I think the Raspberry Pi has a suit of prepackaged games and things like that, which you could use. Give your Raspberry Pi a good casing, and it will be indestructible.
Tangent
I would still warn them from the dangers of the modern digital world, in the sense of surveillance and censorship of social media, what is posted on the internet stays there forever, how proprietary software tricks the user and is oftentimes malware (Gmail, Windows, etc.) and things like that.
I mean, computers are cool, but the mainstream computer world is filled with so much nonsense or outright malice. And if I had a child, I wouldn't want them to be harmed by that. Like, I don't want my child to be indoctrinated into the sexist manosphere, just because the Instagram Algo said so and will do literally anything to keep them on the platform as long as possible. Software and computers are cool, but there's so much vile and genuinely dangerous stuff even for adults. For a child it must be hard to navigate. If you say, for example, that Apple devices literally scan every single picture on your device and send the result to Apple, you'll sound like a crazed tin foil hat lunatic. But this is quite literally what happens with MediaAnalysisD. In the USA, a young family got harassed by police because they sent a picture of their sick child to their doctor via Gmail.
I have a fundamental problem with this attitude. If you recognize there's a problem, and the problem disturbs you, and you CAN fix it, why not fix it? It's not world hunger, it's a computer for God's sakes. Maybe I don't want to hear people complain about problems that are 100% within their control and refuse to fix it.
Not about GNU/Linux. Just my thoughts on complaining about simple problems with easy solutions.
Please enjoy this copy pasta from another comment I made:
My brother in Christ, the joke is life wouldn't work without this "junk" DNA. And if Arch users were to get rid of this "bloat", they would literally dissolve.
My brother in Christ, the joke is life wouldn't work without this "junk" DNA. And if Arch users were to get rid of this "bloat", they would literally dissolve.
I mainly use my workstation for Image editing (raw development and VFX), 3d animation and video editing. Then there's occasional ML inference for image generation or text generation. And lastly, some video games.
About video games: the 1st gen threadripper platform gained a bad reputation for gaming thanks to windows. I used to use Windows for so long and once I switched to GNU Linux it was like I got a new CPU for free. The reason is, Windows doesn't know how to properly do multi-threading, adding to that, my 1st gen Threadripper is basically 4 CPU dies glued together and for low latency applications like games the performance on windows will be trash and oh boy, it was. But on GNU Linux its fine. But compared to all cores on one die, it will be worse for games, yes.
A few of my applications are bound by memory performance. My idea is that, because DDR standards are only published every 5 years or so, it will have better longevity before technical obsolescence. When in its life cycle, will a DDR platform become cheaper?
If the world was running on GNU/Linux for endpoints, tech-normies would still be using computers from 2010. And this would cut massively into laptop OEM's bottom line. Therefore I think it's a quiet conspiracy where laptop manufacturers or the computer OEMs shut up about Windows being bad because just imagine if everyone would be running GNU/Linux. You could use laptops from 2010 with "regular" distros and be completely fine. With light distros you could use things from the 1990's for all tech normie tasks, web-browsing, text editing, e-mail, etc.
Now genuinely curious, as an ex-Windows-refugee, how did the non-Windows-refugees, the "native" GNU/Linux users, find out about it?
Edit: BTW, started a journey with a laptop in a place with no internet. Luckily I had the foresight to install GNU/Linux on it before I started my journey. I was constantly reminded that I were in the same situation with Windows, the computer would stop working because it had no internet. You need internet for Microshit office, Adobe software, etc. That was the time I said: there has to be a better way. That's when I started using free software. I'll take the occasional, inadvertent usability annoyance with free software over the megacorporations trying to constantly gang rape me into submission any day.
Notepad++