I assume RISC OS needs less memory than the default Linux distro?
My comments were mainly aimed at the default distro since I assume most schools won't have the time/knowledge to install something entirely different. Using scratch or python on the Pi is quite frustrating due to slowness and this is hardly going to encourage your average kid with 21st century short attention span.
Model As and early model Bs are, IMHO, severely hampered with only
256M of memory. (I haven't used one with 512M yet)
What's annoying for me is that is means you have to have the latest version of M$ Office at home otherwise the kids can't do their homework. I know that other products can load/save office documents but frequently they get screwed up in the conversion. Lets face it even different versions of M$ office can't read all documents produced by another.
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(\__/) M.
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around
(")_(") is he still wrong?
Y'all "living in the past". BASIC was frowned upon even back in my day! It's OOP these days; but for kids who want to, Minecraft is eminently "hackable" Sadly, mine are happy to just play and let someone else do the mods. (No rockers left!)
Installing RISC OS is simply a matter of plugging in the 2GB SD card supplied by RISC OS Open,
formatting link
whereupon the user has a very fast GUI with a number of excellent applications, including a browser. For a modest sum RISC OS Open can supply a second SD card containing a selection of fully functioning commercial applications.
The BBC Basic interpreter has been developed and refined over 20 years and has produced a great reservoir of people who are familiar with it and use it (including me at 82). It is certainly a suitable vehicle for youngsters to learn programming, as Alan Adams says.
Brian.
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Brian Carroll, Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK
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Scratch (or rather Squeak) may be a bit slow - I don't know. But other stuff is adequately speedy for the kind of stuff kids need to do to learn programming.
They are not (typically) going to need maximum performance.
What kind of programs do you think that they will be trying to write which needs a more performant machine? I learned programming (BASIC and assembler) on the micros in the early 80s, and then proper high level languages on a VAX 11/780 shared between 20 or 30 (which even if it wasn't shared it would still have been slower than a Raspberry Pi).
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Andy Leighton => andyl@azaal.plus.com
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
Don't know how much memory Linux needs these days - RISC OS will take only a fraction of 256Mb, so at least 3/4 of the memory will be left free.
RISC OS 3.1 will run happily in 4Mb (and in 1Mb at a pinch), but I think RISC OS 5 uses more memory. (I'm typing this on a 500Mb RO5 machine while running a memory-hungry browser and a newsreader - and an 8Mb backdrop - plus various other, smaller utility programs, and still have
430Mb free, so running out of memory while programming on a 256Mb machine isn't much to worry about.)
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Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==
At the cutting edge of technology, one tends to end up bleeding
Personally I think BASIC (and specifically my own version; RTB and not that 30 years old BBC variant under a 25 year old OS) is the language of (learners) choice on the RPi...
And that's the issue - ask 100 programmers, get 102 answers...
TBH I don't know what types of gates he uses it may only AND and NOT. I'm just surprised that he wants to, and sticks at, building a computer with the registers, binary adders (with carry), counters etc. Minecraft might have started as just "a game" but it's grown to be far more than that. It is a box full of tools and bits that only ones imagination limits.
Back when I was 13, if I'd wanted to do even half of what he has done in Minecraft it would have taken days with a soldering iron or wirewrap and a bucket full of 74 series chips, then it wouldn't have worked and taken even longer to debug. He can bang together say an 8 bit binary adder, with in/out latching registers etc, test it, see which lines are active/inactive, work out any problems and debug it in an evening. He'll have had the same learning experience as me(*) and can move onto another section the next evening not next week...
Although BASIC was the first language I learned to program (Sinclair ZX81) I don't believe it is a good educational language. I always preferred PASCAL for this but it has gone out of fashion nowadays.
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(\__/) M.
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around
(")_(") is he still wrong?
When I was a young Army Radio Teletype Operator in Germany I walked into the shop one day to see a bunch of guys huddled over a desk. I elbowed my way into the circle leaned over putting my hand on the desk to support support me and asked "what are you guys doing?" They said, "Nothing much, but you just put your hand down on the soldering iron." Amazing how it could be so hot it immediately destroyed the nerves and I didn't even feel it. For the next month or so I wore a sling and had to shift gears with my left hand. :-)
And yes, I learned an important lesson that day. :-)
bill
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Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
billg999@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include
My first programming language was Sinclaire ZX80 BASIC (I was a latecomer to the microprocessor part of the digital age otherwise my first language would have been assembler as was the case for all those early adopters in the mid 70s who had no other option) and I disagree with that assertion.
When I decided to ditch the ZX80 (and the 3K sram pack I'd designed and built for it) a year later before it lost all value as a saleable item in order to build a "Real Computer" using the Transam Tuscan S100 kit, I decided to forego the 8k TCL basic rom chip option (an extra 56 quid on top of the almost 300 quid price of the 150 quid computer kit after shelling out on extras such as the manuals and the video chips _and_ the vat!), my intent was to learn Z80 assembly language programming.
Despite reading the Zaks book twice over, I just couldn't quite get into the art of assembly language programming as the system stood with its 2k Monitor eprom (MITS1) notwithstanding that it was supplied with a full source listing and so I sent off a set of eproms to be programmed with TCL basic (a slightly cheaper option than have them sell me a set of pre-programmed eprom chips).
After about a year or so, programming in BASIC, I wrote a routine to display a page at a time of memory contents to the screen - emulating the "Dump" command in the 2k machine monitor. The screen update was dog slow so I looked at the code in the MITS1 listing and poked a machine code sub-routine into ram and got an instant display response version. This was the very first bit of machine code 'programming' I had successfully implemented and all thanks to BASIC and its peek and poke commands.
After that success, I swapped the 8k basic eproms out for the 2k MITS1 machine code monitor and started hand coding a disassembler program, starting with the most minimalistic functionality I could use to obtain output to the screen.
Essentially, it was based on a 'look up' table of data to translate the op codes into assembler nmenomics with a minimum of code. When it was complete enough to do its job, ISTR having half a K of code and
4K's worth of look up table. When I finished refining the program, I'd shrunk the table to half a K and grew the code to about 2K.
The thing that struck me most about this experience was the way I'd suddenly gone from writing a "One liner" machine code subroutine for a basic program to embarking on such a non-trivial project as a Z80 disassembler program. After that, there was no stopping me[1].
[1] Actually, there was. I made the mistake of buying secondhand IBM PC MoBos and other items at a radioham rally to build myself an IBM PC from a 'kit of bits' a few years later. Although the original IBM PC wasn't a patch, technologically speaking, on the S100 Bus machine, it did have the advantage of there being a considerable amount (at the time) of 'free' software that could be run on it.
It took IBM until August 1984 to finally match the S100 Bus machine with their newly introduced AT. After that the PC just got better and better, leaving the S100 Bus machines for dead.
The only thing stopping me from tinkering with that S100 Bus machine today is the need to find replacements for the butyl rubber drive belts that dissolved into a gooey mess over a decade ago on the Philips solenoid operated bi-directional data cassette deck drives that I'd pressed into service as ersatz 'floppy disk' storage devices.
I might try googling for a solution to this problem now that I'm minded to try again. It would be nice to get back into programming practice and exercise those hard won skills once more.
lots of belts and o-rings in the robot building fraternity
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Ineptocracy
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