Soo... what are you all working on that makes you happy, or at least content?'nI can use some... good stuff?

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

Soo... what are you all working on that makes you happy, or at least content?

I can use some... good stuff?

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

Just so I reply as well... I am struggling to work on @interpeer still; the TL;DR is that I do not have enough time in a block, so I play around along the edges, which is ineffective and I know it.

In the meantime, though, my brain wants to *also* (not instead!) explore a ton of other things, which I have even less time for. But since they might qualify more as a hobby, I feel like I can permit myself to be a bit shit at them, and continue to play around once in a while.

1/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer So, in order to teach the kids about stuff, I have found two potential things they can get into: robots and minecraft.

Let's start with robots.

There are a bunch of rather spectacular robot building kits out there, which all sort of assume you know what you're doing, which my kids do not.

There are also a bunch of toy kits out there, which seem to be interesting for a start, but also appear to be dead ends. Like, you build a kit, and maybe there's an expansion, and that's it.

2/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer Until, that is, I found out about this: https://mikelikesrobots.github.io/blog/raspi-camjam-ros2/

So there's the CamJam Edukit, which is a twenty quid package for building a cheap and shitty robot with an RPi. But precisely because it's cheap and shitty, you spend maybe 100 or so in total, and can build it with literal cardboard parts.

That's the kind of making I feel is very child appropriate. I haven't tried it yet, mind you, but it's on my list.

Also, if the cardboard isn't cutting it, you can always go...

3/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer ... the fancy route, and stick it in a Lego frame, tapping into the next lever that I could use to motivate kids.

So what about ROS2?

Well, it appears that it's not too difficult to steer the kit via this version two of the Robot Operating System. I encountered ROS before, though I don't recall the exact version - it's used, among other things, to power ESA's Justin, who I had the pleasure of meeting some years back:

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2023/05/DLR_s_humanoid_robot_Rollin_Justin_being_operated_by_Samantha_Cristoforetti_from_the_International_Space_Station

There should be a path...

4/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer ... from the cheap, shitty cardboard robot here, via Lego and ROS2 and sensor upgrades and diving into soldering and so forth to something actually cool.

I have the hope of starting this with the kids in a few months, and perhaps get them engaged in video updates for the project. We'll see. It'd be nice.

Anyhow, so I played around with ROS2 a bit just to see how hard it is to get started. It isn't. It's not entirely smooth, but good enough that I think we could go that way.

5/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer Now why do I think that?

Well, I previously thought that maybe I can use their fascination with minecraft to teach them cool stuff.

That... kind of didn't work. And it kind of did. And it kind of didn't. This is a longer story.

So a while ago, I set out to teach the older kid some Python programming. We wanted to make some kind of game. Turns out, the basic concepts aren't too hard. But problem solving with those concepts was a bit of a challenge.

K1 *loved* the success...

6/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer ... of something rather stupid: we opened an SDL window, and just filled it with a colour.

The thing that caught attention? The rather embarrassingly simple thing that clicking on the window changes the colour.

I mean, it was good for keeping a list of color definitions and cycling through it. Basic data structures, well explained.

But going from there to more complex things wasn't so successful.

I figured out fast that the next steps were just a little too abstract.

7/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer Next I thought, well, minecraft!

But minecraft? I mean, I'm fine with them playing, but I do not let them play online. The whole Microsoft shebang is too frustrating (TL;DR).

Long story short, we looked at luanti together. And while that engine is pretty neat, and I had a lot of fun with it for a while, the same thing happened.

Taking photos of our faces, compressing them into pixelated textures, slapping them onto a cube? Yeah, awesome!

Then figuring out and/or explaining...

8/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer ... how to modify *behaviour*? Nope, instant abstraction induced boredom.

Luanti has a fatal flaw for this kind of thing: when you make any changes to the lua files, you have to restart the server/client in order for the changes to take effect.

In other words, the REPL sucks.

So now I want to build a block game engine with an awesome REPL. But that's a bit of an undertaking, and "just a hobby" isn't going to help my kids for quite some time.

Nonetheless, it led to two things.

9/n

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@interpeer One is that my nephew introduced me to "The Farmer Was Replaced": https://store.steampowered.com/app/2060160/The_Farmer_Was_Replaced/

It's a game where you learn how to program in Python in order to instruct a drone that manages fields.

When you harvest a number of resources, you can use those to unlock things in a skill tree: more Python language features, or more game features such as different kinds of seeds, etc.

It's a very fun way to learn programming concepts, OR it is a challenge to optimize the drone, or both.

10/n