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Ask HN: RaspberryPi Games/etc for kids?

7 points by xahrepap ↗ HN
My kids (between 6 and 12) started (finally!) showing interest in real computers (ie- not a smart device). My oldest even started doing Turtle-style programming in school and to my surprise really loves it.

For Christmas we decided to get them a simple computer. It's a RaspberryPi with the basics (monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers) that I want to put some simple games on, including educational games.

My question is: what is some good software for kids in that age group? Any good Turtle-style programming tools you have experience with kids that age using? Maybe something similar to what Lego does with their Mindstorms products? (drag-and-drop programming instructions). I've seen some cool Turtle implementations in Python I might try out. But I'm hoping to ease in a bit more.

I have some old favorite DOS games that I'm going to try get running. But I also want to encourage them exploring the computer like I did when I was their ages. Seems everything is just another app from an app store these days so I'm having a hard time thinking of what I should do.

7 comments

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tfolbrecht
Scratch is the closest thing that comes to mind. Minecraft used to be bundled with the raspi distro.

In my opinion, anything more hands on is a bit complex for kids. Maybe show them how to do a few silly things on the bash shell? espeak is a fun text to speech cli application it should be in your distros repo, it's sort of like the Microsoft Sam voice app that came with early Windows. Text editors, games, all fun for kids exploring.

I'd eventually show them how to add software and update it. Then they'll discover fun things naturally. Maybe not necessarily programming.

oblib
Minecraft is still included in the latest "full" version of the Raspbian OS. The version they have is really a great way to introduce kids to coding too.

Here's where you can find what you're looking for:

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/?interests[]=ga...

xahrepap
Awesome! That's great. Thanks!
zapzupnz
Just be aware it's an incredibly old, feature-reduced, and limited version of Minecraft made especially for the Pi. If your kids are into Minecraft, it won't be that with which they're already familiar.