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Hi Roly, Your firefox and video and iplayer and youtube and Minecraft and such all need a monitor, keyboard and mouse. For every one of those, a six year old cheap third hand laptop is a better option than any pi. Especially Minecraft, the pi version of Minecraft is small small small compared to the regular release. Your left Steam off your list of what he’ll like to use, too – Kerbal Space Program, Universe Sandbox, Space Engineers, No Mans Sky, Shapez, Cells to Singularity are all Steam games that 8 year olds enjoy. Steam needs more processing power than either the pi or the cheap third hand laptop can deliver. There is one thing a pi does which a laptop (or desktop) doesn’t do, and the pi does it spectacularly well. It gives access to the GPIO ports. They let the pi sense the surroundings and change the surroundings, you could run one of Elon Musk’s Starships in realtime with a pi. You can detect the outside world and flip relays to electrocute mice with it. The GPIO options are amazing. The one other thing the pi does that nothing else will is it runs Wolfram’s Mathematica for free, it comes pre-installed on the Raspberry OS. If your 8 year old yearns to read and write from IO ports or to manipulate undergraduate math equations then a pi will keep him off consuming the Internet for weeks at a time. That is a laudable aim but it’s a bit ambitious. My 11 year old at my shoulder who dictated bits of this says he had a laptop at 8 and would not have wanted to swap it for a pi. He does have a pi now (and a new laptop) and he did a course online to get practice and experience with the GPIO. He’s never used the pi for firefox and video and iplayer and youtube and Minecraft but he’s picked up a lot of soldering skills and linux and python from running his pi as his home webserver. A headless pi is a good place to learn linux, an arduino or BBC Microbit is an alternative good place to learn GPIO coding (but I’d not take one in preference, they’re harder to work with). A laptop is the right tool to run anything GUI+Internet whatever age you’re aiming at. On Tue, 28 Jun 2022 at 17:02, Roland Tarver via list <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Hello folks, > > I hope you are all good. Rarely post here, but hopefully you would not mind > pointing me in the right direction please? > > It's time to get my son into computing. He is 8 years old in August. Given that he > has a nerdy dad (me!); I am going to get him a pi - if I can. lol! > > I've done some digging about the net and noted a huge stock shortage, which I'm > guessing is no surprise to those here. However, I have had some success on ebay. > There is new a Pi 4B 4GB for under £100. > > I was about to pull the trigger; but before doing so I thought I would ask here > for any advance surrounding any issues of which I may not be aware. Sadly, these > days, I do not have time to be as nerdy as I would like - and my knowledge is > pretty poor. > > I do have a little experience however. I have a piNas thing which I set up a good > few years ago and its still runnning headlessly in the cupboard. lol. > > My son will use the pi for:- > 1. His homework - largely done through various websites; all of which work fine in > firefox on my MS laptop (dont hurt me! hahaha - I just have not got round to > installing something sensible on it yet! lol). (He currently uses my laptop for > his home work.) > > 2. Videos. > - bbc i-player (i have read there could some issues getting this working?) > - you tube (should "just work" in a browser?) > > 3. Programming > He uses that scratch thing in school; to me it looks a bit of a faff if im honest. > I was just going to start off with some python - or at least a normal programming > language - rather than scratch. I learnt on the bbc micro back in the day - worked > for me lol. RTB - Gordon? lol > > 4. Games > He is dead keen for a bit of minecraft! lol (he has never played it; just seen it > at his mates house). I am aware of the pi edition of minecraft. > > I have no specific questions, but any general comments or advice would be > gratefully recieved. Thank very much. > > Cheers roly :-) > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG > https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list > FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/