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I'm completely sympathetic: the kids are inundated with tons of games and activities, while the world has a severe deficit in the area of learning computing.
I am one passionate about software, and dedicated to increasingly higher levels of abstraction for layered software architectures, but shouldn't the kids start out at the board and chip level with assembler languages?
Granted, most assemblers are too complex.
Don Knuth's MIX and MMIX come to mind as ideals.
And then ARM as a real world practicality, although locked up in commercial access only (unless you rip one out of an old cell phone or router).
But there are alternatives, a variety of "Stamp" chips.
The world of stamp dev boards may be the best place for putting kids today.
And then there are sites (magazines?) with "radio shack" parts lists for similar things.
It's not five minutes to get him going on his own. But should it be?
