Re: [LUG] Raspberry Pi for the boy's 8th birthday!

On 28 June 2022 17:55:52 BST, John PNZ <jh.pcgb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Roly,

Your firefox and video and iplayer and youtube and Minecraft and such
all need a monitor, keyboard and mouse. For every one of those, a six
year old cheap third hand laptop is a better option than any pi.
Especially Minecraft, the pi version of Minecraft is small small small
compared to the regular release. Your left Steam off your list of what
he’ll like to use, too – Kerbal Space Program, Universe Sandbox, Space
Engineers, No Mans Sky, Shapez, Cells to Singularity are all Steam
games that 8 year olds enjoy. Steam needs more processing power than
either the pi or the cheap third hand laptop can deliver.

There is one thing a pi does which a laptop (or desktop) doesn’t do,
and the pi does it spectacularly well. It gives access to the GPIO
ports. They let the pi sense the surroundings and change the
surroundings, you could run one of Elon Musk’s Starships in realtime
with a pi. You can detect the outside world and flip relays to
electrocute mice with it. The GPIO options are amazing.

The one other thing the pi does that nothing else will is it runs
Wolfram’s Mathematica for free, it comes pre-installed on the
Raspberry OS.

If your 8 year old yearns to read and write from IO ports or to
manipulate undergraduate math equations then a pi will keep him off
consuming the Internet for weeks at a time. That is a laudable aim but
it’s a bit ambitious.

My 11 year old at my shoulder who dictated bits of this says he had a
laptop at 8 and would not have wanted to swap it for a pi. He does
have a pi now (and a new laptop) and he did a course online to get
practice and experience with the GPIO. He’s never used the pi for
firefox and video and iplayer and youtube and Minecraft but he’s
picked up a lot of soldering skills and linux and python from running
his pi as his home webserver.

A headless pi is a good place to learn linux, an arduino or BBC
Microbit is an alternative good place to learn GPIO coding (but I’d
not take one in preference, they’re harder to work with). A laptop is
the right tool to run anything GUI+Internet whatever age you’re aiming
at.

On Tue, 28 Jun 2022 at 17:02, Roland Tarver via list <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello folks,

I hope you are all good. Rarely post here, but hopefully you would not mind pointing me in the right direction please?

It's time to get my son into computing. He is 8 years old in August. Given that he has a nerdy dad (me!); I am going to get him a pi - if I can. lol!

I've done some digging about the net and noted a huge stock shortage, which I'm guessing is no surprise to those here. However, I have had some success on ebay. There is new a Pi 4B 4GB for under £100.

I was about to pull the trigger; but before doing so I thought I would ask here for any advance surrounding any issues of which I may not be aware. Sadly, these days, I do not have time to be as nerdy as I would like - and my knowledge is pretty poor.

I do have a little experience however. I have a piNas thing which I set up a good few years ago and its still runnning headlessly in the cupboard. lol.

My son will use the pi for:-
1. His homework - largely done through various websites; all of which work fine in firefox on my MS laptop (dont hurt me! hahaha - I just have not got round to installing something sensible on it yet! lol). (He currently uses my laptop for his home work.)

2. Videos.
- bbc i-player (i have read there could some issues getting this working?)
- you tube (should "just work" in a browser?)

3. Programming
He uses that scratch thing in school; to me it looks a bit of a faff if im honest. I was just going to start off with some python - or at least a normal programming language - rather than scratch. I learnt on the bbc micro back in the day - worked for me lol. RTB - Gordon? lol

4. Games
He is dead keen for a bit of minecraft! lol (he has never played it; just seen it at his mates house). I am aware of the pi edition of minecraft.

I have no specific questions, but any general comments or advice would be gratefully recieved. Thank very much.

Cheers roly :-)

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