Laptop advice

Try and find out what they’re using. At that age a tablet may be more appropriate for lots of reasons.

Graham, the kids in question are 6 years old so perhaps about 5 years off of their secondary schooling. Not only would any laptop be unlikely to last a whole lot longer than that, it would probably be overkill and confusing now, if powerful and capable enough to be intended to aim for long term secondary school  use. That is why I suggested trying to pin down what the school plan is so that people can understand both the needs now and the likely shape of the future developments plan.

And I agree with you totally Richard AND Ed.

You really must conform with whatever the school has decided upon. For better or worse you won’t change their minds.

Scratch is a very useful introduction to programming concepts while also having a bit of fun. You will have to learn it all again in a mainstream language later though ?

I have not done any programming for a long while now. The first thing I did was reprogramme an up to 32 position training simulator in assembler through a 6 byte memory window – I learned to value the save option on that one.

I inevitably did some Lotus 123 macro coding, I wrote macros to write the code I wanted in a spreadsheet. The local support outfit wondered where the result had been bought in from, I would not try that any more.

MS compiled Quick basic was useful, I did many quite large on line analysis jobs with that doing the data collection and formatting into a more standardised data system. It was then parsed and reported using Clipper.

All was self taught and no, none of it would be my recommended way to go forward. I did document everything, but I am pretty certain no one ever looked again at any of the schedules. It was all good fun and achieved the results I needed at the time.

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

…I can now even design an Atari Basic subroutine that is much like a function !

Yes but can you write an awesome game in 10 lines of Basic?

We are going off topic (as usual) but I loved Atari Basic (written by MS BTW). The things you could do with it, including adding your own commands.

“Pac Man” in 5 lines is stretching it a bit but there dots, a pac man and a ghost. I used to like changing the colour of the “paint pots” on a horizontal blank to appear to have many more colours than there where. Of course no one line could have more than the mazimum.

The vertical blank delay was enough to get tons of things done and of course Page 6 was where you put all your code. I seem to remember using strings to hold code too. It was a long time ago, I was off work for 2 years after my accident, so I had time to teach myself. That’s what lead to my later career in IT. Can’t program for toffee now.

Back to school kit, I don’t think at this age anyone need get hung up on MS. Chromebooks are massive in education globally for a good reason. Now you can run Android apps on them there is a crossover to home tablets. The office tools are more than adequate, some very large businesses depend on them now. But I agree at high school and getting ready for the outside world Microsoft skills are a must.

Atari Basic was not written by MS Dave. Atari contracted them to do it but they could not shrink it into an 8K carriage in time for launch in 1979.

They went to shepperson micro systems instead. May have spelt that wrong but they also did Atari DOS and the first Apple II disk system.