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Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

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Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#111

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft. Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder. On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" yo…

I've been programming for 15 years and had to google what NAND was. Had a sense of XOR

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Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#113
I was unemployed for 10 months in 1998, so my kids were both under 10. My now nearly 30 year old asked me yesterday to go to the zoo like we did back then. Washington DC area had (has?) lots of free things to do. They both remember fishing, hiking, biking, exploring public transportation and just spending time together.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#114
My daughter was a little younger than that when we bought a pile of dead DVD drives and disassembled them. Then we build a little driver circuit and hooked a laser diode to it. She was so excited to come home and take those drives apart after school. She learned about how things come apart, the importance of eye protection, how to use basic hand tools, and a little bit about electronics (I am self-taught and my knowledge is super uneven so I'm not the best teacher for that).

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#115
post #113

I was unemployed for 10 months in 1998, so my kids were both under 10. My now nearly 30 year old asked me yesterday to go to the zoo like we did back then. Washington DC area had (has?) lots of free things to do. They both remember fishing, hiking, biking, exploring public transportation and just spending time together.

That's amazing! I have two under the age of five and I hope they will still want to hang out with me when they're adults. Sounds like you're a great parent .

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#117
Maybe the rest of HN has a similar, better option, but I could recommend LEGO Mindstorms. Eleven would be a good age to start getting curious about robots and automation. You should of course, help her with it, as it may be too complex for her to handle alone at the start.

It is pricey new, but you could get an older version used for cheaper.

There's also Nintendo Labo, for a similar, less expensive version.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#118

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft. Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder. On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" yo…

I've been programming for 15 years and had to google what NAND was. Had a sense of XOR

That's not something you should be so quick to tell people.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#119

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft. Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder. On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" yo…

I've been programming for 15 years and had to google what NAND was. Had a sense of XOR

You would be surprised how much more relevant info programmers miss...

Example, most programmers I know have no idea when a variable gets allocated on the stack and when it's on the heap.

Let's not talk about how many dont even know what a (stack overflow)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow] is...

Re: Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming for 15 years and had to google what NAND was. Had a sense of XOR

That's not something you should be so quick to tell people.

Oh come on! There are a lot of types of programming and most of them exist pretty far from logic gates. The previous poster probably understands the concepts from their work but doesn’t relate them to logic gates.
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