Pretty incredible people were able to use this device for anything at all; the base version with 1kb of memory barely had enough memory to contain the screen
Well, the Atari 2600 had a whopping one hundred and twenty eight bytes of RAM. 128 bytes. Literally just 7 address lines worth of data. (The cartridge has 12 address lines)
True, but that kind of computer runs code from ROM. The ZX81 ran Basic programs from that 1k of RAM.
Ah! I forgot about that.
It's not much but you could at least play around coding maths routines. I know that's what I would do. That would have some value for a student.