Laptop advice

[isdarit]

evening guys, was wondering if any of you have any recommendations for laptop purchase for my 6 yr old grand daughter. School has now introduced them to them. It doesn’t have to be bells and whistles but I don’t want it to take a age to start up etc to the point she gets impatient and loses interest. Any advice be greatly appreciated thanks  John

[PlaneMan]

Does it need to be Windows? If not a refurbished Chromebook would be what I would look at. Even a 2 odd year old one would fly along compared with the Windows equivalent.

[Dave Rice]

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

[Richard]

I was at my granddaughter’s school a few days ago. They have a superabundance of small simple laptops there and as a just 6 year old (her birthday was the day before) she was showing great confidence using the machine she grabbed to show off. Most of the time she was doing free form exploring of its apparently limited offering.

As Dave said I wonder if getting a good understanding of what the school uses and what their plans are for the next stage would give you a better guide.

 

[isdarit]

Thanks guys you boys are the best. Will try get some more info

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

If they are not using Windows I would have to ask why not. Its all very well championing open source software in your own time but on a laptop or PC the world uses Windows.

However if they have chosen to use an alternative for some reason then you have no choice but to do the same. At that age I don’t suppose it matters too much but if they later find themselves at a secondary school that does use Windows (more than likely) and with other children that were taught Windows they would be at a massive disadvantage.

[Richard]

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.

[Ed P]

A number of schools in this area start to teach 7+ kids the principles of programming using ‘Scratch‘. However it does not really answer the question of ‘which laptop?’ as Scratch runs on everything from a Raspberry Pi to a Mac, via Chromebooks and Windows!

Unfortunately finding Primary school teachers both keen and able to teach this is very hit or miss.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

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 ?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I nearly went into a bit about the bad habits I learned with Atari Basic but I am going to put that on C++ programming in makers and builder soon.

[Richard]

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]

This is way off topic and i will expand on this later in the right place but I have just finished my first read through of a programming principles and practice book. The book uses C++ as an example language and it is written by the man who came up with C++ but it is pure good practice for anything.

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

[Ed P]

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?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Well no I can’t Ed and it would totally break good practice in the way I have been doing ?

I can’t get the link to work here but someone wrote a packman game in only 5 lines of Atari Basic !

Search Atari User packman game and you will find it on youtube.

[Dave Rice]

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.

[Ed P]

Just in case you still cannot get the link to work, here are some of the 10 line entries for 2019, I gather you can delve and find the actual 10 lines of code. Normally these are impossible to read as they use tricks such as embedded self-modifying Assembler within each line.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

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.

[Dave Rice]

Ah OK. Must have been a mis rumour at the time. The 800 was the best PC around at the time but much ignored. People totally missed the fact that a cartridge didn’t have to contain a game, it could be assembler. I still remember some of the commands.

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