🧒🐧 Linux for Kids: From Terminal Tetris to Bash Scripting – A Parent–Child Adventure

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"Wait… did your kid just open the terminal and run a script?"
Yup. And they also beat me at bastet last night.

📚 Table of Contents

🎮 Step 1: The Game That Started It All – bastet
🛠️ Step 2: Hello, Bash Scripting!
💡 The “Wow” Moments
🔚 In a Nutshell

🎮 Step 1: The Game That Started It All – bastet

Forget flashy graphics or touchscreens. My 10-year-old’s first deep dive into Linux wasn’t through Minecraft mods—it was with Bastard Tetris (bastet) on the command line.

This isn’t your regular Tetris. It’s evil. It deliberately gives you the worst pieces possible, and watching my kid giggle every time the dreaded S-piece dropped again was pure joy.

“This game is cheating!”
“Exactly. Welcome to the terminal.”

🎉 It kind of looks like Candy Crush, my kid said, except it's all keyboard and no tapping.
And you know what? It does. The falling blocks, the puzzle logic—it feels like the retro hacker version of our favorite Android games.

But here's the twist: this wasn’t just about playing. It was about typing commands, understanding apt install, and realizing you can make your computer do cool stuff without ever clicking a mouse.

First, you'll see a few options on the screen—just select "Play with normal version" to get started. If you're feeling brave, you can try the harder version too!
Use your keyboard arrow keys—especially the Up and Right arrows—to rotate and move the blocks. It’s a fun challenge and feels surprisingly familiar if you’ve ever played puzzle games like Candy Crush on Android.

If you lose, no worries—you can press the Enter key to select "Play" and jump right back in. Just like any great game, you can keep trying again and again!

🛠️ Step 2: Hello, Bash Scripting!

After getting hooked on bastet, the next day came the inevitable:

Terminal Playground – Fun Commands to Explore

“Can I make my own command?”

Absolutely.

We wrote our first Bash script(Bash.sh) together—a little program that:

cowsay "Linux is Awesome!" – ASCII cow says your message 🐄
fortune | cowsay – Combine with a random quote
sl – A steam train chugs across the screen (install via sudo apt install sl)
figlet Hello – Large ASCII text

Then: Run the Bash.sh

And just like that—boom 💥—they created their first program

Similarly, They tried Hello, CloudWhislter community, Linux is Awesome.

💡 The “Wow” Moments:

Here’s what made this special:

No GUI, no noise—just pure logic, creativity, and feedback.
They saw the filesystem like a map and used commands to explore.
They typed code, ran it, and saw results instantly.
It wasn't just playing games or copying lines—it was owning the keyboard.

🔚 In a Nutshell:

What started as a simple game turned into a full-blown adventure—one where my 10-year-old **learned to navigate the **Linux terminal, play puzzle games with just a keyboard, and even write their first Bash script. With the right tools and a little creativity, Linux becomes more than an operating system— it becomes a playground for young minds.

If you’re a parent, a teacher, or just someone curious about introducing tech to kids, start small. One game, one script, one “Wow” moment at a time. 🧠💡

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