Need PCs to teach kids programming | Hacker News Reader

Need PCs to teach kids programming

6 pointsVonGuard7 comments

Hey folks! We're a non-profit videogame museum in downtown Oakland. We focus on playable exhibits, and educating the public as to how games are made. One of the ways we do this is by offering free kids programming classes in Scratch on the weekends, and by hosting kids camps this summer.

But we have a major problem: we have only a handful of terrible, broken PCs from people's garages and such. What we really need is someone to donate an old computer lab, or to donate a smattering of new netbooks.

We need about 10 PCs, the more similar they are to each other, the better. Newer is better, as we'd like to teach Unity and modern programming languages as well. We'll install Ubuntu ourselves, but we need Windows due to the number of game development systems that are point-and-click available in that OS.

Anyone who thinks they could help should email me at alex@themade.org and check us out at http://www.themade.org

We can offer a tax write-off for the donation, and maybe even host a party for your company.

You can look in your city for local computer salvages. Contact them and let them know what you're doing.

I scrape up awesome computers here in the sub $80 range. Recently picked up one with a nice video card. This is a good place because they get paid to come get the stuff which usually works fine. I ran the Electronic Recycle Program at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Does RaspberrryPi [1] solves your problem with cheap and usable computers? Also, why don't you set up a Kickstarter campaign? Lots of programmers would like to backup a project that teach programming to kids!

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/

I think Raspberry Pi isn't a good recommendation because he wants Windows. (The Pi uses an Arm CPU, whereas Windows requires x86.)

> game development systems that are point-and-click available in [Windows]

Can you name names?

> need Windows

Using Wine [1] [2] may save you license fees.

[1] http://www.winehq.org

[2] sudo apt-get install wine

Well, we'd rather use standard stuff without Wine. I could make Wine work, but I doubt our volunteers could...

Dev systems that only work in Windows: Fusion, Unity, Stencylworks, GameMaker, and Click N' Play.

We do use Linux and Dosbox to emulate old PC games for exhibits, however.

Update?

No luck yet, just more PC's from people's garages....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com