Tim Streater wrote
Rick wrote
Bob Eager wrote:
Bob Eager wrote

Since the Raspberry Pi will be with us soon-ish (well, about six
weeks I am told, for mine) does anyone have any interesting ideas
about what they might do with it/them?

I've heard of car computers, TV boxes, PBCes as ideas...

I remember a similar looking dev board that came out back around
1981 .. it had a built in Hexadecimal keypad... you do a whole days
worth of coding and get a stepper motor to revolve or a set of LED's
chase a traffic light sequence.

The issue was none of the students could be arsed to do this more
than once .... then would rather play with the Commodore pet.

I think that is the problem with Dev board approach, it provides so
little for your effort when you can instead just go use a PC and gui.

I hope the pi doesn't go the way of the Newton. Lots sold in the lead
up to release date and soon after, then next to nothing. I think what
you're describing above will be a problem. The notion that all these
schoolchildren were just waiting for a cheap board to program at the
bit level is a bit silly, in the same league as when years ago they
expected that all women would learn to become car mechanics.

No. I expect some teenagers will get the pi and do some stuff with it. When I was 15 I had a few relays I scrounged
off my brother, who was in the navy, and doing some primitive binary logic with them. I could have done with something
like the pi being available then. Or relays for a penny instead of five bob each.

If people are expecting that lots of pis will be used in this way, why weren't these people already doing it - using
the Arduino?

Mind you, if "computer classes" at schools consists of them being
forced to learn about ****ing Windows and being bored learning to use
Word and Excel, then that is a waste that could usefully be stopped.
[1]

I'd be interested to see what folks think it could be used for, though.

[1] They need a lesson to understand what an OS is, and that there are
others besides Windows. They need two more lessons to understand what
Word and Excel are, and a quick overview of what they do and what they
might be used for. And that there are other programs which perform the
same sort of function. That's it.

Dunno, that gets into the whole area of what schools should be teaching.

You can make a case that if you want people to be able to use
particularly Excel to do useful stuff for themselves, even just at
home etc, they need to do a lot more with it than you propose.

And if you want them to be able to do more than just trivial documents at
work, they certainly need more than you propose with Word too.

After all, what sense does it make that kids leave school after doing the
full time at school, without being able to use something as common as
Word for the sort of thing Word gets used for at work by so many ?

Corse you can certainly make a case that say those who plan to
become plumbers, hair dressers, mechanics etc dont need that,
so you can certainly make a case for being selective about who
needs that in school, but its going to far to claim that no one does.

With what the Pi can do its more complicated. You can certainly
make a case for at least some school kids being able to do stuff
like that, if only to provide something that might lite the fire of
some potential engineers etc.

Certainly it makes no sense to try and ram it down the throats of most kids tho.

But then you can also make a case for teaching quite a bit of DIY in schools
too when so many chose to do stuff like that after they have finished school too.