Comment by throwaway47292

3 years ago

Ah! I didnt mean to show it off, just my desk is a mess..

Yea its a cyberdeck I am building with hardwired Atreus directly connected to pi zero gpios and using libuinput to make a software keyboard, which works amazing btw.

I am making it to init directly into getty without login (with busybox init), so it boots directly in usable /bin/bash in only 2-3 seconds, and all the available programs are simple python programs (ls, cp, mv, a basic line editor, touchtyping game, hangman etc) and the keyboard itself is a simple python program that basically scans the matrix and emits events to uinput. The frame is from plywood.

And I am trying to make it like a 'scavenger hunt' experience for my daughter, I will put special codes in various places in the programs or on the file system with different difficulty, and I can challenge her to find them.

The goal is to have < 50$ scavenger hunt computer kit (thats why I cant afford teensy or something)

This is just the prototype to see how it feels to write code using line editor, and also to test the effect of thinking of the keyboard as a program with a nested for loop, on her thinking about 'what happens when you press a key'

    for r in rows:
        send(r, 1)
        for c in cols:
             v = read(c)
             if v == 1:
                  # (r,c) is pressed
        send(r, 0)

I just uploaded those to show you how it looks, but again, its just to test the software and the screens size:

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

>And I am trying to make it like a 'scavenger hunt' experience for my daughter, I will put special codes in various places in the programs or on the file system with different difficulty, and I can challenge her to find them.

This is brilliant. I really admire the lengths you go to so that your kids can be engaged. Sounds like this has the potential to be quite fun and exciting.

  • I really enjoy finding new ways to introduce her into how computers think, in the same time, I have to constantly level up my game, as I am competing with tiktok, instagram, youtube, netflix.. etc. So I have to come up with new incentives, and more and more interesting projects, e.g. I printed a tshirt with some of her code, or made a huge poster with one of the turtle images she made (https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...), or sometimes its pure bribery, like buying robux.

    When I was her age, I spent hours just reading random man pages, pretty much because cartoon network was showing the same episode of dexter's laboratory for the 25th time.

    The kids her age are growing in a strange era, programs will control their life, wether they want it or not, so it will be great if they can debug :)

    • This brings me back to when I was ~5 and my grandpa built together with me kits for a simple light bulb, an electromagnet, and a simple crystal radio. It wasn't enough to get me consistently interested, but it put "dots" into my mind that I could later "connect" when I was older. The experience was invaluable.