The Unix Pipe Card Game

Not sure about kids, but I've seen university students that literally did not know how to use a non iOS computing device. Colleagues had to start explaining what a file is, a folder, etc etc, in their courses.

Honestly I don't find that too bad. My guess is that computers will go the same way cars did: Most people will only know the very basics that are needed to operate the thing. Any deeper knowledge will be left to enthusiasts and professionals. Thus computers, while getting more complicated internally, will have fewer and fewer modi of usages.

I think it depends a lot on the kid and the parent, I am teaching my daughter since she was 10, and I try to spend time every day doing something, you can see our progress here: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

It is difficult because I have to compete with snapchat and google/meta for her attention, and school is quite exhausting. Snapchat has this super annoying 'streaks' and the more friends you have the more streaks you have to keep alive, so you have to send like 400 messages per day.. its non stop. I teach her that there are 100_000 developers and psychologists and product owners and etc, that they go to work every single day thinking how to extract the most value out of her attention, and she has to constantly be aware of what is the "algorithm" making her do.

Unix Pipes she got quite quickly, but doesn't use often, but the idea of one program reading another program's output she got. Also grasping the command line was not that difficult. But I used quite some tricks to help. For example her windows PC I change the shell from explorer to cmd.exe, so it boots in cmd, so she has to navigate and also fix it. I also make scavenger hunts on her filesystem so she has to look for a file using dir and cd and etc, also https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ I bribed her with robux for passing each level of the bandit game

I want to teach her how computers work and how to make them do what she wants. From what is a register, to an instruction, to a program to a process. Kihon no Kihon as they say. But in the process I also teach her how to break things down and how to think and most importantly how to learn. I teach her about the heart of things, so there is no mystery between the keyboard press and the letter appearing on the screen, or how chatgpt predicts the next word (I am working on a RNN board game with 3 neurons and you have to teach it to count https://punkx.org/move-37/rnn.pdf [work in progress])

So in the end I am not sure if it matters what you teach your children :)

This is really cool!

One thing I noticed: in the game there are tasks like print the second line and print the seventh line. But both of those lines are empty. So technically e.g. a non-matching grep is a correct solution. :)

There was also a Show HN thread a couple of years ago, for people who are into the whole reading old comments thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687

So cool! I'm ordering a few of these after rework tonight.

Out of curiosity, how do you handle printing? DIY? POD? Order in bulk and ship yourself? I'm always so interested in how people handle physical product sales at a small scale.

KUDOS for the creativity of coming up with something like this!

What age and how much terminal familiarity did you start playing?

I ordered 1 of all your available decks a few months ago, my daughters are too young for them still, but I think they are great, and I can't wait to bust these out in 8+ years

12 Euros is a fairly standard price for tracked postage across continents.

Sorry :( I use PostNL, and its actually even more expensive, on most non EU shipping I lose

but each deck has pdfs you can just print them with your local printing shop, if you don't print the box it should be cheaper

you can also just print them on a4 paper and cut it with scissors, its not the end of the world, it is even helpful to explain to someone with pen and paper as well.

in this case: https://punkx.org/unix-pipe-game/unix-pipe-box.pdf this is the box and https://punkx.org/unix-pipe-game/unix-pipe-cards.pdf are the cards

Come on, you can print it yourself if you want and it's clear that at this price and shipping from Europe he earns close to zero on these.

It's a wild idea to take a completely digital asset, print it in Europe on to paper, and then put it on a ship and slowly transport it to Canada.

Yea that's the fault of the scoring method (Count pipes). Character count would be better... either that or play within the spirit of the game and learn the tools for their intended purpose. I use a lot of awk/sed for quick one-time processing and I use a similar mental model for how I do most of my processing. Build a input stream, use sed to structure the data into records, use awk to process records, massage the output (e.g. sort/uniq). In many cases I could use sed or awk to replace eachother but that makes it take longer to visualize and also harder to re-use.

we played it until we ran out of cards