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by cmrdporcupine 2033 days ago
This is very cool, and I wonder if I could work something like this into a way to teach my (10 year old) son the basics of digital logic.

In his case I suspect the full syntax of Verilog would be overkill and just add confusion, though. A simpler subset without modules and with only continuous assignment would be ideal.

Gears turning.

2 comments

You can also just let him play with redstone and once he got the hang of the elementary gates then let him play nandgame.
Can confirm, nandgame was a hit with my 12-year-old.
Not sure if it would be suitable for a 10yo, but check out MHRD (on steam or itch.io), you start out with NAND gates and gradually build more complex constructs that you reuse in the following levels, where the final level is a (very simple) CPU. Sort of like the first few parts of Nand2Tetris.

It uses a very simple HDL, has a reasonable IDE built in, and each puzzle is pass/fail based on a test suite so it's easy to get into - however, you only have a certain number of lines on screen in which to write the HDL (and comments), so brute force is not an option for most of the puzzles, you do have to optimise your design to fit the constraints.

I second this, MHRD was a very good intro for me