Also - don't forget about the Raspberry Pi. They are a fantastic platform for hobbyists, including teenagers.
They are surprisingly capable little machines, but it's still very possible to run up against their limitations. In my opinion, they provide the closest modern equivalent to the home computers of the 80s (which I'm guessing that many of us cut our milk teeth on) that required even a novice programmer to think about the machine and its behaviour rather than the far-abstracted and extremely powerful / well-resourced systems that modern laptops / desktops are. +1 to the Julia Evans (no relation) suggestion too... Ben On Fri, 19 Oct 2018 at 09:22, William Pietri <will...@scissor.com> wrote: > > I don't deal with high-schoolers much, so take this with a grain of salt. But > I have tried to teach mechanical sympathy to young engineers from > non-traditional backgrounds, so I have one small suggestion to add to the > excellent advice so far. > > My mechanical sympathy started with working on machines where performance > issues were visible. On an Apple II, you knew if disk access was the problem > because the floppy disk made a lot of noise; you could hear the seeks and the > steady reads. You knew about network activity because you could watch the > modem lights blink, or pick up the phone and listen to the pattern of the > bits flowing. So early on, when something was slow, I developed intuitions as > to why. > > My computers have since gotten very quiet, but I still have the right edge of > the screen devoted to a gkrellm display with a dense display of indicators. > And any time I'm waiting, I check it to make sure the displays match my > intuition. When I'm wrong, I pull out richer tools to find out why. > > So my suggestion is to provide visual or auditory indicators of what you want > them to have sympathy with. Then, every time they are waiting on the machine, > quiz them as to why. Get them in the habit of guessing as to what the machine > is doing and then finding out whether they're right. > > As to the finding out part, you also might want to get them some copies of > Julia Evans' zines, which cover topics like perf, tcpdump, strace, and > debuggers. They're lively, approachable, and excellent. Her enthusiasm is > contagious. > > The zines themselves are here: https://jvns.ca/zines/ > > She also has a blog that I like a lot: https://jvns.ca/ > > > William > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "mechanical-sympathy" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to mechanical-sympathy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mechanical-sympathy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mechanical-sympathy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
