Glad to hear it worked out for you. My kids school went full on Pi and they were broken and discarded after 2 months because they are mostly not suitable for educational settings from a software and hardware perspective. The hardware is not robust or reliable enough and the software requires fixing by staff too often to be productive.
I’m surprised to hear that. We had an entire job tracking system in a large factory running off of them and they lasted years. This was with daily handling by factory workers.
I have a friend who has two children who are now allegedly young adults. They smash about one phone each per six months and one laptop screen each per three years. Their iPads are somehow intact, but dented to fuck. I, myself, broke a laptop screen when I was 16 (1999) by kneeling on it while it was open and concealed under my bedclothes. In the intervening 24 years, I have broken zero (0) laptop, desktop, PDA, or phone screens except by activities that I knew might result in their destruction (i.e. disassembly without proper tools under an understanding of 'either I manage to fix this right now or I order a new one and it arrives tomorrow’).
All this to say: kids are just rough on shit. They're inexperienced with potential failure modes and thus fail to anticipate what precautions might need to be taken in trying to avoid them. But they mostly grow up (after killing a few pieces of hardware).
Same here; multiple broken phone screens (and we're not buying him a new phone every time it breaks, he gets hand-me-downs at best), laptops (he managed to cram a power cable into the HDMI port in a panic, closed a laptop with probably something like a pen in between shearing the hinge, he probably punched it out of frustration / wanting a new one and blamed it on "some kids that used it as a shield"), multiple broken bikes, etc.
I think the students are doing more "system integration" work than your factory workers are doing with their day-to-day handling. So they're touching all of the GPIO pins immediately after shuffling across the carpet to rub 18 balloons against themselves, connecting every GPIO pin to every other GPIO pin just for fun, rebooting by unplugging the power, etc.
If the Raspberry Pi had 5V compatible GPIO and SD cards stored data permanently immediately after fsync() returns, the Pi would have been much more successful in the educational environment.
No. You have a 2 hour window and 30 raspberry pi's. How long do you spend fixing them versus teaching?
It's just a fucking computer, not a world changing thing. They already have computers that don't have all the downsides but do have all of the upsides.
Honestly a lot of kids in the US/UK should have no problem finding a used desktop/laptop to play with if they're into that sort of stuff. Even a 15 year old computer can run Linux today and people are practically throwing those out.
I do wonder where old computers end up at (or where they should be taken to), they don't seem to have much at charity shops for example which used to be great for things like secondhand PCs.
I have an old PC at home still collecting dust (~10 years old I think), I need to clean its storage and get rid of it.
Some charity shops (e.g. Oxfam) no longer take mains-powered electronics - my guess is because of the burden of testing them to make sure they're safe. Others will take computers but have various prohibitions - for instance, the Red Cross won't take computer hard drives (they say they're not legally allowed to sell hard drives containing software); the British Heart Foundation won't take gaming machines.
It's not as much _fun_ as making an obvious circuit board do Stuff (tm). There's a very tactile satisfaction about making an RPi or similar go. YMMV, of course
I built doorbells and game sites to use in school. I learned PHP on the thing, my first proper programming language.
Good times. :)