About KidSpec
A 1980s home computer, rebuilt so a nine-year-old can write real programs on it.
KidSpec is a programming studio modelled on the ZX Spectrum, aimed at children roughly nine to twelve. It gives you what those machines gave a generation of programmers and very little else: a 384×256 graphics screen, a text console, and a language simple enough to hold in your head. You type a program, you press run, something happens on screen. The loop is immediate in a way that modern development environments rarely are.
The language is KidSpec, a BASIC-like tongue built around short four-to-six letter commands — PRNT to write, PLOT and RECTF to draw, BEEP for sound, LOOP and WHILE for repetition, WHEN for branching, plus variables, arrays and your own functions. Many commands accept several spellings, so a child who writes IF instead of WHEN, or FILLBOX instead of RECTF, gets a working program rather than a syntax error. Mistype a command entirely and the interpreter suggests what you probably meant.
It is a real interpreter, not a simulation — a proper lexer, parser and evaluator that runs your program a step at a time, so loops animate and long programs stay responsive. Everything executes in the browser.
How to play
- Type a program into the editor. Start small: PRNT "HELLO" is a complete, working program.
- Run it and watch the console and the graphics canvas respond.
- Build up with LOOP for repetition, WHEN for decisions, and PLOT, LINE or RECTF to draw on the canvas.
- Errors name the line and, for an unknown command, suggest the closest one that exists.
KidSpec is free to use and runs entirely in your browser. See the other experiments on cffy.in.