My nephews & nieces aren’t currently allowed much computer access because their parents worry about screen time, inappropriate content and the like. But their mother was sharing concerns with me that they won’t have the basic computer skills and understanding that we learned growing up in the 80s and 90s. Having to make computers work before you got your reward of a game was such a big motivation for me as a child. We learned to program in BASIC on spectrums and Amstrads (typing code for a game out of a magazine didn’t require much knowledge but taught me a lot) and about memory management by fiddling around with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS to get DOS games running, and so on.
Are there any good educational computers / distros / OSes? Searching online mostly shows simplified GUI to access educational “games”. But I was wondering if there was a Raspberry PI or linux fork or something, that was geared to create a challenging but supportive environment for learning the fundamentals.
Any suggestions?
Setting up an old PC with linux and just not installing a GUI as already suggested might be a fun project to do together and exploring various command line programs (maybe ncurses based programs like mc, ncdu, etc.) and I just read about a cute text adventure called bashcrawl which teaches unix commands as you play (“cd” into a room, “ls” to show the items there, etc.). There are so many bash programs (and games) like gnugo and chess that are interactive but without a GUI. Here was where I read about bashcrawl (I haven’t tried this myself): https://opensource.com/article/19/10/learn-bash-command-line-games