> I am not sure if the list has this kind of support but I got quite
> curious to know the age groups using the piclist !!

My guess would be that rather depends on what's going on at
school. Once upon a time, the computers kids generally had
access to there were the Commodore, BBC and Apple, which
are big micros rather than PCs. If you wanted something better
than BASIC, their machine language was relatively easy to learn.

A very good primer for the emerging micrcontroller market. My
first 'computer' was the ETI660, a magazine project based around
the RCA 1802 micro. 16-colour lo-res TV output, could do some
simple games etc. It was ML only until someone brought out BASIC
on an EPROM.

And then along came the VIC20, Sinclairs, Dragon, Spectrum .... !!

I got so stuck into ML and interfacing when the Commodore 64
came out, just loved it.

Can't imagine any kid at school today even thinking about ML
on the laptop in front of them. They are too remote from the
core electronics.

The secondary school mentoring programme I'm part of, in a
modest way, indicates to me that kids now are using PICAXE,
Arduino and Raspberry Pi, and pretty much have no idea what
machine language is. I think many of them would regard low-level
programming of micros, as we HAD to do back then, as either
too hard or unnecessary. And particularly if you don't know
enough electronics to build your own projects. Way back when,
there weren't a zillion ready-made modules on an Internet and
you had to actually go into a component store.

Just look at all the shiny amazing things a phone can do, for a
few dollars an app. And the technological gap between those
apps and learning how to flash an LED or read a thermistor.

The temptation to forego LEDs and aim straight for bigger
brighter things must be enormous.

There may be school-age lurkers here but I don't recall homework
questions for many years now.

Joe
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