I love this as a concept, though.
I think if I were to expand this I'd maybe have pre-defined strings for the greps, cards with results on, number pre-selected etc. This makes it more of a 'find the card' or 'matching' game than a problem solving game, but it would make it more kids-card-gamey
Its amazing how your brain just sees what it wants to see.
This is brilliant. I really admire the lengths you go to so that your kids can be engaged. Sounds like this has the potential to be quite fun and exciting.
When I was her age, I spent hours just reading random man pages, pretty much because cartoon network was showing the same episode of dexter's laboratory for the 25th time.
The kids her age are growing in a strange era, programs will control their life, wether they want it or not, so it will be great if they can debug :)
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 < 50$ scavenger hunt computer kit (thats why I cant afford teensy or something)
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/...
I would love to buy all of them as a set, and I believe a lot of others would as well.
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.
Just grabbing a few cards and looking for where they exist in memory is a fun challenge, but also helps to understand and not be scared of the very overloaded []()* syntax in C.