What makes a good educational toy computer?

[technix]

A friend of mine had a baby, and he is soliciting gifts for his son. (I am still unmarried at 25 and he is already a father... He ain’t that older than me!)

I think an educational computer might be a good idea, as it is a good toy and it can teach the kid STEM basics early on. I don’t want to give the kid something that is capable of modern Internet yet, so no Linux please. Any ideas?

Is it a good idea to give the kid a toy computer based on the WDC W65C02 CPU?

[technix]

Is it a good idea to give the kid a toy computer based on the WDC W65C02 CPU?

Ummm, that will confuse the hell of it, maybe also its father.

Maybe something like this? I started with a similar kit.

https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?id=18192621477

I started with a kit somewhat similar to that too.

The kid’s father has a degree in computer engineering so I don’t think he will be confused.

I am thinking about a slightly modernized version of VIC-20 really, with beefed up RAM, some EEPROM for permanent storage, UV EPROM for core software and some basic IO like a PS/2 keyboard and a dot matrix display.

[Doctorandus_P]

A sister in law was complaining a bit about not drinking beer while pregnant. After the the baby was born I gave her a crate of beer amended with a bunch of pots of babyfood.

New parents can also never have enough diapers. It would be funt to arrange with some friend to give them each some big boxes full of diapers. They are bulky and they'll need them for years to come and it would be fun to give them so many that they do not know where to store them, especially when they have a small house to live in. That will teach them to make another shit factory on this shitty world.

For weird computer project thingies, you can browse through the hackaday archive. Hundreds or thousands of computer gadgets have been listed there.

[Berni]

I think these days its very hard to get a kid interested in retro computing such as a Commodore.

When there perception of a computer is a modern Win 10 machine or Android tablet they would barely even think of a Commodore actually counting as being a computer. Today typical computer users don't even know what a C drive is and have no idea what a hard drive actually looks like and where it is. No longer is programming or writing scripts part of using a computer, these days using a computer is most of the time opening Facebook in a browser.

I think electronics kits are a better way to get a kid interested in technology.

[Canis Dirus Leidy]

A friend of mine had a baby, and he is soliciting gifts for his son.
I think an educational computer might be a good idea, as it is a good toy and it can teach the kid STEM basics early on. I don’t want to give the kid something that is capable of modern Internet yet, so no Linux please. Any ideas?
Is it a good idea to give the kid a toy computer based on the WDC W65C02 CPU?

The most important question: how old is the child?

[technix]

A friend of mine had a baby, and he is soliciting gifts for his son.
I think an educational computer might be a good idea, as it is a good toy and it can teach the kid STEM basics early on. I don’t want to give the kid something that is capable of modern Internet yet, so no Linux please. Any ideas?
Is it a good idea to give the kid a toy computer based on the WDC W65C02 CPU?

The most important question: how old is the child?

He is almost 2 years old now.

I think these days its very hard to get a kid interested in retro computing such as a Commodore.

When there perception of a computer is a modern Win 10 machine or Android tablet they would barely even think of a Commodore actually counting as being a computer. Today typical computer users don't even know what a C drive is and have no idea what a hard drive actually looks like and where it is. No longer is programming or writing scripts part of using a computer, these days using a computer is most of the time opening Facebook in a browser.

I think electronics kits are a better way to get a kid interested in technology.

I don't think his dad will be allowing his kid on the Internet anytime soon. This is supposed to be a restrictive machine that can be used for learning and non-addictive kid-friendly gaming, but no easy access to the Internet. I will be giving the machine some TCP/IP capability, but only for it to use TFTP to access files on the parten's computer.

A sister in law was complaining a bit about not drinking beer while pregnant. After the the baby was born I gave her a crate of beer amended with a bunch of pots of babyfood.

New parents can also never have enough diapers. It would be funt to arrange with some friend to give them each some big boxes full of diapers. They are bulky and they'll need them for years to come and it would be fun to give them so many that they do not know where to store them, especially when they have a small house to live in. That will teach them to make another shit factory on this shitty world.

For weird computer project thingies, you can browse through the hackaday archive. Hundreds or thousands of computer gadgets have been listed there.

The kid is almost two already. And as Chinese education is top priority even when the kid is young.

[Berni]

Hah TFTP. A lot of adults i know can't even insert a table of contents into a word document.

But if you are going in that direction then just use an old laptop running linux without X11.

[rstofer]

What kid doesn't like "frog green"?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3116

[technix]

Hah TFTP. A lot of adults i know can't even insert a table of contents into a word document.

But if you are going in that direction then just use an old laptop running linux without X11.

The dad doesn't want the kid to have anything that have easy access to Internet yet, and a laptop certainly can and thus unlikely to pass his scrutiny.

What kid doesn't like "frog green"?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3116

Way too expensive... Also Pi has Linux too.

[cdev]

If an adult can't figure out a way to keep a 2 year old kid from bypassing his security measures to access the net, that is not a problem, celebrate, that little kid is really smart.

[Circlotron]

I think these days its very hard to get a kid interested in retro computing such as a Commodore.

Those things were exciting back in the day because they enabled you to do stuff at home you never could before. For those who were there at the time, nowadays it reminds you somewhat of the excitement. For those that were not there, it would only appeal to a tiny percentage. If the kid isn't allowed to come in contact with any other kind of computing device it might be exciting.

[technix]

Hah TFTP. A lot of adults i know can't even insert a table of contents into a word document.

But if you are going in that direction then just use an old laptop running linux without X11.

TFTP as a replacement of the Commodore Disk Drive. “LOAD *, 8” becomes a TFTP fetch from xxx.xxx.xxx.8 (high bits comes from local IPv4 address) and “LOAD *” goes to either the address sent by the DHCP server or the default router.

[technix]

If an adult can't figure out a way to keep a 2 year old kid from bypassing his security measures to access the net, that is not a problem, celebrate, that little kid is really smart.

He want to prevent it from ever being bypassable.

[technix]

I think these days its very hard to get a kid interested in retro computing such as a Commodore.

Those things were exciting back in the day because they enabled you to do stuff at home you never could before. For those who were there at the time, nowadays it reminds you somewhat of the excitement. For those that were not there, it would only appeal to a tiny percentage. If the kid isn't allowed to come in contact with any other kind of computing device it might be exciting.

He is open to the idea of introducing the kid to computers early on, but only with age-appropriate hardware.

[Berni]

Well in that case just plug said linux machine into a isolated network.

If you have anything more than a consumer toy router doing your LAN then you can easily configure a port on it to not route traffic to the internet, but still allow routing to any IP that is in the home LAN network. So that way it can get to your TFTP server where im guessing you want to keep downloadable files, but never out to the internet.

I suppose he could get onto the internet by remotely compromising a machine on the network. But i think less than 0.1% of professional IT technicians would be able to pull something like that off out of a linux prompt and no access to the internet. You would need to create your own hacking tools from scratch using GCC or Python, reverse engineer the protocols the other machines on the network are using (Remember you have no internet to even look up how HTTP works). If all the found exploitable machines on the network are Windows hosts then you also need to remotely reverse engineer how that OS works so that you can get it to download you a file from the internet and put it in a place where you can get it. From there you can then clumsy extract info from the internet by reading raw HTML code of websites. This lets you bootstrap yourself to figure how how to get/create a Win32 TCP/IP forwarding app to let you send packets out to the internet directly from your linux machine. At this point you have functional internet on that linux machine.


If your kid can do that then the only way to keep him from getting to the internet is to lock him up in a jail cell and not allow any interaction with electronic devices. And i think we all agree that would be a 'little bit' too extreme.

[technix]

Well in that case just plug said linux machine into a isolated network.

If you have anything more than a consumer toy router doing your LAN then you can easily configure a port on it to not route traffic to the internet, but still allow routing to any IP that is in the home LAN network. So that way it can get to your TFTP server where im guessing you want to keep downloadable files, but never out to the internet.

I suppose he could get onto the internet by remotely compromising a machine on the network. But i think less than 0.1% of professional IT technicians would be able to pull something like that off out of a linux prompt and no access to the internet. You would need to create your own hacking tools from scratch using GCC or Python, reverse engineer the protocols the other machines on the network are using (Remember you have no internet to even look up how HTTP works). If all the found exploitable machines on the network are Windows hosts then you also need to remotely reverse engineer how that OS works so that you can get it to download you a file from the internet and put it in a place where you can get it. From there you can then clumsy extract info from the internet by reading raw HTML code of websites. This lets you bootstrap yourself to figure how how to get/create a Win32 TCP/IP forwarding app to let you send packets out to the internet directly from your linux machine. At this point you have functional internet on that linux machine.


If your kid can do that then the only way to keep him from getting to the internet is to lock him up in a jail cell and not allow any interaction with electronic devices. And i think we all agree that would be a 'little bit' too extreme.

I still don’t feel easy just giving the kid a Raspberry Pi and expect him not to fall into bad hands.

[Berni]

Well given enough effort you can also eventually get a Comodore 64 to display a crude web page.

Tho the monumental software effort is stacked on top of a hardware problem of how to interface a C64 into a network. Extra electronics are required to even make it talk to a simple dialup modem. Again the kid likely grows up before he can figure this out (Otherwise he is an incredible genius).

So the only sure way to make sure its impossible for the device to show a webpage is to give him a Tamagochi instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi The thing has so little computing power and memory that it can't do it in any reasonable way other than external electronics feeding it screenshots of webpages.

[technix]

Well given enough effort you can also eventually get a Comodore 64 to display a crude web page.

Tho the monumental software effort is stacked on top of a hardware problem of how to interface a C64 into a network. Extra electronics are required to even make it talk to a simple dialup modem. Again the kid likely grows up before he can figure this out (Otherwise he is an incredible genius).

So the only sure way to make sure its impossible for the device to show a webpage is to give him a Tamagochi instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi The thing has so little computing power and memory that it can't do it in any reasonable way other than external electronics feeding it screenshots of webpages.

That hardware does have proper Internet hardware in both wired Ethernet (DM9000A on system bus) and Wi-Fi (ESP8266 on one of its serial ports) connectivity, however it doesn't have a browser or enough memory to hold one (32kB SRAM, 16kB EEPROM. The 8kB UV EPROM is not programmable in system.)

[Berni]

Yeah exactly extra hardware is needed to get it to connect to a modern network. Even if they have the hardware they still need software to make it do something. on the internet. If they are not given the software on floppy or cassette then they have to write there own before they can do anything with the internet.

And yes the C64 is a very constrained system in terms of computing power. Especially since the same RAM has to also hold graphics. Of course its impossible to create a modern fully functional browser with support for HTML5 or even simple javascript, But its possible to create a browser functional enough to navigate simple pages like Wikipedia.

The limitations of the C64 just make it so that you have to be good at programing to make it work, likely working in assembler since you don't have a C compiler and BASIC is not gonna cut it. In fact given that the C64 comes with no assembler editor means you would likely have to first write your own assembler IDE in BASIC before you can even start coding the network drivers and browser.

If anything this sounds like a cool challenge for someone who is already a programmer. Can even come in nightmare difficulty mode where you are not even allowed to look up stuff on the internet with a separate PC and are only given the official C64 user manual as documentation. On nightmare difficulty you are going to have a hard time finding someone in the world who can complete the challenge in under 1 month (Without having prior C64 coding experience).

In the hands of a kid the C64 is just a glorified gaming console if they are given access to the complete list of all officially released C64 software.

[ralphrmartin]

A friend of mine gave his young daughter a kit where you solder the bits to making a flashing Xmas tree decoration, which was also somewhat programmable via switches. Nice mix of software and hardware! The girl's now doing a STEM PhD at Oxford, so something clicked, I guess. 

I suppose in China you can get equivalent things for Chinese New Year. 

But beware of getting something "too old" for the kid. My dad got me some Meccano when I was too small, and it was too difficult. I year later my grandma got me some Lego, and it was just right (much to my dad's annoyance!).

[technix]

A friend of mine gave his young daughter a kit where you solder the bits to making a flashing Xmas tree decoration, which was also somewhat programmable via switches. Nice mix of software and hardware! The girl's now doing a STEM PhD at Oxford, so something clicked, I guess. 

I suppose in China you can get equivalent things for Chinese New Year. 

But beware of getting something "too old" for the kid. My dad got me some Meccano when I was too small, and it was too difficult. I year later my grandma got me some Lego, and it was just right (much to my dad's annoyance!).

That machine isn't going to make it to this Chinese New Year. However I do want to give him this machine as a birthday gift for the baby.

Is 5C02 with some modern amenities too old?

[legacy]

Lego computers.

[Canis Dirus Leidy]

Is 5C02 with some modern amenities too old?

More precisely, the child is too young for this "grandfather's Arduino". I'm somehow not sure that a monochrome screen with incomprehensible symbols will cause great interest of a preschooler (and even more so for two-years baby).

[rsjsouza]

I know that kids are different, but Arduinos... C64s... Disassembled computers... For a two year old? At that age my girls loved gadgets from Vtech, Leapfrog...
https://www.amazon.com/LeapFrog-My-Own-Leaptop-Green/dp/B0038AJYSS
https://www.amazon.com/VTech-Tote-Go-Laptop-Orange/dp/B00K89KU4Y

Warning: they tend to be quite irritating for the parents, but help them learn a great deal of basic knowledge.

[battlecoder]

I know that kids are different, but Arduinos... C64s... Disassembled computers... For a two year old? At that age my girls loved gadgets from Vtech, Leapfrog...
https://www.amazon.com/LeapFrog-My-Own-Leaptop-Green/dp/B0038AJYSS
https://www.amazon.com/VTech-Tote-Go-Laptop-Orange/dp/B00K89KU4Y

Warning: they tend to be quite irritating for the parents, but help them learn a great deal of basic knowledge.

I have to agree with this. I've seen some very sophisticated "kids laptop" that pack a surprisingly lot of "software" for what they are.
They can include anything from guided maths and spelling lessons, games, music-oriented apps, calculator, "notepad", etc.

I once bought one for my little sister, and I'm pretty sure that for the first couple of days (weeks?) I was the one primarily playing with it. I was amazed by the amount of content packed in what seems like a very basic toy.

Some even offer two languages in one machine, making them also a language-learning tool: https://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Imports-Bilingual-Advanced-Learning/dp/B001QKQJEO