Have kids use the terminal

Making the terminal console interesting for kids, near impossible? Here’s a possible hack. (kids age 9 - 11 years)

This Christmas my kids wished for a Minecraft server. I wanted to be sure they could actually use the server without my help. They should get familiar with the terminal first, small steps = small risk of failing completely.

Kids in the terminal

One day I was working on the computer and my kids asked what I was working on. (They were being polite, they don’t actually want an answer and will start rolling their eyes of pure boredom if they get one.)

This time I was prepared - I had installed cowsay! Now what does the cowsay do? It basically draws a cow using plain text characters.

Example:

$ cowsay Dad is the best
 _________________
< Dad is the best >
 -----------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

The kids were almost fighting to get to the keyboard and they wanted to write all kinds of things - they took the bait!

Naturally I showed them the cowsay --help and the cowsay -l, when they read the output they got excited - cowsay can render other fabel animals.

Example:

$ cowsay -f sheep Meh
 _________________
< Meh >
 -----------------
  \
   \
       __
      UooU\.'@@@@@@`.
      \__/(@@@@@@@@@@)
           (@@@@@@@@)
           `YY~~~~YY'
            ||    ||

Sure it’s a pointless command, and you have to wonder who and why anybody would foster a command like that. Well there’s more…

Next command fortune

So I wanted to show them how to pipe data from one command to the next - it might be more advanced, but I didn’t let them know.

Now the there is a command called fortune, each time you run this it will output a message sort of like from a fortune cookie.

Example:

$ fortune
I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamt that I was reading on,
so I woke up from sheer boredom.

We can pipe the output from fortune to cowsay.

Example:

$ fortune | cowsay -f flaming-sheep
 _______________________________________
/ What on earth would a man do with     \
| himself if something did not stand in |
| his way?                              |
|                                       |
\ -- H.G. Wells                         /
 ---------------------------------------
  \            .    .     .
   \      .  . .     `  ,
    \    .; .  : .' :  :  : .
     \   i..`: i` i.i.,i  i .
      \   `,--.|i |i|ii|ii|i:
           UooU\.'@@@@@@`.||'
           \__/(@@@@@@@@@@)'
                (@@@@@@@@)
                `YY~~~~YY'
                 ||    ||

Next command is lolcat

It’s yet a command that makes you wonder - it basically adds rainbow’ish colors to the output… But they really liked this command - it made the text area beautiful, right.

And lets pipe the output from cowsay on to lolcat.

Conclusion

Given that exploration is within reach and motivation is greater than 0, formula for learning:

Next blog post will be about setting up a linux server and running Minecraft in docker.