Ask HN: What to put on a donated laptop for a 12yr old | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to put on a donated laptop for a 12yr old

6 pointstonteldoos17 comments

Hi fellow HNers,

I know this question gets asked every now and again on various forums, but the answers also seem to change quite frequently, so here goes:

I'm giving a hand-me-down ex-asset (Dell D610 Latitude) laptop to a 12yr old that I don't know very well. He wants it for homework, and just as an 'own' computer. I'm assuming that his internet will be restricted by his parents (likely a good thing), so want to pack as much on there for offline use as I can, including possibly some small games and basic tools to learn programming.

What I have currently, is:

- Ubuntu 12.04 running XFCE 4 (light on resources

- LibreOffice

- Offline wikipedia dump and reader

- IntelliJ CE along with a JDK (I'm thinking this is probably one of the easier intros using a mainstream language)

What other recommendations/ideas are there? Perhaps people with kids in this age bracket could comment?

Thanks!

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I'd recommend Ubuntu Studio [1] over straight up Ubuntu. First because it contains some really cool software. Second because Unity is enough of an odd-duck that a person should make an informed choice to use it.

Language number 1 for a kid: Processing. It's simple, Has a simple IDE, and does some really interesting things.

I think IntelliJ is a bit of a loss as a way of introducing programming to a child. It's powerful, but the tools are mostly in the way of a novice.

BTW, don't bet on the whole "Internet Restriction" idea. Many twelve year olds have been online via school since first or second grade. If the parents aren't setting up a laptop, they're probably not configuring their router to block packets either.

[1] Of course, Grub should be set up to default to the normal kernel rather than low-latency.

[2] http://ubuntustudio.org/

[3] http://processing.org/

Thank you very much - I'll have a look at all the suggestions!

It's not that they're not setting up the laptop - it's just a spare that I offered to give him. However, it doesn't have a wifi card in it, and unless they specifically get him one, I doubt he'll be on the internet at home(knowing the parents, this will likely be the case). They have tablets, etc for that - my understanding is that this is meant as a learning/homework machine.

These days homework and programming tend to involve accessing online resources...and if the goal is to make using a general computing device more attractive than a media consumption device, gimping a laptop by not installing a wifi card is counter-productive.

As a disclaimer I lean toward Thomas Dewey's and Maria Montessori's ideas of child development in that my parenting style is oriented toward developing my child's habit of making good decisions independently of my presence. I prefer dialogs to prohibitions. But that's just me.

I have a 16 year old that I setup a few years ago with a laptop and I have two more approaching the pre-teen years now.

I initially set up a linux machine for him but found that in school they were forcing them into Windows and working from that, it wasn't until he got into his high school that has a technology program that he is in that the linux became valuable. Until then though, Windows was way more beneficial for him for school and solved compatibility issues we were having with Microsoft Office and the open source office products, also power point etc. Just a point, and I know you say the laptop is light on resources so Windows may not be possible.

Offline wiki was a great idea, I need to remember that one.

Why not load up some good bookmarks too for things like stackoverflow and other potentially useful resources.

Webstorm is also a great IDE for node.js, html and other projects. It is also from JetBrains and free for students. May not be necessary since you have intelliJ, but I know we use both WebStorm and PhpStorm.

Also, Adobe Reader, Chrome, FireFox, MySqlAdmin, FileZilla, Git/GitHub, Instant messenger of some sort and maybe Skype.

I know my kid uses Skype for classes and for homework projects, and just to keep in tough with his friends of course. My younger ones even use it.

Just ideas. Good luck!

http://turtleart.org/ http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://kidsruby.com/ http://www.greenfoot.org/door http://www.bluej.org/

Minecraft.

On the Java side, if that's the route you wanna go, consider getting the stuff from http://teachingkidsprogramming.org/. Llewellyn Falco took me through some of it at a conference a few years back and it looked pretty nice.

(Disclaimer: Not a Java person, no kids, but have geek-friends-with-kids ;-).

Awesome - thanks!

Yes this; Minecraft are the Legos of this generation. Heck, the even look like Legos!

Good call on Minecraft, my kids are constant playing that when they have free time.

It's nice to see TKP pop up on HN. Also met Llewellyn Falco at a conference and I've volunteered to teach their curriculum to kids. Their curriculum great way to get kids started with not only coding, but good development practices, like pair programming and TDD.

You haven't said anything about the kid being interested in programming, so I'm not sure IntelliJ is going to be of any use. It's a very heavy tool, perhaps too much for anyone just starting to learn how to program.

Yeah, good call. Some other posters mentioned it too. I'll look into something a bit easier.

Erase JDK, add vim and ruby :-)

PS. Look at elementary OS, it have nice look and feel and very lightweight.

Thanks for the elementary OS pointer - I'll check it out!

As for vim and ruby, much as I'm a fan of both, I don't want to put him off programming entirely by first having to learn the entire shell first ;)

Erase JDK, add emacs, slime and ccl (or sbcl).

Any particular reason for these? I'm a software engineer, and apart from emacs, I have no idea what the other ones are ;-)

I'd go with Emacs over IntelliJ, not that I'm recommending IntellJ [see other comments], simply because Emacs is less about pushing buttons and more about writing in general and creating tools for oneself.

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