Comment by scarmig

2 days ago

For my toddler's first desktop, I started with a simple collaborative setup project. Nothing at all fancy: had them write a scheduler, MMU, etc. Holding off on network stack and drivers until they're a late teen, though.

Well, there is nothing at all wrong with those projects, but perhaps start at the lowest level first, such as building a bootloader. Being able to boot hardware using your own code is a tremendously valuable lesson for a toddler to learn.

  • Totally agree, but if you don't teach them how to build a simple CPU, RAM and storage device first (possibly also network card), the experience is quite lacking.

    • correct! That's why I made sure my kids know how to mine rare earths and assemble a decent CPU from scratch. They loved it.