<story><title>John Carmack&apos;s son&apos;s game in Racket</title><url>https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/racket-users/yjRuIxypUQc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bliti</author><text>My 7 year old is learning on a Raspberry Pi that does not load X by default. She gets around the terminal pretty well (changing, dirs, calling python scripts, etc.). The GUI is just overwhelming at this point. She prefers the terminal. In fact, she will boot it up and type:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    nano story.txt
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
To start writing simple stories (she loves doing that). And yes, she saves it by pressing Ctrl-x, y, and enter. :D</text></item><item><author>myth_buster</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Dropping a newbie into Eclipse or MonoDevelop makes them feel like 
  they are walking around in a byzantine museum, afraid to touch 
  things, while DrRacket feels closer to old-school personal computers 
  where you felt like you were in command of the machine. 
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I think this is a very important observation. As with most things, it&amp;#x27;s extremely important to get in during the humble beginning stage and then tracing your way up to grok more complicated systems. Similar to the &amp;quot;first principle&amp;quot; approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bbcbasic</author><text>&amp;gt; And yes, she saves it by pressing Ctrl-x, y, and enter. :D&lt;p&gt;As a child there is no bias as to &amp;#x27;oh it must be hard doing that because I am use to clicking X in Windows&amp;#x27; they just learn stuff and get on with it. We should all remember to be like children sometimes. Explore ... not language wars!</text></comment>
<story><title>John Carmack&apos;s son&apos;s game in Racket</title><url>https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/racket-users/yjRuIxypUQc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bliti</author><text>My 7 year old is learning on a Raspberry Pi that does not load X by default. She gets around the terminal pretty well (changing, dirs, calling python scripts, etc.). The GUI is just overwhelming at this point. She prefers the terminal. In fact, she will boot it up and type:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    nano story.txt
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
To start writing simple stories (she loves doing that). And yes, she saves it by pressing Ctrl-x, y, and enter. :D</text></item><item><author>myth_buster</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Dropping a newbie into Eclipse or MonoDevelop makes them feel like 
  they are walking around in a byzantine museum, afraid to touch 
  things, while DrRacket feels closer to old-school personal computers 
  where you felt like you were in command of the machine. 
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I think this is a very important observation. As with most things, it&amp;#x27;s extremely important to get in during the humble beginning stage and then tracing your way up to grok more complicated systems. Similar to the &amp;quot;first principle&amp;quot; approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jsingleton</author><text>You can set a Raspberry Pi to boot straight into Scratch. It&amp;#x27;s a great introductory graphical programming language.&lt;p&gt;The next step is usually Python but I&amp;#x27;m not sure kids will get the significant whitespace. Go is an option or maybe BASIC (on RISC OS perhaps).</text></comment>