John Rumm wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Tim Streater wrote
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.

A bit more than a couple of weeks, perhaps - but certainly not years of it.

We dont do years even with the trade schools.

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 ?

You mean writing one page letters, three page memos, and documents
that might use high tech capabilities like auto numbering! ;-)

Plenty of them do rather more than just that.

Bit rash to claim that no one takes years full time to teach
say Word, but if anyone is that stupid they should be shut down.

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.

Anything you stick on a school curriculum you in effect "ram down the throats" of the kids...

Nope, particularly when quite a bit of the curriculum is optional and not compulsory.

things like the Pi just make it cheaper and at least make it possible for just about any parent to also "buy what
they use at school" should schools choose to adopt them.

Sure, but its less clear that something like the Pi
makes more sense than a netbook or a laptop.

However, I expect it being mainly taken up by the self selecting group that are already into such things.

And it remains to be seen how many kids do, either by
demanding their parents do that or driven by the parents.

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.

and in fact, some schools do. There is a local one here that teaches building, plumbing, wiring skills etc, and even
has outdoor "pens" so that the trainees can get a feel f what it is like to work in real world conditions for some of
these tasks.

Sure, I didnt mean to imply that none do, I really just meant
that it may make more sense for most schools do to that
instead of using the Pi in schools, just because thats more
likely to be more use to more of the kids than the Pi would be.