201–210 of 244 posts
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, plu…
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Indeed. I had the 4K 'Level I' from RadioShack, and there wasn't much that could be done with that . But the allure was that there was literally nothing else you could do with a television that was interactive, save for maybe the Atari 2600. So you could watch TV, play rather finite games on the TV, or omg have Total Control of the Screen! It helped that the graphics from a TRS-80/PET/AppleII were on par with the 260…
This is true! Getting control over the pixels was a big deal back then. Doing anything interactive was magic!! My own kids were not interested in computing itself. They largely ignored my retro systems. They loved MAME though. I had a great setup with a big CRT and they played the crap out of it, that setup competing nicely with a Playstation. This surprised me. My granddaughter is a bit different. She's interested,…
iPads have a lot of good stuff, I think. I've 2x 7 year old girls, which have iPads. Generally they're limited to 1h/day, but screentime is off for: - Codea - https://codea.io - it took a while, but eventually they found out that there's a few sample games, so they thought they'd found a loophole to "no more screentime for games". Then it took a bit longer until they realized they can tweak the source code. "Look at…
I like to idea of using a DTP app (look at the old guy).
Have your girls tried the lessons at code.org? My ~6 year old really enjoys doing them. They're touch optimized which is nice as well.
But if you really wanna go oldschool, there's THEC64 from Retro Games Ltd. Sure, it's an ARM SBC that boots straight into VICE. But the effort, polish, and craftsmanship they put in to making a modern replica C64 experience is second to none. The keyboard looks and feels like the real thing, and you can boot into BASIC or (with a USB stick) any other C64 programming environment. (I got Forth running with no issue at all.)
The kid's probably gonna find it quaintly retro at best. But if they're curious about programming they may wish to find out just what they can accomplish with such a limited, retro machine. And a modern computer is a useful adjunct to help program a retro computer... thanks to powerful programming tools and decades of deep knowledge, the C64 scene has much better and more vibrant games, demos, and software than it did in the 80s!
Oh, and THEC64 doesn't have internet. Cocomelon does not play on it!
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When I was around your son's age, my parents introduced me to computers by getting me a LEGO Mindstorms Robotics Invention System 2.0 set for Christmas in 2001. My favorite thing in the world was the Exploration Mars expansion. The "hacker" community around Mindstorms was huge in the 00's. After the RCX was reverse engineered, all sorts of language support appeared. BrickOS for C and C++, lejos for Java, NQC, etc. I…
I was in middle school around that same time, my parents got me the educational equivalent of Mindstorms (with RCX 1.0). We didn't have a PC and the educational edition came with a alternative LabView-based UI that ran on classic Mac OS. I remember seeing that article in Macworld and wanting to learn some of the other languages, but I never had much success. I can't say it was totally life altering, I was already hea…
Was that Robolab? I remember running that on an G4 PowerMac.
I always thought that the "Robotics Invention System" sets were the consumer oriented ones and the educational ones were a separate product line distributed by a company called Pitsco if I'm recalling correctly. Came in a green tub.
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, plu…
Do you think what your dad did, helped you become a grey-beard?
I'd attribute more to my own purchase of a PC when I was learning to walk after a road accident, and being part of the Windows 95 preview program. That got my foot in the door as a software tester and support tech. Becoming a sysadmin happened rapidly after that.
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I remember being a kid, and really wanting one of those for xmas - I think it was the first versions they had made of them. Unfortunately it was too expensive, but man did it look exciting, and the idea of having your own robots was so cooooool. Oh well, years later I got access to computers and ended up doing programming, but now that I could afford one, I cannot find them anymore :(
I got it as a kid but after diving into it I lost interest once I got everything working. I guess for me assembling things and getting them to work was always the most interesting part, after that I moved on to something else. Today I'm a DevOps Engineer :D The parts should still be somewhere in my father's basement but getting them would take time. I found a new Mindstorms Robotics Invention System 1.5 on eBay (auct…
I guess the cool kids learn CAD and just 3D print the parts they want, which is also awesome (I wonder if there is any research in recycling failed designs or prints back into filament)
I certainly do that with PCBs these days. The cost went down so far I just throw a design together in kicad and have them made for me and shipped over in a week or two. It's only a few bucks more than ordering protoboards and doing all of the wiring myself. I'll exchange a lunch out for that convenience.
Well, you could just get an Apple. New plus boards are being made, the cards you need are available. Mine is equipped with: 80 Col / mem expansion to 128K Fast Chip for some speed, up to 16Mhz (which is crazy fast on most software designed for 1Mhz) HDMI output device, VidHD card. This thing is GREAT. CFFA / USB Flash disk solution for loading programs, disk images, etc... My younger granddaughter enjoys the machine.…
BTW found reactivemicro. $340 for a fully assembled board looks fine to me. Not sure where to find other components you mentioned but I'll keep looking.
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 13 y.o. girl sent me a screenshot of herself programming Python Turtle in Pycharm the other day :-)
It felt similar to the Apple II, but modern at the same time, quite a good little "here's your first computer" approach for a kid under 10.