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217 points uticus | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mk89 ◴[] No.45670689[source]
How can someone explain this to a kid? Is there somewhere an even more simplified version than Arduino or similar to show how all these things actually work? I know arduino is not a cpu, but overall, how these things work together, would be great to see/show.

I don't expect to show how electrons move :) I mean, some model, a toy or so, that shows how these things work. I remember it only from books/specs, but even there, at a certain point there are "limits" :)

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thessalchips ◴[] No.45670980[source]
I‘m teaching a course on computer architecture at my university and there are these model processors called MUx (MU0-7) that explain how a CPU works from the ground up. I‘m not aware of any toys (my students keep asking me about that as well), but I wrote an interactive visualizer that illustrates the simplest processor and how data moves through it: https://pascalbormann.de/mu-vis/ Not mobile friendly unfortunately and maybe a bit too advanced for kids, but it could be a starting point. The code is here if you want to build on it: https://github.com/Mortano/mu0-visualization
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1. thabit ◴[] No.45671033[source]
A breadboard CPU would be a good "toy" no?
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2. thessalchips ◴[] No.45671905[source]
True but to do anything interesting you do need a whole bunch of wires and components, even for an 8-bit CPU. Maybe it is a good start to instead combine gates to do some useful work. People are also building CPUs in Minecraft, that should get kids engaged :)
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3. jjk7 ◴[] No.45674710[source]
That's how I was taught, build up a CPU using TTL logic chips.

Even just starting with the building blocks is useful, like build a flip-flop