The plan · For the printer
Eight sheets. Paper next to the machine does something a browser tab cannot: it stays readable while both hands are busy, and it never tempts anyone into a different window.
Twenty terminal commands, one line each, plus the three keys — up-arrow, Tab, Ctrl-C — that decide whether typing feels survivable to a ten-year-old. Deliberately short: a longer card is a card he stops reading.
One copy. Replace it in term four with a longer one he writes himself.
The five red messages of the first ten weeks — SyntaxError, NameError,
IndentationError, command not found, Permission denied — each with
what it means in plain English and where to look. Turns panic into lookup.
One copy. Next to the command card, at his eye level, not yours.
Date, what we built, what broke, what the error said, what to try next, and a box to draw it in. He fills it in, in pen, in the last four minutes. After a year it is the best thing either of you owns from this.
Print 40. Punch them and use a ring binder — the stack getting thicker is half the point.
Thirty-six numbered boxes in four colour bands, one tick per finished session, stars on the four demo nights. Visible progress is disproportionately motivating at ten, and the bands let him see a term end coming.
One copy, in colour if you can. Somewhere he walks past, not somewhere he has to look for.
A protractor circle plus the six polygon divisions — 360 ÷ 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10. He puts the turtle's start point on the centre dot and predicts where it lands before running the code. Predicting first is what turns drawing into mathematics.
One copy. Colour helps here; print it on the heaviest paper your printer will take.
Two breadboard grids per page — one for the circuit he plans, one for the circuit he ends up with — over a short explanation of which holes are joined to which. Drawing before wiring is the single habit that prevents most of term four's frustration.
Print 10. You will want more once he starts designing his own.
All forty pins, colour-keyed by what they do, plus which way up the board goes and the two rules that keep it alive — never a GPIO pin straight to 5V, never an LED without a resistor.
One copy. You will reach for it every session from twenty-eight onward.
Signed by you, dated, and slightly too formal for the occasion. That is the point: deeply uncool at the time and quietly treasured for years afterwards.
Print 4 — one per term, after each demo night, on the best paper in the house.