[GLLUG] Raspberry Pi for children

[Sean McManus]

On 05/06/2013 17:24, Hearns, John wrote:
>
>
> I am thinking on buying a Raspberry Pi for my nephew.
>
> Are there distributions for them which are aimed at children -- ie. if 
> I pre-installed it with such a distro would he be able
>
> to run some interesting applications out of the box?
>
> Yes, I do know Google exists. But somehow the human touch is better.
>
As Bernard said, Raspbian includes Scratch. Children as young as 7 have 
made videos on Youtube of their Scratch creations, and it's been used 
all the way up to university level to teach the basics of programming. 
You can set it to boot straight into the desktop, but it's easy enough 
to get into from the command line. It doesn't come with a lot of other 
stuff preinstalled that's useful to children, but you could set it up 
with a few programs easily enough (Tuxpaint is nice for younger kids). 
I'm not aware of a distro targeted at children: the Raspberry Pi is more 
about inspiring children to use a more grown-up computing environment, I 
think, than it is about sealing them away from complexity.

-- 
-----
Sean McManus
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