Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

252 pointsqq66235 comments

When I was a kid, I had an Apple II with a BASIC interpreter, Print Shop Pro to make really cool cards and banners, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego to learn about geography, Pinball Construction Set, Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, and LOGO for programming the turtle.

Today I can't see a way of giving my kids a computer like that, where there are a lot of open-ended ways to create. The iPad games are too directly educational, or mindless, and great creative experiences don't seem available on desktop or iPad suitable for early elementary schoolers.

Any suggestions here? I will be happy to pay $.

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I had a similar problem a few years ago. While I never found the perfect machine here is how I have been introducing my now 10 year old son to the world of computers:

- I bought him a Kano computer kit when he was about 7. The kit retailed for about $250 at the time and a kid could assemble it "like LEGO". It came with educational software that introduced him to programming languages, etc. (Unfortunately I do not think they make this kit anymore.) Verdict: MINOR SUCCESS.

- I tried to introduce him to Python (around 7.5) by following an online book about game programming. He did not show much interest. Verdict: FAILURE.

- I introduced him to MakeCode (arcade.makecode.com) around 8. He got absolutely hooked and it is still his favorite platform today. I bought him some cheap hardware (Meowbit) to put his programs on and he loves showing off his games to his friends and everyone else. Verdict: MAJOR SUCCESS.

- I introduced him to Godot when he was 9. He showed strong interest, built a few games in it and even understood enough of the Python like language that Godot has. He used this series of YouTube videos to learn about Godot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvPTSZl2WCc. Verdict: MEDIUM SUCCESS.

- We are currently building Ben Eater's 8-bit computer (eater.net/8bit) and he absolutely loves it. He is able to follow along with the videos and understand the material at a good level. He has named the computer "Terry". This project does require a lot of my own time. Verdict: MAJOR SUCCESS.

We have also tried other projects (e.g. Raspberry-pi with Raspbian, Arduino, Robotics kits, etc.) although nothing that he showed major interest at the time. I think you have to try with different things to see what will capture your child's imagination.

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 bumped into lejos in a section on Mindstorms toolchain options for Macintosh in one of my dad's MacWorld magazines. He helped me set it up and that's where I started learning Java.

It was a life altering gift for me if there ever was one. The first large event that set me on my current path.

I honestly kind of miss the silly hacker/spy/matrix-y aesthetic of computing in the early 00's. It was fun when I realized those LEGO Spybotics kits could be targeted by some of the Mindstorms tools. Everyone in elementary school thought I was going to be an evil genius. Now I build storage virtualization systems. Oh well I guess.

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 headed down the path of an engineering career.

My college was still using the official Mindstorms sets for their intro to engineering classes, and so I recall finally getting my hands on the official Mindstorms software and finding it lacking. A classmate was using NQC to do it all, and his team let him do the programming. My team wasn't a fan of that approach so I stuck to the hardware.

> alternative LabView-based UI that ran on classic Mac OS

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.

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 (auction number 324365658011) if that is the one you are looking for.

I do miss the heyday of LEGO Mindstorms. Everything seems to have moved to low-cost limited use sets you can get on Amazon. Lowering the bar of access is a good thing, but I do miss the feeling of having a big tub of LEGOs you could build anything you want from.

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.

Thanks for reminding me of the more "individual challenge" aesthetics of early coding. But I have to ask - you say, "oh well," like that's not something cool. I would have no idea where to even start with a storage virtualization system.

Maybe it's not evil genius, but it sure sounds cool.

+1 for Ben Eater's 8-bit computer, the videos are very well put together and easy to understand. It's even a bit addicting to watch them because you always want to get to the next step. I binged it in a matter of 3 days. His 6502 is also very good, I wonder if that can be a good computing platform OP is talking about.

Godot is a dead end. I tried it and found it very difficult to grok and then immediately ran into their hacked to hell threading model that you must know about (and sprinkle yields around in just the right spots) to get anything done.

I see it being revised significantly which will be a breaking change. If not, then it is what it is.

> Godot is a dead end.

c'mon, there have been millions of human hours played on games developed on engines or systems with not even 1/1000th of what Godot is able to achieve.

I introduced my daughter to ScratchJr when she was 5 and Scratch when she was 7.

I taught her class Scratch. It does make a big difference which language you start with. I think how much you are involved with your child’s learning make also is a big part of the success.

I introduced her to MakeCode at 8 and we used the microbit to build a robot with legos and servos.

This project was such a hit that her principal asked me to teach it to the middle school kids.

Is scratchjr only available on ios/android? Not on pc/mac?

This is me-in-5-years I hope. You're a good parent.

Do you think any of these would work for a 3-year-old?

My daughter just built her very own Raspberry Pi 4 based computer[0] last weekend for her 10th birthday. Key points:

- She picked the components herself (with dad's supervision to make sure they would work together), so the case and keyboard and so on are ones she likes the look of and wants on her desk.

- She assembled it all and installed the OS herself (again with dad supervising but trying really hard not to help except when requested), so I'm hoping she'll have a much stronger sense of ownership due to the Ikea effect[1].

Still too early to see how well it has worked, but she's been very excited about it so far and proud of her accomplishment. It's the 8Gb model and (as per dad's recommendation) she installed 64-bit Ubuntu on it, so she can use all the same systems and tools she sees her dad using. They are doing Scratch and Python in school, so the plan is for her to use it for at least those things, but she has shown interest in learning how to develop a mobile app, and I'm hoping it'll be a bit of a gateway for other potential interests like video editing, graphics editing etc.

Also want to add that I wouldn't be doing any of this if she hadn't seemed genuinely interested - I have this theory that trying to push children in a certain direction will end up being counter-productive, i.e. you push and they rebel and end up wanting to go the opposite direction just because.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

I did not know we had coined the term "IKEA effect" for that process of ownership, but it makes a ton of sense.

Personally, I have never felt ownership of something I did not setup from the basics. Makes a ton of sense.

It was a Final Jeopardy clue last year: https://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=6979

Raspberry pi also has some good books that seem kid friendly on getting started with the computer.

https://store.rpipress.cc/collections/books/products/the-off...

Available at other book sellers as well.

Maybe give this a shot for mobile apps: https://appinventor.mit.edu/

It uses the same puzzle pieces as scratch, but it's a little more advanced.

It's worth noting that a lot of Raspberry Pi software and projects assume you are running the default "Raspberry Pi OS", because it comes bundled with a lot of Pi-specific libraries and hacks.

Raspberry Pi for the win! I love my RPis, and feel like the release and continued support and improvement of them and similar devices has caused a bit of a resurgence of the old "Hacker" mentality. Buy a kid a box of Raspberry Pi's and related components and show 'em the right websites, and stand back. Lord only knows what kinda crazy/fun stuff they'll build. ;)

>When I was a kid, I had an Apple II with a BASIC interpreter, [...] a computer like that, where there are a lot of open-ended ways to create.

I think your particular childhood memories that understandably left an imprint on you have inadvertently affected your idea of what "open-ended" creation means.

>, and great creative experiences don't seem available on desktop

I also grew up with those 8-bit computers and I don't think the Apple II / Commodore 64 / Texas Instruments TI-99 with burned in ROM BASIC and 64kb RAM are more creative. It was simply a different time and we as children just used the technology that happened to be available for the price point of home computers. If I ignore my childhood, I'd have to objectively weigh those early home computers as less open-ended. Sure, I had fun with BASIC "10 PRINT HELLO 20 GOTO 10" and giggled as the text infinitely scrolled up. But we all had lower standards of novelty because computers were not as powerful.

With today's desktop and a browser, kids can "be creative" with digital art or make music with more powerful tools. Many examples of expressive worlds are just a few clicks away with no software to install or EPROM cartridges to buy:

+ digital art: https://www.google.com/search?q=online+painting

+ digital music: https://www.google.com/search?q=online+beats+maker

+ Javascript is more powerful than ROM BASIC and the tools cost $0

With Commodore or TI computers, I couldn't even save my BASIC programs until my parents saved enough money for a $100 cassette tape interface or $200 for floppy drive. Instead of thinking my childhood time with computers was more creative, I'm actually jealous of what today's kids can do on modern desktop computers and the web.

However, restrained environment may inspire creativity. For sure today's kids have way more choices and the almost unlimited resources (as long as the family is not poor), but I wouldn't say it's a benefit without harm, from my exp having way more choices than one can digest is always bad. Plus most of the choices out there do not give you the benefit to build from the bottom -- a very important skill for engineering.

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 2600, that made the ROM BASIC boxes the same, to a child's visual senses, and gave you the control. Had the game console of 1979 been even as good as the NES, it's doubtful that those early BASIC boxes could have competed for the attention of a 10yo.

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, sees me using the old machine and wants to join in. If I am doing it with her, she's in. She won't do much on her own yet. And she's 6!

They say grand children are like their grand parents, guess there is some truth in it.

There was truth to it in my family.

I had a great affinity for my GPs

Take any decent computer and point the browser at scratch.mit.edu. It’s got fun, easy ways for kids to learn programming concepts.

And more importantly (to the kids), it’s got tons of fun content that other kids have made using those tools. This helps spread ideas and inspiration. They can see something cool and then “look inside it” to see how it was built.

Kids want to be doing what other kids today are doing. Hearing “I loved this as a kid” from a parent can doom something right from the start. Kids want their own experiences, especially as they get older. The technologies you have fond memories of were contemporary at the time you enjoyed them. Your kids also want contemporary experiences.

But most importantly, kids are unique, and often different from their parents. They might not like the same things we did as kids, even if we could exactly recreate them.

To add to the value of Scratch: it's taught at the start of Harvard's CS50 course for introductory programming. It's a drag-and-drop block-based code editor, which is good for learning about if statements and loops while getting an immediate result. (e.g. the instructions cause an animated character moves in a certain way). The immediate reward can help motivate programming, as it skips the time needed to memorize function names or syntax before understanding what you can do with programming.

I will chime in that I program professionally and first learned in the 7th grade in Scratch.

The most incredible moment for me was that for CS50 I found a game I had uploaded to scratch.mit.edu maybe 6 years earlier and submitted it (it was my own work, after all). Great platform, I remember fondly learning how to program a platformer on there without a camera system.

For older kids, the Microsoft MakeCode platform is great.

They have a microbit IDE, including emulator: https://makecode.microbit.org/

And a dedicated gaming device like a gameboy, including emulator: https://arcade.makecode.com/

Can code in Blocks, Javascript, or Python.

There's also Snap.

https://snap.berkeley.edu/

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 _literally_ the most desirable and sophisticated "computer game" there was at the time.

I talk to a friend's 11 year old occasionally about "computer stuff", and he plays Fortnight and Roblox - and he just can't see a connection between simple child oriented computer programming, and Fortnight, which is what he would rather be playing than futzing around in Scratch (or even Minecraft).

I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle, when they could be playing multiplayer games on their phone or iPad instead.

(And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs, I did most of my Basic programming in junior high on a BBC Micro, because there were not games on pirated floppy disks, which was what the AppleIIs were all in demand for. I suspect today it'll still only be a half dozen or so kids out of a school of 6 or 800 who _want_ to program computers, same as it was in '79 and '80. The rest of them will just want to play games not learn how to do magic...)

If you wanna give your kids the opportunity, I s3econd cons's suggestion of a RaspberryPi400. Add a spare HDMI monitor and you're got "the spiritual equivalent" of an AppleII. Don't get your hopes up _too_ high about your kids being the maybe 1% of people who choose to program for fun.

I agree with this post. Most of the young 6-12 year olds out there aren't going to be really interested in a terminal/basic interpreter. A lot of what that audience wants to do is build mods for the games they play. Minecraft, fortnite, etc. and the like. But programming for these games is a bit more involved than regular programming obviously. I suggest getting them a computer that is capable of playing the game they like and helping them setup the environment for making mods (this is probably something young adults can do on their own but definitely not 6-12 year olds with little experience/patience). And, I think being there as the one learning it with them and understanding what is needed is going to help. I would highly suggest purchasing a book centered on minecraft modding or the like (they seem to be really popular at least the bookstore near me), as this will give you the knowledge to help your child(ren) make mods. I suggest the favorite game modding because it is something both the child and their friends will actually appreciate/use/play with.

Modding is actually an excellent catalyst to begin the programming path or other similar paths... Great suggestion!

Agreed with modding. In the early aughts my dad encouraged me to learn basic but I was more into playing games and I didn’t see the connection to basic which seemed to me to be mostly about printing text.

But at some point, my favorite game involved a scriptable server engine, and nothing brought me joy like updating the game that I had poured hundreds of hours into, with a simple line of text.

After that I went back to mainstream games like WoW and didn’t do anything like programming again until college (minus an attempt at AP computer science which I dropped because it was boring)

minecraft modding is doable with some help. obviously more complex than writing some little BASIC program from scratch since you're hooking into existing things that are at times not ideally documented but it's a lot more feasible than trying to teach your kid unity, probably

There are plenty of tutorials available out there, with some geared toward kids with no programming experience. My older son went through a class (can't remember which one...it was at least six years ago) that did a very nice job of making basic Minecraft mods very accessible, while still introducing programming topics.

plus it's java, so it's something they can actually carry on to use in the future, rather than some proprietary custom script language with wildly different syntax than anything else. it's even got strict typing!

the minecraft modding experience on the raspberry pi my pre-teen has is dead simple to get working, with a quick code-observe loop, but then there's a gap moving to java mods on the PC, which is much more involved

Are you aware of Nintendo Game Builder Garage? [1,2]

My youngest daughter was begging me to get this for her when it came out. She spent ages in earlier years trying to figure out doing stuff with the MIT Scratch offline editor. She's not super keen on text-based programming yet (my elder daughter is and solidly resists my typed FP propaganda in favour of hand-typed OO programming), but these kind of visual programming environments do teach real agent-based algorithmic concepts.

I'm not saying your advice isn't better than something along these lines, but it's good to be flexible in terms of what advice you offer and be encouraging rather than prescriptive.

[1]: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/game-builder-garage-sw...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058300

I'm vicariously proud of your children :)

Out of curiosity, how old are they, and when did you start them on programming related stuff? I have a 5yo and 7yo boy. The older one is just starting to develop an interest in creating things, and recently took an unsuccessful (but still educational) stab at learning Blender.

18 and 15. I started them on Scratch about 9 years ago, so your elder was about the same age as my younger when we started, and I kept coming back to its model to explain ideas about algorithms.

Playfool recently had a nice video with suggestions on how Game Builder Garage combines really well with earlier Labo kits. So if you have any of those lying around..

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTJH11qXtys

My 7yo is absolutely thrilled by scratch on Lego Mindstorms Robot Innovator [1]. The physicality of it is engaging. Granted, I'm generally a very restrictive parent about mobile/console gaming.

1: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/robot-inventor-51515

Restricting kids from the mobile games is like restricting kids from drinking vodka you have in your bar. Everyone should do it. Those things are not games they are whale seeking mind fucking drugs that no child should have to try and deal with.

Anyway school my kids are in uses older version of the inventor, librarian runs a class with that twice a week both my 8 and 6 year old LOVE IT. Meaning that is their topic of conversation and they remember which days they have it during the week.

Couple days ago 8year olds class had a bring your parent to school day so I did a presentation mentioning a game I hacked with a debugger as an ice breaker. Forget what I actually do for next 20 minutes all I was asked is how to hack Minecraft, how to hack some online game I don't know :o and not get caught. Blew my mind, teacher was looking sideways at me :)

Now I promised to compile a set or resource about modding Minecraft for the class. I am also thinking about setting up a website that kids can mess with using developer tool in the browser(super simple html with hidden "password" etc)

> Restricting kids from the mobile games is like restricting kids from drinking vodka you have in your bar. Everyone should do it. Those things are not games they are whale seeking mind fucking drugs that no child should have to try and deal with.

Absolutely. I work in the industry so I know exactly the monetization culture there. It is so deeply rooted that there is way to avoid that, at least on Android. I think Apple is slightly better but maybe not really. I'm sad that the whole industry got trained in that mindset :(

> Couple days ago 8year olds class had a bring your parent to school day so I did a presentation mentioning a game I hacked with a debugger as an ice breaker. Forget what I actually do for next 20 minutes all I was asked is how to hack Minecraft, how to hack some online game I don't know :o and not get caught. Blew my mind, teacher was looking sideways at me :)

This is really very good experience :) I guess it's also very proud of your children to have a cool parent.

I'm struggling with what to do about Roblox. There are many different subgames on it, some of which really focused on money, some not, some focused on grinding, etc. But restricting Roblox wholesale then misses the opportunity to get into the creative/coding side of things. But then if the focus of that is going to be monetization...

This concerns me too. I have arrived at the task of just getting into Roblox enough to manage the problems.

It's like crack to my younger one. The pandemic has limited social contact, and she's ultra social! Like 11 on a scale of 10.

The moment she understood there are OTHER PEOPLE IN THAT THING, boom. Donzo, it's all she wants to do.

The appeal to me is the "low level programming". I know, the language is not low-level, but: "write code, make thing move" is what I mean by low level.

We used to look sideways at the engineers that "wrote drivers", but I see the appeal now. Even a programmer as jaded as me still gets a thrill when code I write for an Arduino is able to talk to a device like an air-particle measuring device.

My advice: go Arduino + peripherals. A "sound board" that can generate synthesized sounds would be fun to program — any kind of sensor that measures heat, humidity, air quality, etc. Motor controllers + robot platform of course....

Stuff is fairly cheap and there's so much out there.

Agreed. Mobile gaming should absolutely be banned from kids. Most of the games out there were designed to be money-grabbing. Consoles are better especially if you give them a retro one as the first machine.

You mean designed to get you to pay/watch ads gaming.

There's lots of great mobile games, why bad them all?

That's for sure, not all mobile games are bad, but the majority out there (especially those pushed by stores) are bad because only those have the $$ for monetization (aka pushed to front).

I guess we can always ban store access and only download the "good" ones, which is one solution that does not toss the baby out.

Yeah, I have a little section of no-ad kids games on my phone. There are times when it's helpful.

Minecraft, a couple educational games the younger one likes, machinarium, don't starve, lost journey.

I find that it's nice to say no mobile games but it's easier to fill that void with stuff that doesn't suck.

I agree with this. I think robots are probably where it's at these days.

Kids sometimes like the simplicity of the old computer games, but as mentioned above, the old excitement at having your hands on cutting edge tech isn't there with a Raspi, or an old retro computer.

When I was at school in the 90s the computer room used to be full of kids at lunch time writing code in qbasic. The reason why was that was all there was to do on the machines that wasn't writing a document or making a spreadsheet. If you want kids to not play Fortnite and instead write code, take away Fortnite and leave them with something they can code on.

> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs.

Exactly. When I was a teenager in the 80's the kids in school came in three classes: the majority who did not know what computers were or thought they were lame, a minority who dabbled in the nascent gaming scene and an even smaller minority (of maybe 5 people in a school of 1500) that was interested in programming a computer. I happened to be part of the latter minority.

The gamers were all about getting the newest (cracked) games as quickly as possible. Meanwhile we were cutting our teeth on the internals of the c64. While we were lousy gamers with zero connections, we had a certain amount of respect in the gamer community because we were actually capable of programming the intro's to their cracked games. In return we got to feed on their scraps, so there was a living in that. :-)

Putting the Roblox controversies aside, I see kids creating entire multiplayer systems in this environment. Putting together 3D polygon models and animating them with Lua scripting.

And then on top of all of that they organize themselves into systems. My son belongs to a virtual "airline" that has an org chart, schedules "flights", and has dozens of players that run the show on a daily basis. And, like any other org, you get management disputes and daily problems. I see them better trained for what comes next than we are here, sitting around and talking about it.

So yeah, why would you draw circles with LOGO or blink LEDs when you can literally do all of this from an already-running desktop environment?

Roblox is crazy!

I have one very interested, and I feel it's worth doing. But, I'm way out of the loop on that one, meaning it's a time sink for me too.

But, maybe I just have to. Very interesting comment!

If your kid has the interest, they will teach themselves. That's the magic of the 'kids computer' we all get nostalgic for. Nobody taught us how to work with an Apple ][ or C64, we picked it up from books and from friends.

These days the online resources are lightyears better. I say let them explore and they will find their own path. You can't force this on someone and expect them to succeed.

No plans to force anything. She comes to me. Great. We have fun.

I was a lot like your friend's 11-year-old when I was a kid. I loved games, and I loved clicking around to make custom content for games, but I didn't comprehend programming.

My mother at one point even installed and booted up Visual Basic for me once and I just didn't get it.

It wasn't until I was 16 or 17 before I actually started seriously getting into computing.

I guess some kids are "late bloomers" and some just don't have the aptitude for it.

16 or 17 still sounds pretty young. In the December 31, 2020 lecture for Harvard's introductory programming course (CS50), the lecturer explains that 2/3 of the class have never programmed before [0] (most enrolled students are 18-19 years old by then, assuming the number excludes non-Harvard undergraduates who are taking the course online).

I started later, and I attribute it to my parents being low-tech, and online discourse framing programming as "really hard" and something you just do to find a steady job (versus make something useful). I bet I would have started a lot sooner if I had different influences growing up, but at least there's still time to learn now.

[0] https://youtu.be/YoXxevp1WRQ?t=208

> Don't get your hopes up _too_ high about your kids being the maybe 1% of people who choose to program for fun.

Programming is mostly plumbing anyway, so if your kid chooses differently, that's very ok.

I sometimes think of it as interior decorating. I do a lot of frontend though.

> I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle

To be fair, as a kid growing up in the 80s enamoured with BASIC, I didn't even want to play with the LOGO Turtle. It always seemed like the most boring thing you could do with a computer.

Not really true. When there was Quake and Visual Basic, we still played around with qbasic in msdos because it was fun and gave immediate feedback.

I think the combined editor and runtime environment of qbasic shortened the feedback loop and made it more fun.

> 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 _literally_ the most desirable and sophisticated "computer game" there was at the time.

I think this explanation makes a lot of sense. I was that age a few years later and learned to program by building Flash games when they were at their peak.

It makes me wonder if there's a way to approximate that experience today, even with how far we've come. It doesn't need to be as high fidelity as Fortnite (most of my peers were far more interested in Call of Duty than Flash), but are there simple game engines that a kid today could get started with and quickly build something that's "cool" even by modern standards? Most I'm familiar with have a huge learning curve compared to a BASIC interpreter or even Flash.

> I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle, when they could be playing multiplayer games on their phone or iPad instead.

My 13 y.o. girl sent me a screenshot of herself programming Python Turtle in Pycharm the other day :-)

> 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

OTOH, "open ended ways to create" have grown as well. There's of course programming, but also office activities, desktop publishing, making simple websites. If they're interested in modern 3D games like Fortnite, they might experiment with the basics of 3D rendering and game development using something like Godot. They won't come up with the next AAA title, but simple, proof-of-concept arcade or puzzle games ought to be feasible.

A couple of years back I bought a microbit (in fact I bought two). "it's just a microchip" was the response.

I think he might be a future product owner as he was more than happy to give me requirements for a simple game, but had no interest in how it worked.

> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs, I did most of my Basic programming in junior high on a BBC Micro

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if part of that is simply that writing a fun game in Basic is really really difficult. Actually, designing a fun game, period, is really difficult.

I know I was interested in making games at a young age but I also knew I wasn't going to be able to make them in the version of Basic that I had on my DOS computer

I have actually never thought of it like this, excellent answer!

I would start a kid on Etoys from Squeakland.org, first show her some video demo. And show her how to script Minecraft from Etoys. Also Microblocks for hardware. Then Thonny and a $4 Raspberry pico led blinking and temperature with ADC, then have her measure her skin voltage. Then look at Squeak Morphic (Lawson English tutorials on Youtube).

Indeed, maybe only 10% of kids like it. The rest should go play with World of Goo. Then the Powder Toy.

Kids like having power. Computers - even old ones - give them power.

Even if it's the power to say "wow, we've really come a long way, and what I think I would prefer to pursue is..."

Blender could be a good thing to get someone started in terms of programming. You can do things with it that you can't do easily with most other free or easily available software.

I think this is a lost cause. Other have already mentioned this, but I'll state it again. The computers themselves are the trivial part, both the hardware and the software. You can buy a budget 11- or 13-inch laptop, new for $300 or used for $100, load them with emulators of all the 1980s and 1990s machines, and have literally the same software and much better hardware than we did back then.

If you give that to them, odds are overwhelmingly (I'm guesstimating at least 99:1) that your kids might show some interest for less than 5 minutes, and them move on to their current preferred form of entertainment. You might stretch it a bit if there is a knowledgable and enthusiastic adult sitting with them all the time, but most will only continu when the adult is present. How many hours can you spare?

Back in the 1980s, we had 3 tv channels (with mostly boring adult programming), a library that we visited a few times per month, to take out 6 books per visit, a video store where we rented movies a few times per year. Even in that restrictive setting with far less competition for attention, most of the (few) children who hade home computers only used them (personal schoolyard experience) to consume (cracked) games. Nowadays, with the endless streams of highly optimised attentions sinks (all-you-can-eat video channels, adware/IAP touch screen "games"), just giving them open-ended ways to create or great creative experiences does not stand any chance.

Now maybe your children are among the very few that do have an aptitude for open-world creativity. You can probably tell with something like Lego, or paid games with some creation tools (Minecraft, Super Mario Maker). But don't be too disappointed if they show little interest or enthusiasm. It's not you, nor the hardware/software. It's the children themselves.

Good observation. This generation has the problem of abundance of resources and attention competition which we didn't have in the Apple II years.

Worst, you have TikTok kind of content contaminating them with futility that makes them get dopamine shots in exchange of "short exciting things" that will make them A) loose time and B) raise expectations on what will make them trigger dopamine hits in the future.

And once the dopamine shots are done, there is no way back unless the parents are very mindful. It would be only decades later, when they are at our age (30/40) that they realized that something could be changed back then.

In reality I see many parents actively feed kids with dopamine shots because it "quiets the kids".

TBH I don't know what I can do. Even as both my wife and I are aware of the situation, in daycares and schools they simply feed those stuffs too, maybe with an educational bent, but still dopamine shots underlied.

Somehow, the attempt has to be in imprinting virtue and high values. And a lot of the culture wants people to focus in resentment, self-victimism and ungratefulness towards anything good and punishing what's trying to be good. Negative Dialectics focused in this, the destruction of everything.

I have a vintage Mac setup, and I tried to get my nieces and nephews when they visited to play KidPix. It's a PowerMac 5400 all-in-one, and they thought it was a weird looking machine, but they kept trying to use it as a touchscreen. When they started to use the mouse with it, they played it for awhile then got bored.

This is super depressing. What do we do? Firewall all the things at the house and get rid of tablets/phones?

Don't be depressed. In due time, our kids will complain about their kids zombie-ing out in the metaverse all day, whereas back in their days, they were actively creating memes and dance videos, modding minecraft worlds, and occasionally even had to read entire paragraphs of text.

I was able to get through this thread, guess I haven't zombie'd out too much.

That's what I usually say: my grandchildren will revenge me.

One thing to realize is that technology is not bad—it's the shitty apps and the social media superficialities that are bad. So if you can pre-load the "good stuff" (educational stuff, documentaries, wikipedia, etc.) then you're biasing their device time toward useful stuff.

Here is a comment with detailed instructions for how to setup Kolibri and Kiwix, which are really useful educational software that works on localhost (or local network): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137100 The idea is after installing these locally, you could turn off the internet connection.

Thanks this is really good.

It's only "super depressing" if you choose to see if that way

Here are some ways to "combat" the choices available, though, if you want:

- kill/limit streaming services

- kill/limit TV in general

- limit internet time(s) per device

- have your kids go outside and play

You can't. They will have friends who have access to those devices, plus daycares play programs and schools sometimes "require" a tablet. I don't know TBF.

Agreed. As I said in an above comment, getting 100X of resources and choices is NOT a good thing. You need VERY knowledgeable adults to guide the kids. TBH most parents are not prepared for this, let alone many of them are deep into the rabit hole themselves.

This all rings true for me.

Frankly, if I am doing things on the old computer, that's one scenario. My young one wants to get involved and do stuff with me.

Doing stuff on their own? Not gonna happen.

Yeah, I have this question myself a lot.

I thought I could just buy my kid an old C64 or ZXSpectrum, but those computers are just sooo slow and cumbersome now. They have the right spirit, but too nonstandard and weird in some ways. If you just want an environment to go over basic programming and doing sprite stuff, they can work.

One possibility is to get a raspberry pi kit that comes with a display and keyboard to where it is kinda like the old C64 experience. Depending on their age, make it a family activity. I doubt my kid would just go read on their own (at least now), but when I say it's reading time and sit down with them, it is usually an enjoyable activity. Start with Scratch and then later move to a Basic interpreter or Python. Programming is hard, but if they have little example text games to program and tweak, they'll pick it up little by little. To really learn, they'll have to keep at it (a few hours a week). It probably won't be super enjoyable at first, but eventually I bet they'll be happy once they can actually do stuff.

As far as Basic goes...Once you've taught them some basics (print statements, if-then, for loops, while loops, arrays), you can help them with creating easy games like tic-tac-toe, guess the number, a 3 room text adventure...etc. This will never be the dopamine hit that watching TV, social media, or playing Fortnite will be though unless they're really just into it.

Recommend you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 400:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400-unit/

These are about USD100 a pop and need a HDMI screen and you're all set.

And then configure it to run a Basic or Python REPL on boot, to give that 1970s home PC feel.

I also think the raspberry pi 400 is your best bet right now. It has that feeling of being an 80’s computer, but it boots to a modern graphical desktop with lots of open source educational software that they can do explore freely.

If you want your kids to dip their toe into the field of programming, show them around scratch for 10 minutes and let them explore on their own. Set them up with a scratch account and they can work on their projects on any computer with web access. My 10yo started with scratch a few years ago and is now starting to learn javascript. The real challenge to getting them into this stuff is the lack of boredom. Kids have so many options to keep themselves entertained nowadays that they tend to not be bored long enough to start tinkering.

I bought one of these for my kid. He’s not quite old enough for it yet. Key challenge: what software do I put on it?

My main ideas are:

(1) touch typing instruction game

(2) some way to interact with a very controlled group of people… maybe a mastodon or matrix server I run in the homelab and limit to our immediate friends.

I get this same sense. I really want to need an RPi 400 out of nostalgia. My original machine was an Atari 400. It's not much to justify, but I can't think of what I'd actually do with it, other than put it on a shelf like a hipster.

I think the closest recreated retro-experience is the Commander X16[0]. The thing I like about it is that it specifically isn't a modern computer. Everything is simple right in the hardware. Other choices are often capable of running a full Linux but then used to run a script or emulator. There's definitely the realistic possibility of getting to fully know your machine, especially given that there's extensive documentation and a community.

Here's some hardware specs from c64-wiki[1] and it 'boots to basic'

    CPU: WDC 65C02S, a static descendant of the 6502
    Speed: 8MHz
    Video: The VERA module generates VGA (and other formats)
           tile and bitmap modes; 128 sprites; 128K video RAM;
           palette with 256 colors selected from a total range of 4096
    Sound: Yamaha YM2151 sound chip.
           16-channel stereo Programmable Sound Generator
           PCM audio playback up to 48kHz 16-bit stereo
    RAM: 40K "low" or "BASIC" RAM
         An additional 512K SRAM (expandable to 2MB) in 8K banks
    ROM: Banked in 16K groups; contains an upgraded Commodore KERNAL,
         DOS functions and a 16 bit ABI, and an upgraded BASIC 2.0
    Media: An on-board SD card with native FAT32 support
    Outputs: Two SNES controller ports, plus two additional SNES port headers
             PS/2 keyboard and mouse. VGA. Stereo audio. I2C bus
    Inputs: SD; four expansion slots with access to the CPU databus;
            IEC port; SNES ports; I2C bus
    Operating System: Commodore KERNAL and BASIC
    Battery-backed Microchip MCP7940N real-time-clock chip
    Form Factor: Micro-ATX

[0] https://www.commanderx16.com

[1] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commander_X16#Hardware_specifi...

At this point I think it is questionable whether the X16 will ever come out. There have been a lot of technical and supply issues, a lot of scope creep and drama in the community and there seems to have been no real significant progress updates in a long time.

An alternative that is finished and can be pre-ordered today is the MEGA65:

https://mega65.org/

I don't necessarily think a kid would be interested in a glorified recreation of the Commodore 65, but it's roughly equivalent to the X16 in a lot of ways. Just thought I'd mention it.

I have faith in David Murray. He's got a good track record of pushing things through and seeing them to the end.

Second the suggestion of a raspberry pi.

The book getting started with raspberry pi was the best introduction to computing I’ve ever seen.

>The book getting started with raspberry pi was the best introduction to computing I’ve ever seen.

I just wanted to second this comment. I was skeptical that the book included with the Raspberry Pi 400 kit would be good or useful, but it is amazing. If anyone remembers the old Usborne introduction to computing/electronics/programming books, it feels a lot like those in some ways. If I was nine years old again and got that book, I'd probably be buried in it for weeks, trying out all the different projects.

The Raspberry Pi foundation also published a book on game development, which is also very much like a lot of the old Usborne books. Really great for kids who are a little older.

The hardware is the easy part. It's the software that's the tricky part. That Apple II software was something a 5 year old could have fun with, which a REPL would be hard to do. It had enough rails to be usable but enough user input to be creative.

If it's just software, you could always cheat; Apple II emulators exist - you could have exactly that, if you want. (Granted, with worse boot time and hardware integration)

An Apple II emulator is an interesting approach. Would something like LinApple [1] work or are there other options out there that could work better?

[1]: https://github.com/linappleii/linapple

Virtual II[0] is paid software and requires a Mac, but it’s probably the best. One of the neat things about sticking with the Apple II is the community that still organizes around it at KansasFest[1].

[0] http://virtualii.com/ [1] https://www.kansasfest.org/

The thing about your childhood memories is that the actual output was not possible any other way. Paint Shop Pro banners made at home was awesome! Writing a program that took your age in years and returned the number of months was, in the 80s, mind-blowing. Remember, we thought that digital watches were cool! Now, you can ask Alexa how many days there are until your birthday. So writing software on a PC is a bit <meh>.

Any attempt to revive that sense of wonder has to be something that seems like an achievement, which is why Lego Mindstorms keeps getting a mention. Along that vein..

- If going down the Raspberry Pi route, look at doing stuff with sensors, servo drivers, that kind of thing. The CrowPi seems to be good for that.

- An Arduino educational kit with a bunch of electronics is really good - particularly if you can get it with a proper accompanying educational programme and all of the bits. Arduino is probably better than a Pi to get some introduction to embedded and electronics, because you don’t have to have an argument with your parents about whether or not systemd is a good thing.

- Good projects are buying LED lighting strips for their bedrooms and finding ways to turn them on and wire them up. It has to be something that you can’t get from Amazon Prime, so LED strips that you have to cut and solder make it much cooler.

- 3D printing is still amazing. Kids feel that they have produced something from nothing. The sense of wonder is definitely there.

- Radio controlled electric planes or drones are good. There is a fair amount of ‘programming’ involved (of radios, ESCs, etc), and it is surprisingly more complex than you would think. Start off simple though with a kit that has some self-assembly and upgradability.

Just get an old computer. Old computers don't die - their users do.

You can get a nicely specc'ed ZX Next (https://www.specnext.com/) or Amstrad CPC6128 for the budget, or find an old C64 and deck it out with some solid-state storage (actually do this for all the machines, they all have it now).

My kids learned hacking on an Oric Atmos with a Cumulus drive (SD-card storage), which was just mind-blowing to see and also very, very inspiring for me personally, as a 40-year veteran of the art of programming.

These systems are still out there, and still work. AND, they are amazing - just look at the beauty of the 10liner Basic competition, which this year was won by an Oric Atmos program that implemented a fully working Lunar Lander game in 10 lines of Basic, custom graphics, sound and all!

https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/games-list-2022

(Winning entry here: https://bunsen.itch.io/moon-landing-by-rax)

Failing that, check out the Clockwork Pi options: https://www.clockworkpi.com/

+++++ This is what I always imagined I'd do if I had kids, and I think I'd love every minute of it.

Did your kids get bored with those things when they got a look at an iPad? Or did they understand what they were looking at?

At first they were all "oh this is crap, look how big the pixels are! <disbelief>" but then after I typed in a 10-liner, the wonder started and they haven't complained a bit since, besides the time the power went out and nothing was saved .. but even that was a valuable experience, because my kids finally were able to properly elucidate the difference between a file and a folder, and in fact had a much better understanding of what a file is, in the first place .. a problem many still don't quite resolve today.

Just go for it. Even if your kids ridicule it, you'll have fun. :)

From other replies on here, it seems that you are more interested in the Software side than the hardware. Scratch was the gateway drug for my kids. It immediately let them create games they could share with friends, it immediately let them grab other resources and tweak and change those for their own game.

I also kept them on linux (ubuntu) machines until they started high School - the reasons for this were 2-fold:

1) let them get comfortable with other OS's - they saw windows machines at school and ipads, this showed them that they were all 'just computers' and feel comfortable jumping between os's

2) security - oh man if you could see the amount of dodgy looking .exe and .bat files that are in the download folders.

My kids have now moved on to Godot and pygame, but an old laptop with Scratch was the key.

Have you tried PICO-8? https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

Not a computer but I think embodies a lot of the open-ended creativity of the Apple II.

Also TIC-80.

The only problem with these is that, other than using lua instead of Basic or assembler, they are a little too literal an interpretation of "give me the same experience as when I was a kid".

If OP wants to make game dev the focus, then PICO-8 or TIC-80 is the way to go. Their constraints are a good thing when you don't know what you don't know. With the asset pipeline built in, you don't get bogged down researching pixel editors and libraries for importing sprite sheets or map tiles. You can get things drawn on the screen satisfyingly FAST.

PICO-8 is awesome, and you can run it on lots of inexpensive hardware for even more awesome!

I built a small raspberry pi zero "laptop"[1] with 4" screen and usb battery that does not have X and inits directly into openvt that starts vim (takes like 2 seconds to boot) and it has python and you can directly write pixels into /dev/fb0, there are also console games that are quite fun.

The best part was "no distraction environment" no internet, no messages, nothing, you have to be bored a bit to get creative.

Though my daughter doesnt use it much (she did in the beginning), it is super hard to compete with modern entertainment which is so reachable and so instant. All kids get what they want immediately after they want it. I want a football, order online, it arrives same day. I want to watch this movie, they start watching.

I am trying to create some time per day, in a safe space where she can be creative and bored.

[1]: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

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, plug them together and write a python loop to display the gas levels. You can call it a fart detector to get the kid interested.

That's a simple example that someone might say is too complex. Thing is, a kid generally has zero interest in loops, IO, libraries, etc etc. They may need to see and hold something for it to take priority over Fortnite or whatever. Other projects might be a do not disturb LED for their bedroom door. Or get a strip of LEDs and have them light up based on what they do in Fortnite or Minecraft (if that's possible)

Good luck, so many children have serious attention problems due to their saturation in social media.

Do you think what your dad did, helped you become a grey-beard?

He helped more about a decade later when getting me into DOS games: He'd configure AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS which I could then look at after he was done playing.

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.

Hah!

Learning to craft a custom autoexec.bat to run Doom with 4MB of ram is how I got "into" computers as well.

I turned pale as snow the first time I hit (F5?) during boot to bypass it. I had no idea if what I was doing was permanent or just temporary.

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 this, no gravity" or "Look at my high score!" (after tweaking the scores to increase in increments of 1000 instead of 1), or "Look, I changed the text messages" etc.

- Swift Playgrounds - they're not super fascinated with this, but I see them occasionally open it and noodle around.

- Procreate - they have an Apple Pencil, and any YouTube video about using Procreate is exempt from Screentime limits. This has led to a lot of amazing digital illustrations.

- Pages - just this simple built-in app is already pretty fun if kids are bored, and something is exempt from screentime. Last weekend one of them asked to go to Starbucks, because she's "writing a novel". She wrote a short story over ~5 pages, and was super proud of it.

- YouTube - in general, this is my least favorite app of theirs, and I try to police this the most. But any requests for videos where you learn things are exempt from screentime limits (case by case). E.g. Lego builds, origami, drawing instructions, "how to make slime at home" videos, etc.

This is a great question, and I'm eager to see what other creativity-fostering approaches are there. But to sum up my approach - limit screentime for mindless games, and let boredom take care of the rest.

Thanks for the suggestions.

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.

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. I've got a joystick on it, and am seeking a mouse card. Those are a PITA right now, and I may just build one.

I need a printing solution and that's true for my home overall right now. Gotta break down and get a good printer. I just hate doing that. Need to talk to some people and get one I won't get pissed off at.

Right now, we play games, education and action, create with the various programs, painting, etc... She enjoys time on the machine and soon will write some little programs.

LOGO is just too much fun for little kids. I can't wait to see her try it. And with a little speed boost, the machine should really perform!

That all said, my mind goes right to the Raspi 400. It's a pretty cool little computer, built into a keyboard, has the right ports, etc...

If you do some setup on that thing, a younger person could have a good time, and could by the way run an emulated Apple and have a good experience.

I see billziss talking about building the Ben Eater 6502. This is something I would enjoy with them. And if successful, that is a powerful experience on par with anything we had back then.

A IIgs with an accelerator card, maxed out memory, and solid state storage would really fit the bill, wouldn't it? You could run Apple Logo AND Hypercard.

Or maybe one of the macs that took an Apple IIe card, same thing only different.

That is my next machine to build up.

Thanks a lot. Do you have a link to get all of the components? Would be nice if I don't need to solder anything.

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 just saw this. Will link over the weekend.

Thanks man~~

https://www.callapple.org/tag/vidhd/

You have to email order that one. Worth it. I am super pleased to have HDMI. This card gets the subtle details right. Few others do.

But, you can get a nice CRT TV too. Apples look great either way.

http://www.a2heaven.com/webshop/index.php?rt=product/product...

Ask him for a 65816 version, if you want the better CPU and may program for it. Real time speed control. Goes from below 1mhz to a little over 16! I run at 4 an awful lot.

https://applerescueofdenver.com/products-page/apple-ii/cards...

Apple Rescue is special. You may get a full computer from them. Check in and inquire. I got my //e from them. Nice folks.

https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/cffa-v1-0-rev-c-rm-for...

Not cheap, and none of this is. Best modern flash storage solution. Others include the Booti. These come and go.

https://finapple.hho.fi/finapple/index.php/category/msx/

I just got one of these. Have the Z80 piece, have the MSX, Colecovision, Sega game add on coming.

I do not have a sound card yet. I kind of like the standard bloops and beeps from the 1 bit speaker, lol

The card you want for sound is some clone of the mockingboard.

Have fun!

Someone here mentioned a GS. Building one of those up can be just as fun.

I am partial to the //e myself.

One thing to note: when this stuff becomes available, buy. It comes and goes.

I have been chipping away at my 8 bit workstation for a decade. Now is a great time. Soon, that time will pass.

Expect to spend $1k or so. That is about my spend over some time. I like to get a card, and enjoy it, then get another one... no rush.

Former kid here, one of the toys my parents provided me with early on was Snap Circuits: https://www.elenco.com/brand/snap-circuits/

Not strictly programming-related per se, but they were a very educational toy. Messing around with these from a young age probably helped to cultivate an interest in electronics, how things worked, and later computing/programming.

My route to programming was through snap circuits. After I ran out of things to do with that I got an "Electronics Learning Lab" (highly recommend!). Then when I randomly met an Electronics engineering professor I was asking him for help building an adder iirc, and he told me about microcontrollers. I learned programming for them but got more hooked on the programming then the microcontrollers...

Super happy to hear this. Got my 7yo daughter a snap circuits kit for xmas, and she's pretty curious and so far has enjoyed following the initial setups.

I think the best learning experience is seeing you can still build and repair a computer yourself, so I had my 8yr old kid build his own gaming PC from scratch (with me standing by for guidance). We were about $1200 in with parts: motherboard, cpu, ram, nvme, chassis, dvd-rom, etc.

Then he got to help as we installed dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows, with Ubuntu being default :)

In windows I installed some games I felt ok about. Microsoft Flight Simulator, Kerbal Space Program, Pokemon TCG, his school office apps. But I only let him run Minecraft on the Linux side, so he will have to boot there and sort it out from time to time, with the bonus of a Minecraft server environment we've hacked a bit.

We're no longer in the 80s, that's for sure! But I think focusing on learning the components of hardware/software in computing are better done on a desktop than a laptop or tablet. There's really nothing to be learned in today's repair-hostile walled gardens.

Even though both my kids are in their early teens and graduated to using regular computers, I am building a dedicated PICO-8 machine: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/01/29/1830

They went through Scratch in a browser and iPads to Unity and Xcode (through Thonny on a Pi and Pythonista on iOS), but we all like PICO-8’s constraints and integrated graphics/music/code editing. It is a gem and feels better than the ZX Spectrum and C64 ever did, really.

So maybe just get a Pi or and old laptop and buy PICO-8 to run on it as an experiment.

I'm old enough to have used an Apple II in my early teens, and then the BBC models A and B. My parents bought me a Vic 20, and later I bought myself an Acorn Electron from money I made helping out teaching people basic computer skills. I hacked the hell out of those things. I also typed-in a lot of code from magazines. I remember the feeling (really almost ecstatic sometimes, to my teenage self) of possibility and exploration. I wrote Mandelbrot set programs and blew my mind a bit. I typed-in a planetary orbit simulator and then played with the constants to see what would happen. I learned 6502 assembler and wrote a simple (what I now know to be) cooperative multi-tasking scheduler. Information moved at the speed of monthly magazine publishing schedules, so you mostly had to figure stuff out yourself. It was fun. This was all pre-PC.

Now I'm older and I have teenagers and I did try to recreate this experience for them: Logo, RasPi, MicroBit, electronics kits, etc. But the truth is that simple stuff just wasn't that interesting to them. They played a lot of minecraft and built huge automatons with redstone and chickens, and they explored worlds like Mario Galaxy (impressively huge to me). I guess they got out of that something similar to what I did with my Vic 20. I can regret that their experience is built on a deep stack of tech that they know little about, but I don't think they really cared about that - if they thought abut it at all.

New technology attracts enthusiasts - but then it fades into the background or fades away. When cars became things that normal people could own, there were car clubs for people who enjoyed messing with cars. Some of these clubs still exist. When sound recording became a consumer tech, there were clubs were people met to listen to and share recordings. Domestic CB radio was a thing for a while. Astronomy clubs still exist - from their origins in a time when it became possible to buy a telescope and actually do new stuff with it.

My advice is to look for ways for them to actively explore the world in a positive, non-passive, fun way. Equip them with the means to explore - don't try to teach them web development. Don't ask them to stick with one thing. There's a lot more stuff now - so its ok to try things and abandon them and move one. They'll do that anyway.

The creators of the Raspberry Pi had a good take on this:

If you make something that doesn't have a website browser and can't play a youtube video young people won't see it as a computer.

It's easy to forget that BBC micros etc were popular for games, and being fully fledged computers, as well as educational devices.

Separate cartridges or disks for the OS, the various programs, the user files. When we switched over to internal storage and started putting everything together, the end user lost something. Children (people) need freedom to experiment but also need a way to put things back to square one, like they CAN'T mess the os up when it's on a write protected disk that's already been ejected.

Scratch works pretty well on the iPad for programming, and there's Scratch Jnr for younger learners.

Repl.it also works well on the iPad, as long as you sign in for them, so they can play with any language they like.

If you want an actual computer that they can play around with that's cheap then a Raspberry Pi is a good choice. The Pi 400 with it's integrated keyboard is excellent.

If you want some programming projects then have a look at https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en

They're not just projects for using the Raspberry Pi. There's a tonne of Scratch, Python and HTML stuff for them to work through as well.

I'd suggest https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/pathways/scratch-intro if they've never used Scratch before. All the projects are tablet friendly as well.

MS Word can be lots of fun and is easy to get started with. For sure let them design their own birthday invitations and so on.

I had a lot of fun as a kid playing Minecraft and building Redstone contraptions. Minecraft does invite tinkering with texture packs, mods etc.

So I'd say just go with a basic windows install on a normal PC.

Redstone seems like a great way to start learning programming Not that far of a leap to doing small hardware stuff.

I set my kid up with a Raspberry Pi 4, large key color lit keyboard, and monitor with HDMI loudspeakers.

Then I wrote her own "OS" - it's a bunch of python and bash scripts that run things she wants. As she asks for more things it should do I add a command and show her. So far she can:

1) Log in with name and five letter password* 2) whoami (she loves this) 3) music - it plays a random track from her music collection 4) photo - a random picture from our vacation last summer with her in it 5) sound - a random sfx plays in the speaker 6) say - text2speech the next word

The main objective is to get her typing and word recognition happening. She is 5, so definitely NO INTERNET. This summer I am going to add

7) talk - unix talk to daddy's computer on the LAN *

* we haven't talked cybersecurity yet, remembering 5 character password is still advanced

* I will regret this I know

Maybe you can consider to buy a Nintendo 3DS?

There's this prominent French artist who makes his creations on that device: https://twitter.com/Kekeflipnote/status/1487872156629413888

The device itself is not meant for professional work, therefore should be suitable for beginners and kids but obviously it is powerful enough to be used as a primary tool by a recognised artist.

The software he is using is Flipnote Studio 3D:

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-3DS-download-softw...

Minecraft is the most popular computer game in history, it lets kids create and experiment, and I'm genuinely floored by the stuff mine get up to. They play Roblox and want to make Roblox games so are learning Lua in a simple REPL. My son makes custom Yu-Gi-Oh cards, writes his own comics, and composes music. This is all on the iPad, where, believe it or not, you can get Carmen Sandiago, Number Munchers (how is this not too directly educational?), Oregon Trail, and various LOGO implementations. I'm sorry if your kids aren't interested in the same stuff you are, but with all the love in the world, that's your baggage, not theirs.

Apple IIs are still out there. Just takes $s to get the equipment.

My son's almost 4, on his birthday him an old tower(hooked up to the lounge tv) with a MES emulator. My plan is to approximately every 6 months upgrade his emulators to next gen.

Between SNES and N64 I'll introduce him to dos games. Then basic to show him how to control basic output and PC speaker(that's going to be a hunt).

I'll see how he likes all that stuff and if he is interested, steer him through how I had access.

I know once he hits 8ish he and his friends will be into whatever is popular at the time online wise, but it's the only way I can figure to see if he is interested enough to try programming.

I think it needs a change of perspective. It's very hard to get a child interested in things like programming by introducing him to it. I picked up programming by watching my brother do programming and I asked him to teach me some basics. I think this is a better approach. Instead of introducing a kid to Python, work on a simple game in Python and let him watch. He will see that you find it cool (despite it being "boring" compared to alternatives like Roblox), and he will see what it looks like, and if all goes well, he will ask you to teach him to do the same.

Kids nowadays have too much distractions.

Back in the day most of the entertainment kids got were TV and occasionally film but both are also family/friend activities. Then the personal computer showed up, and many kids wanted to make games because 1) That's so cool and 2) There was not many games anyway. They naturally learned BASIC because that was the only high level language pre-installed and then naturally learned Assembly because that was the only language left and is of high performance -- exactly what games need. Once they bag that as a skill there is not too much to stop them.

Nowadays there are way to many instant-gratification floating around. Kids get in touch with phones and pads so early that a whole generation from my country actually don't know much about computers, just phones and pads. Can't blame them though, because phones and pads were the first thing they got hooked up and addicted.

Honestly I don't even know what I can do as a parent. The only way is to see if a kid has a thirsty for creativity, and go for it if he/she does. I'm not sure if a Pi is equivalent to Apple II back in the day, but perhaps that's the best we can get. I still believe that people should start from some bare metal and grow gradually from there, because that dispels a lot of black magic. But maybe that's too much nowadays because of the instant-gratification culture we are grooming worldwide. Life is too short use Python.

> many kids wanted to make games because 1) That's so cool and 2) There was not many games anyway.

Yes. And the drive behind this was not only technical, but also artistic. You have seen the works of others (professional game developers) and you want to create something along the same lines. And into a very deep rabbit whole we went.

Yep! And a lot of people learned programming by this way. There was very little formal introduction to such topics back in the 80s if one does not go into a privileged middle school.

There are $100 Chromebooks now that can run Linux and Android. And Windows. And Apple II emulators.

In comparison, my parents paid $2,000 for an Apple IIc. Back then. Like, I'm not adjusting for inflation.

It looks like there's an Apple II core for Mister if you want to recreate the experience. I've never used Mister before, but setting it up could be fun, too, or it might be over most people's heads. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Apple-II_MiSTer

I also think a slightly different way to go here is an arduino kit. Even as an adult, I got some kind of ardunio kit with a bunch of parts that got me more interested in wiring & coding. I like it because it gives you the code and parts to get things working, but then, you have a bunch of stuff left over to expand on it. If you don't like coding, you can reuse the same code and build out the hardware, and vice versa. That is definitely more work and less play than Number Munchers though. You'll probably have to do some of the stuff with your kids, depending on how curious they are about this stuff. I've seen things that look like simpler arduino kits meant for teaching younger kids similar concepts, but I don't know how good they are.

I think a synthesizer is good, too. A cheap FM synth with a bunch of dials lets you play real songs, exercise your creativity and maybe learn some science skills by mistake like an old computer with a BASIC interpreter. There's probably software solutions geared towards infotainment as well.

i have 3 kids, an Apple IIe, a MAME arcade box, and a MiSTER as well. I would have died and gone to heaven as a kid with all that stuff.

They just want to watch youtube videos, ipad games and minecraft. every now and then my oldest wants to play ms pacman or puzzle bobble (she just turned 8). i think there's just stuff that is specifically designed now-a-days to instantly reward the kids its hard to compete with.

even my friend who is also into computers asked i boot up an apple 2 game. he was slamming enter after 10 seconds asking if it was stuck. people want some instant gratification now-a-days!

mister is great btw, i got in before they raised the price a few times and the stock depleted. if anyone can get a hand on one i highly recommend it

The Apple ][ wasn't a kid's computer, it was a computer that kids could understand because the technology was relatively primitive.

Same with the C-64. I had a C-64 (one of my stepdads had a ][ but it wasn't "mine") and I had a book that told me what every memory location was used for in a C-64. It wasn't a kid's computer, it was a computer that a kid could still comprehend fully.

I don't know what to tell you. That world is gone. You can give your kids toys but that's not what that was.

Would also add, that the point, when even well educated adult can comprehend in toto, how computer "works" now, is long passed by. It's way too complicated software, hardware and distributed networks wise.

what about Processing?

It runs on a lot of computers, its fun to make graphics and games. The online version is "javascript" and lets you code online and share off. And if you have a machine with a browser you can run it.

https://p5js.org

"The coding train" series has some tutorials, from very basic to pretty complex.

https://thecodingtrain.com/beginners/p5js/

I love all these "back in my day.." and "how do I replicate my [very limited, and - no doubt - wildly incorrect memory of] childhood for my kids" type posts

Because they all-too-often display a vicarious hubris that some how some way my [limited] memory of childhood is the Only True Way™ to experience childhood, and must be replicated for every successive generation

Nostalgia is great - but I do not want to force my kids to go through the stages I had to to get to where I am now

I want them "standing on the shoulders of giants" to be able to do the next Great Thing™

Or for them to decide to do something totally different - because I don't want them following in my career and hobby footsteps because I do it, but because they actually want to do it

Socrates bemoaned this self-same behavior in children ~2400 years ago: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Don't mistake your biased nostalgia as some kind of Thou Shalt Do Thus™ for the next generation

Surely there are positives of how you learned something, but that doesn't mean it is the One True Way™ to learn

Love the Socrates quote.

I would take the opposite approach if I had kids. Build a really baddass PC with KDE Plasma, great monitor, just a perfect workstation then tell the kid they can't use it. This is what grownups use to build Youtube and all the apps you love, you aren't old enough to use this.

Build the most simple youtube search app with vanilla js/html/css and then act like the code is almost pornographic and they can't even look at it. Finally at some point give in to them begging to see what is going on.

Emulating basic on an Apple IIe is like forcing the kid to learn trombone and play Count Basie tunes because that was what was cool back in the day. They will despise trombone by the time they are teenagers.

>Emulating basic on an Apple IIe is like forcing the kid to learn trombone and play Count Basie tunes because that was what was cool back in the day. They will despise trombone by the time they are teenagers.

Exactly!

Forcing kids to learn what you did the way you did is not smart - unless they actually want to learn what you did (the way you did)

I worked at a non-profit in my early 20s, and had the chance to teach kids from middle school to early college how to build web pages (among many other things). When I would teach the workshop, they were building actual, live XHTML 1.0, CSS3 (I think it was 3?) compliant pages and sites in about an hour or so

When others would teach the workshop, they'd be in there for two hours just seeing all the ways we used to do it that we don't anymore (except, you know, when you really need to (using tables to format, etc (all those 'fun' geocities hacks folks making "complex" sites in the 90s had to do before CSS was a thing and widely supported))), and only then get to the 45-60 minutes of how to do it now.

There are some things that can more-or-less "only" be taught one way (like, say, using a table saw). But everything else? Teach it in a way that engages your student(s).

Want to write games? Get some books on the topic, and write games. A handful of fundamentals need to be known first, but without goals that connect with the learners, they'll never really learn it.

And if it turns out they hate programming? That's OK, too - there's a whole world of alternatives, an being so myopic as to think the only way to "have fun" or "learn" is the way you did it as a kid is kinda dumb :)

Do you have children??

I have several

Thanks for asking

Wicked! What’s your goto when things are ambiguous? I find myself defaulting to stuff I learned from my parents when I was young. Not because I believe I was raised perfectly or in the One True Way, but because I don’t know what to do and that’s the pattern I default to. Any ideas??

I’d dig getting get of patterns and parenting in the moment, but it’s very hard (for me).

When things get ambiguous (which I'll take to mean, "they don't get it the way you're explaining it" - please correct/direct my understanding if you meant something different), I look for how others have explained something - or I'll take my kids to someone else and ask in front of them how they'd explain it: it's as important to me that my kids know I don't know everything and am willing and want to learn as it is to be able to answer/explain things to them in the way I learned/understood it :)

Sometimes, intentionally or not, we all, of course, revert to "how we learned it" - and sometimes it's because you can't find someone else to explain it, or some other way to accomplish something, or of all the ways you've seen it learned/explained, you really are using the "best" :)

The Apple II was not what I got at the time, and its graphics and sound were really sub-par compared to cheaper competition, but it was a really nice combination of things that are hard to match:

1) It had very fast storage for the time

2) It had excellent documentation in the box

3) The BASIC interpreters were better than what shipped with the Atari and Commodore machines

4) Apple LOGO was particularly well executed for something on an 8-bit machine

5) I had the impression it was easier at the time to get pirated copies of more sophisticated software like macro assemblers, Apple Pascal, etc for the Apple; Commodore and Atari circles were about the games

6) It had a built-in debugger ("monitor") with mini assembler

7) It had card slots that were straightforward to interface to - building real hardware for it was possible for a hobbyist. Also, it was affordable and practical to have an 80-column display

8) As you've noted the educational software for younger kids was exceptional

I just don't see anything remotely like that today but a used Apple II, and even then you're not going to have the ferment of early-mid-eighties home computer culture.

The counterargument is that today we have an embarassment of riches - the paradox of choice - and if you carefully select hardware and software and books for your kids (Scratch or Snap, paint programs, robotics kits, whatever takes with their interests) there's a much bigger world for them to explore.

For modern stuff, others have suggested the Raspberry Pi 400. Which is just... talk about the modern implementation of the "keyboard thing you plug into a TV" home computer! It runs Linux and other modern stuff -- can't be beat if your kid wants to do Scratch or Python.

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!

What about having the kids learn to assemble their own game console, then how to run Linux on it and use the expansion (gpio, i2c, USB ports) while they have fun?

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go-advance-black-edit...

I purchased the older ESP32 based model years ago and it was really a good product.

Try out Circuits in Rec Room: https://blog.recroom.com/posts/2021/5/03/the-circuits-handbo...

It appeals to the age group and general audience currently playing Roblox. Full functionality can be used for free. Rec Room is essentially a game for building games.

Disclaimer: I’m the lead Circuits dev

It's not a computer (although there's a computer in it) but I thought I'd mention "Robot in a Can" ( https://robotinacan.com/ ). They have a kit and online classes, and partner with some educational orgs like Centre d’art de Préville in Montréal. The kit is Open Source ( https://github.com/Robot-In-A-Can ) and the robot can be programmed via wifi using a Scratch-based UI.

> Turn the kit on and you can start programming in less than a minute without any difficult driver installation or software setup. The main component of the kit is our custom WiFi microcontroller board. It can be programmed and controlled by a phone, tablet or laptop. Using our easy-to-use, open-source, browser-based, drag-and-drop coding system.

https://robotinacan.com/products/robot-in-a-can

Color Maximite II boots into BASIC, good graphics library, fast interpreter.

https://geoffg.net/maximite.html

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

I go back and forth trying to decide whether to try and introduce my 5 year old to programming. To him, every screen is a little entertainment portal of some kind. I recently got him an Odroid Go Advance kit - a Linux-based handheld gaming device that you can put together in an hour. Putting the thing together with him felt constructive - but then it was quickly off to running old video games under emulation. He loves it, and I curate the games he can play on it, but he's not making anything with it.

Here we go with the "when I was a kid" bit... but I felt that computers were something that were just barely within reach when I was in grade school. I really wanted to learn how programs worked. I checked out every book on programming I could find at my elementary school's library. I had my dad take me to the university library where I had a proverbial field day. But neither he nor any other adult was trying - at all - to expose me to programming. It just happened.

I sometimes wonder if this new norm of actively encouraging and exposing kids to every possible creative outlet in life is really just stifling their progress. When everything is presented to you as a buffet of choices, with hopeful parents anxiously awaiting some kind of interest or progress, how does it not all become kind of ... boring? Where is the space to develop longing and desire?

I remember being a kid and longing for access to the university's Ultrix machines. They seemed to be just for adults - and difficult to access - and all of that just made me want it more. I became obsessed about the concept of multitasking and machines serving multiple users at once. I really had no encouragement, and was even reprimanded for gaining unauthorized access to some university machines. This, along with the tied up phone lines, annoyed my parents to no end. They were patient and understanding, but not actively encouraging.

I hope my kids can some day feel a similar passion and longing to learn something. If they can have that, they won't need it to be spoon-fed to them. They'll break down doors to get at it.

We're working on a modernized version of Apple Logo II that does 3D and is more engaging for modern children https://turtlespaces.org -- there's no Raspberry Pi build yet but it's in the pipeline!

There are some web implementations of Logo, e.g.

* jslogo - https://calormen.com/jslogo/

* Turtle Academy - https://turtleacademy.com/

Definitely get a few generations old machine. Something that runs modern software but is noticeably slow, your kids will want to google tips and tricks on optimizing it. Like a westmere optiplex, older think stations/thinkpads etc.

That's how a lot of us got into computers, I think.

I was just thinking about how to give my 4 year Old my experience growing up. I had a Mac, and I remember with great joy wandering around “Cosmic Osmo”, and drawing my own imaginations in MacPaint.

There are games, and paint programs, but many of them seem too directed. Too much intention.

Raspberry Pi with a free Mathematica license. You can do a lot with a little code. Geography, graphics, natural language parsing, everything is built in w/o having to learn about package management etc. I mostly enjoy generating crystal lattices and searching for convex polyhedra, casting shadows of 4D objects... its great for making art out of math equations. Docs are second to none and the online getting started book is a great intro to programming IMO.

Edit: +1 for LEGO mindstorms, thats how I learned code as a 10 year old. If you haven't read Seymour Papert's book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas", check it out. You can put a marker on a LEGO bot and have your LOGO turtle in real life.

I don't think kids today would be as interested in an Apple II today as we were as kids. The games and things they can do on a computer now are far beyond that and it just doesn't hold their interest.

My kids have done some basic programming in scratch, which I think is a good place to start. I also once set up godot with a simple open source game that they could edit (change sprites and adjust parameters like speed/size etc). They enjoyed that. I think once they want to start doing something more advanced, something like roblox or minecraft modding might be a good place to get their interest. Shadertoy/GLSL might be another fun thing to start with at more a high school level.

TI-89 Graphing Calculator. This is the perfect answer for you. It's portable. It's kid-sized. It's useful. It's what I learned to program on 20 years ago. The hardware and software architecture are positively ancient, in a good way, yet it's still sold and used today. Has its own BASIC. Can be programmed in C to the bare metal. There's an active hacking community and a good library of software and tools, but no commercial app store so all it's all hobbyist quality and it's feasible for your kid to contribute something meaningful that will actually get users, like a version of their favorite board game or something.

Or the TI-92 / Voyage-200. Same OS, same hardware platform, but with a bigger screen and a proper keyboard.

There's lots of great stuff out there if you know where to look and that's cross-platform to boot. As other posters had said, don't focus on looking for hardware as any Windows/Mac/Linux machine will work fine. Also, my unpopular opinion is it doesn't really matter if kids are on a locked-down machine like ChromeOS when it's now easy to start up a Linux container, either locally or via one of the web-based IDEs. replit.com now has pygame which is pretty nice. The coding train channel on YouTube has a lot of nice videos on P5.js, physics simulation and generative art. Xojo (paid) is an easy way to make desktop apps.

This is a good question and something I've been thinking about lately. I can't see my kid getting anywhere near of an explorative and self-learning experience that I had in the 80s with the tech available today.

It's so sad if this is the case. It shouldn't be, but it's kind of the way the world is going. Exploration is so discouraged now, and our computer environment makes it really hard even for adults to not get sucked into some corporate hole.

I've begun to think that learning what's hard and important about computers, and experimenting, doesn't require a computer. A computer is just one kind of sandbox. Building a structure, fixing part of a car, these have more in common with our experience of tinkering with computers than anything offered now by the social media world. Really, computers should be just another kind of mechanical thing you know how to work on, build, take apart, etc. It's what's being delivered over them these days that's poison.

I don't have kids but I don't see any difference in how you can teach yourself now from in previous years.

I was just given a BASIC manual around 1977 and started writing software, been doing it ever since.

I would have loved an FPGA dev board as a child, plugging TTL chips into a solderless breadboard was fun but there is a limit to the size of circuit that you can build.

I've setup a misterfpga with the atari ST core and put it in a keyboard case. I think that a lot of the old software from back then are perfect for a 3-6 years old and my hope is that he'll be used to it by the time he's 6 and will be more likely to be open to retro games/environment.

Of course, this is all speculation, my son is only 2 years old so let's see how it turns out, but I did start using such a computer at 3 and it was great for me so I'm highly hopeful :)

I will also not allow any mobile gaming, mobile gaming is a wasteland of predatory practices.

I earned my stripes continuously installing various Linux distributions and breaking MBR on the shared family computer. There is an infinite amount of things to explore, from the different distro’s and window managers, to all the various open source apps. Lots of open source graphics tools and games.

Old hardware is fun too. You can build a “top of the line” rig from hardware that’s a few years old and continue to iterate and play with it. Then again, I find things like setting up a ZFS pool to be fun and therapeutic, most kids might not share this sentiment :)

I'm not sure about finding a computer that would both meet your idea of a fun machine and meet the aesthetics that they might be used to of modern computer systems.

Have you thought about introducing them to something where they could code/create online and could share their work? You might want to take a look at the online free Logo system at:

http://www.logointerpreter.com/

They would be able to click on the works others have published there and they could tweak the code to do other things.

It's too bad there's no open source version of something like Print Shop Pro.

I find LibreOffice to be very buggy when trying to design signs and banners (at least on the Raspberry Pi, some features don't work properly with huge fonts, and the option to print a large banner spread across multiple pages doesn't seem to work properly). Inkscape is okay but is a little too advanced for kids and doesn't come with clip art. There's currently no build of Krita for the Raspberry Pi so I haven't been able to try that.

Don't think it is open source but I thought this was pretty neat. https://theprintshop.club/

The DOS correspondent in those times was banner-mania AFAICR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_Mania

Maybe think of building an RC2014 with CP/M. If it's completely self built there is another sense of specialty no prebuilt system can reach. And it's a good project to do together, too. There is also a variant with an 6502 instead of Z80 (RC6502), which can be built Apple I compatible.

https://rc2014.co.uk

https://github.com/tebl/RC6502-Apple-1-Replica

Multiple things are making things seem this way, one is that the income model has significantly changed, from "we make good software, people pay us for it" to.. whatever sentence sums up the current state of exploitation.

Another reason are the proverbial rose-colored glasses.

Yet another reason is just curation and sampling issues, since we now have a whole category of shovelware and shovelware-hybrids, the chance you'll actually stumble upon the really good stuff, is just way lower..

Are we ready to pay for curation yet?

Why not emulator of Apple II? Bonus: all the software is "acquireable".

I've been mulling how I get my kiddo acclimated to modern computers. I think I will sort of "roll back time" and give him access to old, simple machines and software via emulation, and then roll him forward as he gets older.

The bonus is that he can wreck the software/emulated machine as much as he wants with bad commands. I can rebuild it easily.

Modern kids games on tablets are horrible with the ads. This needs regulation so badly.

Love this prompt!

In theory Raspberry Pi could be a perfect kid's computer, but the software side still needs help to make it a useable experience for younger ones.

Here's an example of a super simple app that I made trying to solve that problem for a very tiny use case: https://medium.com/@kfarr/part-1-babypi-a-simple-raspberry-p...

I have an idea. You could give them a reason to slave away at programming when there are 10000 other things that are easier and more entertaining: pay them.

Make their allowance have a bonus based on some objective function of their work product or effort in programming or whatever field. At the same time, try to encourage them to use it to explore things that interest them. Such as, creating and releasing games or programs for their friends.

I grew up the same - just replace the AppleII with a C64. A box just just switch on and another world is instantly waiting for your your input. Tried to figure out something similar in our days, using it to teach our kids. The closest I could find - and I am perfectly happy with it - is a Rasperry Pi with Pythons Idle programming environment. Just start it up, type anything and get instant gratification. Cheers from Germany

The Raspberry Pi 400 would be a modern day equivalent. It can run PICO-8, which is a fictional emulator that can make very constrained games, Sonic PI which is a live coding musical environment, and I think the Arduino building block software. Plus it can run Node and Python if they get deeper into programming. The computer is built into the keyboard, Commodore style!

Kids, we're gonna build a MAME machine. I'll build the cab, you figure out how to install RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi.

I built AnimationCPU for kids. See https://add1hp.herokuapp.com/ join to https://old.reddit.com/r/acpu for updates

Ask me anything

Grab one of these: The C64 https://www.amazon.com/C64-not-machine-specific/dp/B08GMTJYX...

Games pre-installed (and you can add your own) plus you can boot into BASIC.

When I was younger I loved making batch file scripts and would look up how to do things like this. It seems to me that something like this would require its own private "internet" that allowed the user to make searches that the search engine would funnel into a desired result.

I was thinking of making my kid's login auto-run a fullscreen VICE C=64

Here's another approach https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids

Part of what made the Apple II great was the Apple II Reference Manual, which started out gently with an introduction to the hardware, how to turn it on, how to type on the keyboard, and ends with an assembly listing of the autostart and monitor ROM.

Apple 2 was more like a prototype for the C64 that has graphics and sound unmatched without cheating on 8-bit with 16-bit memory.

But honestly today I would give a Raspberry Pico instead, it uses less energy and has more performance but it's still low level!

And on the Apple IIGS, and other platforms, Electronic Arts had a program called Cartooners that let you create animated cartoons with pre-defined characters, animations, scenes, and music. What are some modern counterparts to that?

I've using Raspberry Pi 400 + PyGameZero + emacs for a 8yo. I miss a good book that keeps complexity very low to give him some independence (I need to constantly supervise his steps and what he is understanding at each point).

Have you seen the Raspberry Pi Foundation's book "Code the Classics"? It's a pretty gentle introduction to game programming using PyGame Zero, building old-style games like Frogger. It's quite colorful and meant to appeal to kids, a lot like the old Usborne books.

The 8-bit guy is building this:

https://www.commanderx16.com/forum/index.php?/home/

Which might fit what you are looking for.

Most any Craptop will do, but one with a styless is better for drawing.

Install

1. GCompris

2. Gimp, Inkscape

3. Rosegarden

4. https://github.com/commanderx16/x16-emulator/

Don't install a bunch of games.

Dreams on Playstation is an amazing creation studio

https://www.playstation.com/en-in/games/dreams/

Maybe try the Maximite

https://geoffg.net/maximite.html

Which boots into a fast Basic interpreter and has plenty of programmable graphics and sound capabilities.

Don't rule out a normal laptop loaded with whatever software you want

Sure, but what is that software?

LOAD81:

http://github.com/antirez/load81

Pretty much the bees knees to run on older laptops ..

P5.js is nice for physics/generative art. See the Coding Train videos on YouTube.

Scratch?

There is a debian/raspbian based image called Kano OS

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.

I recently received the Raspberry Pi 400 as a gift. That machine and the book it comes with is as close a thing as I’ve seen to my original Tandy CoCo 1 from the 80’s. It felt nostalgic.

Yeah, just cause you had wonderment and curiosity about stuff doesn't mean it can be grafted onto kids. Believe me.

Especially when they've been exposed to iPads and Nintendo Switches.

The reason why many of us Boomers, Gen-xers and old Millennials were fascinated with this stuff is simply cause we didn't have much of anything else. And limitations foster creativity.

Kids today (and I know I sound old as fuck) but they grow up with so many cool toys and so many choices.

It will be hard to foster the creativity in them when there are so many things competing for their attention. Sometimes they find it and sometimes they don't and something else calls for their attention (wanderlust, sports, etc.)

And also, not all kids want to program the games or see how they work underneath the hood, some just want to play the games and that's never changed even back then.

You just gotta pay attention to them and help them foster their talents in whatever direction they choose.

You had to create, because there was just so little to consume.

This is a deep problem. The Internet isn't just the biggest thing since fire, it's bigger even than fire. It's the most world changing thing the human race has ever been exposed to. Yeah, fire was big. Kept predators at bay, killed parasites, tamed seasons, let you melt shiny stuff out of the oddly colored rocks. But it didn't obviate the need to think entirely. For kids in their very formative years, the internet does exactly that.

> I will be happy to pay $.

Buy rpi400 (or a similar device with dominantly non-consumptive ecosystem around it) to your kid... and all his friends or a class.

There are plenty of open-ended games or programs for iPads or Android tablets.

For example, try searching for BASIC, or LOGO. You obviously did not try.

I searched quite a bit. None of the LOGOs available today are as easy to use for a 5 year old as the Apple II version was for me. #1 reason is that 5 is still young to use a mouse effectively, so a keyboard UI is much more functional.

Just buy them a couple of Raspberries and maybe a few accessories. I don't have kids, but sure I would have loved them as a kid :)

Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it, how many kids were given horses back in the 1910s 1920s, that they just ignored?

pi or arduino with a bunch of extra parts to make things and see action. They can learn simple code basics without layers of bullshit from modern dev.

but wait... do you want them to go from that to today's dev environments? ;)

Add a real language / console for it, instead of bash and terminal.

FWIW, every one of my kids that I have shown UCB logo to have loved it.

Yea, I'm surprised no one has packaged up something like this.

Not for a kid in elementary school but I think a machine running a BSD variant would be a better learning environment than one running Linux.

It is a lot easier to make a source code change, rebuild and update.

Make them program stuff in Scratch and Roblox?

I literally gave my son an Apple ][e lol

For gaming (and how to identify dark patterns) take a look at https://www.darkpattern.games/

Discussed yesterday:

DarkPattern.games: Find Healthy Mobile Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184457 - Feb 2022 (199 comments)

Colour Maximite 2

buy a raspberry pi 400 and see where it goes.

Raspberry Pi

OK. My best friend had the same Apple II. We used to play Carmen Sandiego, and California Games, Oregon Trail; I had a TRS-80 Model 100 laptop that I learned BASIC on, but my first programming language was LOGO. Then Hypercard.

So I figured I'd address this question if or when I had a kid. I don't have kids. But I'm glad someone asked it the way you asked it; it's very important to me that kids should learn this way, by building things rather than having structures shoveled at them.

Quick side note. My dad banned RPGs in the house. My brother was a huge D&D fan but my dad said it encouraged "follower" mentality to follow a dungeon master's idea of the storyline; and he viewed all videogames with plot elements basically the same way.

OK. So how would I approach it? I'd make a language that took all the basic elements of code (vars, control structures, etc) and made them come to life the way LOGO did. The rewards of doing something cool have to be tangible. When I was 10 or 11, my friends and I had our own code competitions in Hypercard to try to make cool screen savers or little games. We judged each other and ourselves; we'd spend 72 hours and see who made the coolest thing and we'd be honest with each other if someone else's thing was cooler. None of this was "cool" at the time but it was like we had magically tapped into some power that other kids didn't have, and that was what kept us addicted to learning. We learned from each other and from our own mistakes. The two friends I'm thinking of from elementary school are both incredible developers and business owners now; one runs a very bizarre entertainment venue, and the other is a great writer who put out a bunch of games after working at Microsoft and Bungie.

So I believe they'd have the same view on it. Here it is:

1. Concrete results need to happen quickly 2. Introducing abstract concepts (arrays, complex data structures) should be challenging but lead to far greater results 3. Results need to be "pretty". But only in the way that encourages stretching your skills further. For example, if you start a kid in a programming environment where everything is a pristine 3D world, and their job is to program the behavior of an animal, then you've done most of the work for them; their work has to actually stand out and shine. The problem with too many platforms is that they reward the kid too soon. So you made an animal but it isn't really that different from every other kid's animal. The competition between kids is critical... and so is the ability to make something unexpected. LOGO could make unexpected artifacts. Hypercard was wide open, it was just a blank page. Kids' imaginations filled the gaps, and we all wanted to make Spaceship Warlock or Myst or the Journeyman Project from that page.

What I would do? I'd probably be a terrible parent. But my advice would be to get your kid a Commodore 64 or a TRS-80 and show them the manual for BASIC. And tell the kid if you want to play a game, make a game. Then get other kids to compete on it. The sense that you can create something from nothing using these tools is a powerful motivator. Then later they can see the world where it's all "been done" and they'll probably think of something like Wordle which wasn't quite done, because they've learned how to think that way.

Just my 2¢.

templeos could be interesting if you make it kid friendly

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