Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands (opens in new tab)

Is `shuf` a basic command on *BSD (or Unix)?

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing, I will try it with my daughter.

Ah! I didnt mean to show it off, just my desk is a mess..

Yea its a cyberdeck I am building with hardwired Atreus directly connected to pi zero gpios and using libuinput to make a software keyboard, which works amazing btw.

I am making it to init directly into getty without login (with busybox init), so it boots directly in usable /bin/bash in only 2-3 seconds, and all the available programs are simple python programs (ls, cp, mv, a basic line editor, touchtyping game, hangman etc) and the keyboard itself is a simple python program that basically scans the matrix and emits events to uinput. The frame is from plywood.

And I am trying to make it like a 'scavenger hunt' experience for my daughter, I will put special codes in various places in the programs or on the file system with different difficulty, and I can challenge her to find them.

The goal is to have < 50$ scavenger hunt computer kit (thats why I cant afford teensy or something)

This is just the prototype to see how it feels to write code using line editor, and also to test the effect of thinking of the keyboard as a program with a nested for loop, on her thinking about 'what happens when you press a key'

    for r in rows:
        send(r, 1)
        for c in cols:
             v = read(c)
             if v == 1:
                  # (r,c) is pressed
        send(r, 0)

I just uploaded those to show you how it looks, but again, its just to test the software and the screens size:

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/... https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

Sorry, I copied ND and NC by mistake, I just pushed https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/commit/8d14a... to move to CC-BY-4.0 (removing NC and NC)

Oh! Because of the slow and costly printing process I read it like 50 times, and yet..

Its amazing how your brain just sees what it wants to see.

You can just generate the tiffs yourself with different colors, border_color is the color of the border and the comments https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/8d14a24...

(if you are talking about the programming time game)

I print with some professional card printing companies, the pricing goes something like 10 decks, 500$, 50 decks 800$, 100 decks 1200$, and 300 decks 1500$ and then it continues to drop

Since I printed only 50, I think the price is too high, so I would rather to give them for free than to charge unreasonable price. If you are willing to pay the shipping cost send me an email to b0000@fastmail.com, I still have few left.

A cheap laser engraver could work well here.

Doesn't seem to be a problem for OP since the files are available on GitHub [1] but they choose to leave downloads up on their domain.

1: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/tree/master/...

Please no. Doh’t feed bad typography to kids.

(When I was a kid, I had access to good design examples. I hated fonts “for kids”. Also, because the essence of play is simulation, and childish fonts ruin the game)

And a mascot - Pipey

This is one of the things that I think Perl (still) does really well. It has flags to allow for command-like one liners and has built in things (like the diamond operator) that make it very quick and easy to write 'filter' scripts that read STDIN and print to STDOUT.

Python can do these things, but they aren't very pythonic and they don't feel as natural/intuitive.

Now with everything on the cloud, kids are growing more and more disconnected with their computers, instead of the kid making the computer do something, they do some magic sequence of actions and sometimes things work, sometimes they dont.

Being able to type a command, give it some input and see its output, I believe is the most fundamental way to interact with the computer.

The basic concepts of files, folders, programs and processes are getting more and more murky with every new iOS and windows release, and yet, those are still the building blocks of everything, they are just hidden by some obscure interfaces and menus or are just plain inaccessible to the user.

UNIX Pipes are the most pure and useful way I know of how the user interacts with the programs and how the programs interact with each other passing their output to the other program's input, and I think it illustrates how more complicated things can be built.

Kids are people too?

But yeah this type of thing was always fun for me when I was a little guy.