[HN Gopher] The Unix Pipe Card Game
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       The Unix Pipe Card Game
        
       Author : Shugyousha
       Score  : 92 points
       Date   : 2024-07-23 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (punkx.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (punkx.org)
        
       | Neywiny wrote:
       | inb4 uuoc award givers. Having the cat at the front simplifies
       | adding to the front of the pipeline.
        
       | throwaway71271 wrote:
       | I make those decks (https://punkx.org/) to help me teach my
       | daughter, and so far they seem very effective, especially the
       | unix pipes one and the 4917 machine code https://punkx.org/4917/
       | and the pointers deck https://punkx.org/c-pointer-game/ , from
       | the python deck I use only 10 cards or so
       | 
       | btw, you might also like https://punkx.org/overflow/ which is a
       | buffer overflow riscv assembly board game, or depending on your
       | kid's level you can also play snakes and ladders with gotos
       | https://punkx.org/overflow/build/snakes-and-ladders.pdf
       | 
       | Also if you have kids, I would recommend you print
       | https://punkx.org/panic/ which has amazing pranks that fit in one
       | poker card (e.g. randomly hitting backspace or space every 30
       | seconds, or pressing W randomly if minecraft is open)
       | 
       | I am donating a lot of the decks to teachers and schools, so if
       | you are interested send me an email.
       | 
       | PS: I am in London for 1 more week, so if you order decks now the
       | shipping will be delayed, but I will make sure I add 1-2 extra
       | decks in the package because of it.
       | 
       | PPS: the unix pipes expansion deck is all about process
       | substitution, but I don't think its useful for kids, though I
       | think it contains nice puzzles
        
         | jjice wrote:
         | So cool! I'm ordering a few of these after rework tonight.
         | 
         | Out of curiosity, how do you handle printing? DIY? POD? Order
         | in bulk and ship yourself? I'm always so interested in how
         | people handle physical product sales at a small scale.
        
           | throwaway71271 wrote:
           | I print with local print shop http://www.hrspeelkaarten.nl/
           | and https://www.printenbind.nl/ and I print a lot so the
           | price gets to 3-4$ (like 800 decks or so) and then I ship
           | myself.
           | 
           | TBH physical products are amazing, I want to make more. Its
           | such an amazing feeling once the product is "done", you can
           | just start working on the next one, in contrast with software
           | which is always in your head..
        
         | pvg wrote:
         | There was also a Show HN thread a couple of years ago, for
         | people who are into the whole reading old comments thing:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687
        
           | dang wrote:
           | Thanks! Macroexpanded:
           | 
           |  _Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game - teach kids basic Unix
           | commands_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 -
           | Oct 2022 (59 comments)
        
         | liendolucas wrote:
         | KUDOS for the creativity of coming up with something like this!
        
         | vesinisa wrote:
         | This is really cool!
         | 
         | One thing I noticed: in the game there are tasks like print the
         | second line and print the seventh line. But both of those lines
         | are empty. So technically e.g. a non-matching grep is a correct
         | solution. :)
        
       | elchief wrote:
       | $19 shipping (Canada) is a little outrageous
       | 
       | anybody in Greater Vancouver wanna do a bulk order w me?
        
         | throwaway71271 wrote:
         | Sorry :( I use PostNL, and its actually even more expensive, on
         | most non EU shipping I lose
         | 
         | but each deck has pdfs you can just print them with your local
         | printing shop, if you don't print the box it should be cheaper
         | 
         | you can also just print them on a4 paper and cut it with
         | scissors, its not the end of the world, it is even helpful to
         | explain to someone with pen and paper as well.
         | 
         | in this case: https://punkx.org/unix-pipe-game/unix-pipe-
         | box.pdf this is the box and https://punkx.org/unix-pipe-
         | game/unix-pipe-cards.pdf are the cards
        
       | g4zj wrote:
       | Are kids these days actually able to grasp things like this? I
       | don't have kids and am never around them, so please take this
       | question as genuine and in good faith.
        
         | throwaway71271 wrote:
         | I think it depends a lot on the kid and the parent, I am
         | teaching my daughter since she was 10, and I try to spend time
         | every day doing something, you can see our progress here:
         | https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...
         | 
         | It is difficult because I have to compete with snapchat and
         | google/meta for her attention, and school is quite exhausting.
         | Snapchat has this super annoying 'streaks' and the more friends
         | you have the more streaks you have to keep alive, so you have
         | to send like 400 messages per day.. its non stop. I teach her
         | that there are 100_000 developers and psychologists and product
         | owners and etc, that they go to work every single day thinking
         | how to extract the most value out of her attention, and she has
         | to constantly be aware of what is the "algorithm" making her
         | do.
         | 
         | Unix Pipes she got quite quickly, but doesn't use often, but
         | the idea of one program reading another program's output she
         | got. Also grasping the command line was not that difficult. But
         | I used quite some tricks to help. For example her windows PC I
         | change the shell from explorer to cmd.exe, so it boots in cmd,
         | so she has to navigate and also fix it. I also make scavenger
         | hunts on her filesystem so she has to look for a file using dir
         | and cd and etc, also https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ I
         | bribed her with robux for passing each level of the bandit game
         | 
         | I want to teach her how computers work and how to make them do
         | what she wants. From what is a register, to an instruction, to
         | a program to a process. Kihon no Kihon as they say. But in the
         | process I also teach her how to break things down and how to
         | think and most importantly how to learn. I teach her about the
         | heart of things, so there is no mystery between the keyboard
         | press and the letter appearing on the screen, or how chatgpt
         | predicts the next word (I am working on a RNN board game with 3
         | neurons and you have to teach it to count
         | https://punkx.org/move-37/rnn.pdf [work in progress])
         | 
         | So in the end I am not sure if it matters what you teach your
         | children :)
        
       | oliwarner wrote:
       | Great until you play a minimal game with somebody who grew up on
       | awk, perl, etc
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-23 23:02 UTC)