[HN Gopher] Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game - teach kids basic ...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game - teach kids basic Unix commands
Author : throwaway47292
Score : 177 points
Date : 2022-10-16 10:57 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (punkx.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (punkx.org)
| EdSchouten wrote:
| I'm not saying that this isn't a great way for people to
| familiarize themselves with basic Unix shell commands. That said,
| why would you want to teach this to _kids_?
| [deleted]
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| Kids are people too?
|
| But yeah this type of thing was always fun for me when I was a
| little guy.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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.
| mrashes wrote:
| Oh man! Love it. Great Idea!
| nixpulvis wrote:
| This is brilliant. Every office should have this!
| CaptainRefsmat wrote:
| My first thought when I saw this was "stocking stuffer". It
| sounds a little bit pricey for DIY, though. The Python game
| sounded interesting, but my initial impression was that it would
| be way too advanced for beginners. Am I missing something?
| avsteele wrote:
| Nice. Was trying to print out the programming set for my son, but
| its too hard to read.
|
| Can anyone get these to printout larger, and where the grey
| comments are less washed out?
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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)
| dlg wrote:
| Is the creator thinking of doing another printing? If not can
| someone recommend a service that will print a high quality card
| deck given the PDF?
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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.
| OakNinja wrote:
| Maybe you could run all the decks as a kit on kickstarter?
|
| I would love to buy all of them as a set, and I believe a lot
| of others would as well.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| I am halfway done with the C deck, as we are switching to C
| soon, and I will setup a kickstarter after, should be done
| around December.
|
| I want her to know why x[3] and 3[x] are the same thing.
| int x[3]; 2[x] = 5; printf("%d %d\n",
| 2[x], x[2])
|
| A lot of people struggle with x = 5
| y = 6 y = x x = 7
| print(y)
|
| and x = [1,2] y = [3,4]
| y = x x.append(5) print(y)
|
| There is something magical in understanding how the
| computer uses its memory, its almost as if you walk out of
| a mist.
|
| I think it will be very valuable to have a set of 4 decks:
| python, machine code, unix pipes and C, so that the decks
| compliment each other. In the machine code deck there are
| few cards that have pointers (e.g.
| https://punkx.org/4917/play.html#43), and they can be used
| to help with the C deck for example.
|
| Then its LISP.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can get the 50 deck rate for even a single deck (and
| there are often coupon codes) at
| https://www.printerstudio.com/unique-ideas/blank-playing-
| car... or https://www.artscow.com/photo-gifts/playingcards
|
| Also, if you're trying to give this away, they both allow you
| to share a link to your design so other people can buy the
| cards direct.
|
| ----
|
| edit: the sites may seem cheezy, but they're probably
| responsible for 95% of prototype card decks that professional
| designers print.
|
| For other excellent non-Chinese, Buy America options, there
| are https://www.printplaygames.com/product-
| category/prototypes/c... ,
| https://www.thegamecrafter.com/make/pricing#Cards and
| https://www.drivethrucards.com/joincards.php
| rabf wrote:
| A cheap laser engraver could work well here.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Would you need 2layered paper, with a different color
| underneath? Or would engraving the words directly onto card
| stock be legible?
| patrickdavey wrote:
| I would love a Kickstarter (or something similar) with this.
| Would totally buy a nice set.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Looks nice, though my guess is it would be more appealing to kids
| if it used more color, a bigger font size and a more "fun" font
| family like Comic Sans perhaps.
|
| Nice work though, would definitely consider this for my own kids.
| ape4 wrote:
| And a mascot - Pipey
| blue1 wrote:
| 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)
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Comic sans black on white is more readable than most copy
| produced in modern web products.
|
| Designers love grey on grey. I'll take comic sans any day.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Font and font contrast are entirely orthogonal.
| flobosg wrote:
| Are they? Font contrast is a multifaceted concept that
| encompasses not only color but other properties as well.
| For instance, stroke weight and its modulation, which are
| inherent to a typeface.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Can you give a visual example where they're not? (other
| than anti-aliasing round the edges)
| flobosg wrote:
| See https://medium.com/alex-couch-s-portfolio/type-
| hierarchy-and... for some of them. The "blurry eye test"
| mentioned there is related to the typographical term of
| _color_ (see
| https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-
| holmes/2015/04/... and
| https://practicaltypography.com/color.html) which is
| affected, among other things, by the actual shape of the
| glyphs. Font contrast has little to do, if anything at
| all, with anti-aliasing.
| SamBam wrote:
| To be fair, though, the first comment that referred to
| contrast was clearly talking only about color, and had
| nothing to do with "topography contrast."
|
| The original comment was
|
| > Designers love grey on grey. I'll take comic sans any
| day.
|
| These _are_ two orthogonal features. It 's like saying
| "fashion today is really into high waists, but I'll take
| denim any day."
| flobosg wrote:
| > the first comment (...) was clearly talking only about
| color
|
| That comment explicitly mentions a typeface (Comic Sans).
| geraldwhen wrote:
| They're not. The people asking for specific font faces
| for brand or accessibility reasons are the same people
| who design apps and websites with text I can't read.
|
| In this case, click the post link. It's black text on a
| white background. Comic sans would work fine, and it
| would be better than a monospaced font added for some
| nostalgia for a time when fonts could not be kerned.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| I see. You're clearly knowledgeable in this area and my
| naively used terminology has misled you. In terms of
| contrast I'm talking about the simple stuff "Contrast is
| the difference in luminance..."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_(vision) whereas
| you're talking of something typographical I was unaware
| of. Sorry for the confusion.
| flobosg wrote:
| In the end, font contrast also involves the simple stuff,
| but the difference in perceived luminance depends on more
| than just foreground and background colors.
| lupire wrote:
| Kids don't like comics fonts?
| Shared404 wrote:
| Not when they'ee out of place.
|
| Any time I've worked with kids older than ~8, they'll
| gravitate away from comic or obviously "kid focused" fonts,
| and more towards "cool" fonts.
| layer8 wrote:
| While I wouldn't advocate for Comic Sans, monospace isn't
| exactly good typography either.
| throwamon wrote:
| > When I was a kid, ... I hated fonts "for kids"
|
| So you were a snob since you were a child. Got it.
|
| Please stop gatekeeping subjective matters.
| Zhyl wrote:
| There's a typo on the instructions page. The example has 'rises'
| but the rest of the explanation uses 'raises'
|
| I love this as a concept, though.
|
| I think if I were to expand this I'd maybe have pre-defined
| strings for the greps, cards with results on, number pre-selected
| etc. This makes it more of a 'find the card' or 'matching' game
| than a problem solving game, but it would make it more kids-card-
| gamey
| loonster wrote:
| You should add this game to boardgamegeek. They will also host
| the files for you if you want.
| pluc wrote:
| 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/...
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| I do that so there is no tracking, I want people to be able
| to download the pdfs without microsoft's knowledge :)
| ajot wrote:
| Is there any way you could/would change the license from ND to
| something else allowing derivatives? I would love to see
| translations of these!
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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)
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I love Unix pipes and I love the immense computational power you
| can achieve through streaming pipelines. You hear stories of
| people processing terabytes of data faster and cheaper than a
| distributed cloud solution, by the virtue of Unix pies[1].
|
| But I don't really see them in any other environment. I can't
| think of anything that uses something similar except for big,
| distributed data processing pipelines like Apache Beam.
|
| Where's the Python with streaming pipelines?
|
| [1] https://livefreeordichotomize.com/posts/2019-06-04-using-
| awk...
| [deleted]
| Zhyl wrote:
| 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.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| The photo at the bottom appears to be some small ergonomic
| keyboard (maybe an Atreus?) built into stained wood along with a
| screen. Perhaps it is a cyberdeck? Curious to know more.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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/...
| falcor84 wrote:
| Looks a bit simulator to the online Unix Game, which I really
| like:
|
| https://www.unixgame.io/unix50
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| This is amazing! Thanks for sharing, I will try it with my
| daughter.
| petespeed wrote:
| More from the author: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-
| kids
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-16 23:00 UTC)