Yep, me and my son are currently daily users of QB1.1 in DOSBox. Works nicely, but you might need trial and error to figure out the [Break] key when you're on a laptop.
Haven't tested, but QB1.1 or 4.5 should also work with vDosPlus [1]. The original vDos apparently has issues with keyboard input in QB, but, arguably [2], this has been fixed in vDosPlus.
There's also that bootable USB stick with FreeDOS or SvarDOS or smth on bare metal + native QBasic within it. I imagine this would actually make a really nice, responsive and distraction free environment for a child. DOS could also boot straight into QBasic via autoexec.bat, or present some fancy personalized menu.bat for the child, which is, yknow, cool. Or... it sure used to be in 1995. :)
As a non-native English speaker, I must also say that QBasic's simple syntax is incredibly good for teaching programming to children. Not too many footguns with weird (#$ymb0ls{}) either. It really is a great teaching language, even in 2023.
Haven't tested, but QB1.1 or 4.5 should also work with vDosPlus [1]. The original vDos apparently has issues with keyboard input in QB, but, arguably [2], this has been fixed in vDosPlus.
There's also that bootable USB stick with FreeDOS or SvarDOS or smth on bare metal + native QBasic within it. I imagine this would actually make a really nice, responsive and distraction free environment for a child. DOS could also boot straight into QBasic via autoexec.bat, or present some fancy personalized menu.bat for the child, which is, yknow, cool. Or... it sure used to be in 1995. :)
As a non-native English speaker, I must also say that QBasic's simple syntax is incredibly good for teaching programming to children. Not too many footguns with weird (#$ymb0ls{}) either. It really is a great teaching language, even in 2023.
1: http://www.vdosplus.org/
2: List of additional features as compared to original vDos: "Keyboard IRQ1/INT9 handling for running programs such as MS-DOS EDIT, QBASIC, Visual Basic and XyWrite": http://individual.utoronto.ca/wengier/vDosPlus/featurelist.h...