[Linux-aus] Programs for education

[Paul Shirren]

On 1/11/2013 6:42 am, Greg Cockburn wrote:
> My interest lies in how to get my sons interested in the *right* side of
> the computer.

If by right side you mean learning how things work, then Raspberry Pi or
hardware hacking with stuff like Arduino are the way to go. See if they
get into it or not. You can't force it, you either like tinkering with
this stuff or you don't.

I sometimes sit at the computer with my little kids and build something
in Scratch with them directing. Learning by watching is quite good and I
expect eventually they will want to grab the controls.

My first computer was a Sinclair and as a kid I was soldering ram chips
and wires on to it, writing z80 asm and translating it to op codes using
a copy of Rodnay Zaks.. You can still get a lot of that experience but
actually achieve more results with it.

For the price that useless Sinclair cost you could buy a Pi and several
Arduino so given we are one of the richest countries on earth cost isn't
an inhibitor as much as knowing this stuff exists for lots of parents.
You can get old PCs given away anywhere if you just want software and
Linux beats Windows because you get all the dev tools included including
access to practically every programming language ever.