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$100 isn't cheap for a curious kid with no income, especially if they're not already sold on it as an interest. There's a big difference between buying a compu

$100 isn't cheap for a curious kid with no income, especially if they're not already sold on it as an interest. There's a big difference between buying a computer explicitly for the purpose (even if it's cheaper), vs being able to play around with the hardware that you already have, for no new monetary investment at all.

ben_w 6y ago
If a kid with a phone but no money wants to know if programming is something they might like to study, and somehow the school also can’t afford a Pi, I’d point the kid at something like https://js.do/ https://js.do/
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The problem is that's not really how people get started. Hello world is how you get started in a university intro course, not in your parents' basement. What happens there is that you have a pile of photos that are all in one folder and you want to organize them into separate folders by date. A problem you're actually having, not a homework assignment. Which is possible to do automatically, because they all have metadata with that information in it. So you find a python script somebody wrote to do that, and it works! Then you realize the script is just a text file and you can modify it to sort using geotags or something else instead, and now you're down the rabbit hole. But only if it's easy to see and modify the code that runs on the device you actually use.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Not everyone learns the same way or for the same reasons. For example, I learned to read at the same time I learn to code, and from the same source — I had the unusual combination of not just the right birth year, but well-off parents and two elder siblings that had gotten bored of their Commodore 64 just as I was reaching reading age. Back then my coding was, naturally, 95% transcribing from the manual, but it was fun. One of the few ones I can remember reasonably well this far removed from the experience was a sentence generator that had a list of nouns, verbs, etc and picked from them to build grammatically correct gibberish.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Hello world is how a lot of us started in C with the K&R book, wherever we were. Most of us didn't want to organize photo folders, we wanted to make the computer display something cool or play a song or something, and usually we had to start with something elementary when tackling a new language, especially a complicated one like C. I can still remember being 11 years old and meticulously keying in the hello world program on my dad's aging Tandy Model 16, then saying 'cc hello.c' and watching as the compiler chugged through the tiny program for a minute or two. (It #includes stdio.h, so there was more code to go through than it seemed, plus there was a linking step. And not much actually happened, because Unix C compilers are silent if there are no errors.) When I ran a.out and saw "hello world" appear, I was over the moon. It was like clearing 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Like I had surmounted the first obstacle and was thus ready for all the challenges that lay ahead.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I don't know why a raspberry pi is supposed to be a good device to learn programming other than the fact that it forces you to use Linux. Do kids really ssh into their raspberry pi from their phones? Or do they really buy an expensive screen, expensive cases and expensive peripherals adding up to $200? I also doubt that raspberry pis are actually the type of device that schools are interested in. What they'd want is the TI-84 equivalent of a laptop. It should be easy to reset the laptop to factory conditions and it would only run a few specific preinstalled programs (one of which would be a barebones IDE, probably for Java). To me it feels like the raspberry pi fails at all of these. You have to mess with hardware and then mess with the software. A school provided Chromebook with student accounts managed by the school would be way more practical. However, if you actually want people to learn programming organically, it's much simpler to just get a Windows laptop and use that as the main device.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I too have doubts about the real-world suitability of the Raspberry Pi in formal education environments, but certainly the business of resetting it _is_ a solved problem; every kid is issued their own SD card, and can flash it back to the starting image whenever they want.
    - greyhair 6y ago
      It all depends on what you want to learn. On a RPi, with a standard laptop on the side (Windows/Mac/Linux, doesn't matter), and some basic installed tools, you can pull down and configure Alpine Linux and run a bare bones IoT Linux platform. If you want to get really gritty, you also configure and build U-Boot as a primary loader. Once you get passed that point, you pull docker into your Alpine build and start running containers. Stepping through that full process will teach you research (because you are going to be reading a lot about how to pull that off), it will teach you about Linux kernel configuration. It will teach you to be at least comfortable with git. There is a lot you can learn on a Raspberry Pi, cheaply, that only involves plugging in an ethernet port and power supply, and never seeing anything on a terminal.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Get involved in the local community board. Present to the library council that this is a good investment for education. Purchase 20, lead a community class to teach the next generation of students.
greyhair 6y ago
But computing tools are cheaper now than they have been in ages. You can buy an Atmel dip version of the chip in an arduino really cheap, and build basically what is an arduino on a breadboard. Then get a USB programming adapter (again, cheap) to get it running. Then you can get in expensive USB logic analyzers that are plenty capable of monitoring I2C and SPI buses and learn how all that works. None of that existed in the 1990s. It simply wasn't there. The the price and the availability of tools is so much better today. You don't even need to buy any books, it is all online, with community members jumping in all the time to help.

ben_w 6y ago

If a kid with a phone but no money wants to know if programming is something they might like to study, and somehow the school also can’t afford a Pi, I’d point the kid at something like https://js.do/ https://js.do/

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
The problem is that's not really how people get started. Hello world is how you get started in a university intro course, not in your parents' basement. What happens there is that you have a pile of photos that are all in one folder and you want to organize them into separate folders by date. A problem you're actually having, not a homework assignment. Which is possible to do automatically, because they all have metadata with that information in it. So you find a python script somebody wrote to do that, and it works! Then you realize the script is just a text file and you can modify it to sort using geotags or something else instead, and now you're down the rabbit hole. But only if it's easy to see and modify the code that runs on the device you actually use.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Not everyone learns the same way or for the same reasons. For example, I learned to read at the same time I learn to code, and from the same source — I had the unusual combination of not just the right birth year, but well-off parents and two elder siblings that had gotten bored of their Commodore 64 just as I was reaching reading age. Back then my coding was, naturally, 95% transcribing from the manual, but it was fun. One of the few ones I can remember reasonably well this far removed from the experience was a sentence generator that had a list of nouns, verbs, etc and picked from them to build grammatically correct gibberish.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Hello world is how a lot of us started in C with the K&R book, wherever we were. Most of us didn't want to organize photo folders, we wanted to make the computer display something cool or play a song or something, and usually we had to start with something elementary when tackling a new language, especially a complicated one like C. I can still remember being 11 years old and meticulously keying in the hello world program on my dad's aging Tandy Model 16, then saying 'cc hello.c' and watching as the compiler chugged through the tiny program for a minute or two. (It #includes stdio.h, so there was more code to go through than it seemed, plus there was a linking step. And not much actually happened, because Unix C compilers are silent if there are no errors.) When I ran a.out and saw "hello world" appear, I was over the moon. It was like clearing 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Like I had surmounted the first obstacle and was thus ready for all the challenges that lay ahead.
imtringued 6y ago
I don't know why a raspberry pi is supposed to be a good device to learn programming other than the fact that it forces you to use Linux. Do kids really ssh into their raspberry pi from their phones? Or do they really buy an expensive screen, expensive cases and expensive peripherals adding up to $200? I also doubt that raspberry pis are actually the type of device that schools are interested in. What they'd want is the TI-84 equivalent of a laptop. It should be easy to reset the laptop to factory conditions and it would only run a few specific preinstalled programs (one of which would be a barebones IDE, probably for Java). To me it feels like the raspberry pi fails at all of these. You have to mess with hardware and then mess with the software. A school provided Chromebook with student accounts managed by the school would be way more practical. However, if you actually want people to learn programming organically, it's much simpler to just get a Windows laptop and use that as the main device.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I too have doubts about the real-world suitability of the Raspberry Pi in formal education environments, but certainly the business of resetting it _is_ a solved problem; every kid is issued their own SD card, and can flash it back to the starting image whenever they want.
  - greyhair 6y ago
    It all depends on what you want to learn. On a RPi, with a standard laptop on the side (Windows/Mac/Linux, doesn't matter), and some basic installed tools, you can pull down and configure Alpine Linux and run a bare bones IoT Linux platform. If you want to get really gritty, you also configure and build U-Boot as a primary loader. Once you get passed that point, you pull docker into your Alpine build and start running containers. Stepping through that full process will teach you research (because you are going to be reading a lot about how to pull that off), it will teach you about Linux kernel configuration. It will teach you to be at least comfortable with git. There is a lot you can learn on a Raspberry Pi, cheaply, that only involves plugging in an ethernet port and power supply, and never seeing anything on a terminal.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Get involved in the local community board. Present to the library council that this is a good investment for education. Purchase 20, lead a community class to teach the next generation of students.

greyhair 6y ago

But computing tools are cheaper now than they have been in ages. You can buy an Atmel dip version of the chip in an arduino really cheap, and build basically what is an arduino on a breadboard. Then get a USB programming adapter (again, cheap) to get it running. Then you can get in expensive USB logic analyzers that are plenty capable of monitoring I2C and SPI buses and learn how all that works. None of that existed in the 1990s. It simply wasn't there. The the price and the availability of tools is so much better today. You don't even need to buy any books, it is all online, with community members jumping in all the time to help.