BASIC. It was an amazing tool of creativity and intellectua…

Your personal experience is not the only correct one. I assure you that the people coming before you, making their own computers out of chips and resistors with a soldering iron, would say the same thing about you. And people who grew up with Windows 98 say the same thing about people only exposed to iOS and Android, and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

#80

Post by archi42 »

If it was my kid, I'd use any single board computer or an old laptop (pro: integrated keyboard and screen, e.g. Dell D630), and install a Linux that boots straight into QB64: https://www.qb64.org/

I didn't test if it runs in pure Linux text mode, but if possible that's what I'd use.

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