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Comment by Taikonerd | Hacker News Reader

This, unfortunately, is the truth.

But that begs the question: what are 11-year-old computer nerds doing now? Modding games? Building complicated machines in Minecraft?

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There are lots of things to do. Lots of programming things mixed with other domains like music. Just one example: https://sonic-pi.net/tutorial.html There are tones of SBC, plus arduino. Calliope and others. Scratch for little kids, lego mindstorms. I know boys between 11 and 13 learning Python, programming some simple games. There are also lots of robots and HW. What there is not (or I do not know it) is something like the microcomputer of the 80s. That is a little computer which can do graphics, sound, little games, and even control peripherals with a very simple language. I would really have something like that.

Frankly what you're asking for in your last sentence is just a Pi

And with which SW? I mean, I can do “anything” with C++, but doing what I did in Basic in 100 lines would need 1000, plus downloading libraries and frameworks and reading several 500+ pages manuals. If your kid is not an english native speaker, you have yet another hurdle.

maybe check out PICO 8. It's basically a VM (self styled fantasy game console) that runs on a bunch of devices and an active community. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

A similar project that I'm eager to hack on (or maybe try my hand at implementing something similar in WASM) is the UXN platform. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

And if we're already talking VM platforms to explore, there's no reason that someone who doesn't want to do software professionally can't get a lot of enjoyment from some basic syntax knowledge and making modifications to software they use every day (whether that's writing a userscript in your browser or exploring your favorite game via mods)

MicroPython. On any hardware it runs. RaPi ist not the worst choice.

Robotics is my guess

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