Nopecraft - was Re: OT: learner kits

[Christian Gauger-Cosgrove]

On 21 June 2015 at 18:21, Tapley, Mark <mtapley at swri.edu> wrote:
> It’s actually full V10 Mathematica, which was the thing that pushed me into getting it. It does depend on the web-link for lots of the help features, but I think is otherwise complete. It is also SLOW compared to most Mathematica platforms. I didn’t find out about the availability of the obsolete Minecraft version until later; my son spent some time with it but didn’t get hooked into other Pi features (and now owns his own x86 laptop).
>
The RPi comes with a free full version of Mathematica? That intrigues
me; I've never used it before but I hear it's similar to MAPLE? (Then
again in terms of CAS's I'm quite happy with the one on my TI-89
Titanium.)


> Many thanks to all for the Minecraft mod suggestions; I’ll pass those on to Will the 14-year-old and see whether he feels like downloading some to make his redstone creations more programmable; like Toby I’m not a huge MineCrack fan but Will is spending time on it anyway; if he learns FORTH or 6502 assembly as a side-effect of fooling around in MineCraft, that seems like a step forward.
>
The mod that does FORTH on a 6502 is a bit dead. Right now the "best"
you can get is Lua. Yo uneed an obsolte version of MineCraft to use
old RedPower 2 (which has the 6502 and FORTH interpreter). I think
V1.4.6?


> He did help me write some code on the CARDIAC simulator (which rocks) but may have run out of interest in that, but at least he has this much intro to machine language.
>
> https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/museum/cardiac.html
> https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/museum/cardsim.html
>
Have you tried setting him at a PDP-8 or PDP-11 simulator yet? Much
more productive than Minecraft, and if you can find a simulator that
also simulates a front panel...


Cheers,
Christian
-- 
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.