Project Ideas to Indoctrinate the Young

[gro.utnubu]

My younger brothers, 10 and 12, are avid gamers, excited about computers, and have all the makings of future computer geeks, so I decided to indoctrinate them to the world of Nix and see what they can make of themselves. I've given them my old laptop with an Ubuntu installation. I'm soliciting this list, the community, for project ideas by which I can teach a 10 and a 12 year old about the shell, about the OS and about networking and the structure and protocalls of the Internet. By 'teach' I mean give them enough background, leads, ideas and resources that they can bootstrap themselves. Any ideas for scripts that do fun/interesting things or other projects?

I have two weeks before they are on their own. As interested as they are about it, and as much as they've demonstrated a willingness to learn, they still have the attention spans of 10 and 12 year olds. I don't want to teach these things in a vacuum, not if I can teach them in the context of a project.

The forbidden appeal of becoming hackers is the main thing that keeps their attention, but there are imposing prereqs even to being a scriptkiddie. Their introduction to coding is Scratch, which is fantastic (scratch.mit.edu), but I can probably give them some proper code too. I was thinking of writing with them a php script that can send text messages (They live in the Philippines, texting is a part of their everyday lives). I could show them how to write a webpage, but that is a little cliche. What is a project that can introduce the shell?

And for those of you that started at 4 feet, what kept you going? Were you on your own?

Thanks lots!

[Tomosaur]

My younger brothers, 10 and 12, are avid gamers, excited about computers, and have all the makings of future computer geeks, so I decided to indoctrinate them to the world of Nix and see what they can make of themselves. I've given them my old laptop with an Ubuntu installation. I'm soliciting this list, the community, for project ideas by which I can teach a 10 and a 12 year old about the shell, about the OS and about networking and the structure and protocalls of the Internet. By 'teach' I mean give them enough background, leads, ideas and resources that they can bootstrap themselves. Any ideas for scripts that do fun/interesting things or other projects?

I have two weeks before they are on their own. As interested as they are about it, and as much as they've demonstrated a willingness to learn, they still have the attention spans of 10 and 12 year olds. I don't want to teach these things in a vacuum, not if I can teach them in the context of a project.

The forbidden appeal of becoming hackers is the main thing that keeps their attention, but there are imposing prereqs even to being a scriptkiddie. Their introduction to coding is Scratch, which is fantastic (scratch.mit.edu), but I can probably give them some proper code too. I was thinking of writing with them a php script that can send text messages (They live in the Philippines, texting is a part of their everyday lives). I could show them how to write a webpage, but that is a little cliche. What is a project that can introduce the shell?

And for those of you that started at 4 feet, what kept you going? Were you on your own?

Thanks lots!

I think the thing that got me interested in programming was this little game my dad created using a DOS script years ago. It was easter morning, and me and my brother were hunting for easter eggs. They were hidden in different places around the house, and the first clue was blinking away on the monitor. I was amazed that the computer new our names, and after it had asked us a few questions it gave us a cryptic clue to the first easter egg. Even though I didn't actually start 'doing' any programming related stuff for years afterwards, I always had that at the back of my mind. I liked the way the computer 'spoke' to us, and even now I'm mostly interested in making 'personal' programs. I like making little games and question/answer type stuff. The good thing is that it's very easy to learn how to do, and you can apply it to any age range really, so I would suggest you introduce them to that kind of thing.