Re:Turing Complete is a game about computer science
by ykonstant on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @05:26PM
(#38933152)
I am a little confused; is NAND-to-tetris free? I thought you had to buy the course, or something like that.
Re:Turing Complete is a game about computer science
by jerry_tk on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @01:43AM
(#38937030)
nand2tetris is free on https://www.nand2tetris.org/course
The course is also available on Coursera where it also offers free option if you do evaluation yourself ("auditor" mode).
Personally, I would say NAND-to-Tetris is a (great) freely available learning resource for people looking to actively learn more about computers and digital logic from the ground up. It is mostly structured like a course you would take and the game it leads up to is a means to an end.
Turing complete on the other hand is a more playful approach that guides you through the individual steps (though it still requires you to look up quite a lot of things on your own) with a little story and provides more smaller challenges instead of just one big end goal. In addition to that, it features a relatively powerful sandbox that allows you to interact with things and there's a scoring system for complexity and runtime for all your little solutions that gives it a small competitive side.
I wouldn't say one is better than the other. NAND-to-Tetris is a learning resource with a game in it and Turing Complete is a game with learning resources and a sandbox in it.