Tiny PC for Schools

[CyberNerd]

Game developer David Braben creates a USB stick PC for $25

 

[plexer]

Interesting good have many uses in control and monitoring or digital signage applications

 

Ben

[plexer]

He's promoting it as being able to be given to students so that they can use it at school to learn more about programming etc... but it needs hdmi tv/monitor to hook it up to that's going to be an issue.

 

Mini displayport may have been better so that adaptors could be used to connect them to a vga or dvi monitor.

 

Ben

[Arthur]

I wonder how well this will run Windows 8?

 

It's a shame it's only got 128MB RAM.

[PiqueABoo]

Despite having an engineer's unlovely sweeping generalised opinion of the types Comp Sci degrees spit out it's not at all difficult to see where he's coming from. But would this gadget do much to solve the problem, not least the school/teacher interest and/or ability though? A VM of anything-you-fancy has long been capable of filling the "kid can play with this to destruction" space, but HDMI implies a key point is that unlike a VM they can (mostly) all do this at home so perhaps there's a little something there.

 

There's an irony in all this: Can't swear it works for all of them but watch most kids grow up and early on they are wonderfully inventive and creative, then over time society but **especially school** knocks it out of them - growing up is largely about conforming, doing exactly what you're told in the "right" way and so on and so forth. May have changed a bit, but the idea going back at least 50 years is that most of the damage is done by the time a child is around seven years old.

[dhicks]

Mini displayport may have been better so that adaptors could be used to connect them to a vga or dvi monitor.

 

Handily:

 

Micro-SD Card Slot Abused As VGA-Port - Slashdot

[plexer]

Interesting.

 

Hardware spec for the pi is not set in stone.

 

Ben

[Dos_Box]

David Braben was one half of the team who developed Elite in the early 80's, and as such is on my personal 'Gods' list!

[Gibbo]

Mine too, although we don't really need a device like this to teach kids to program - we all have lots of PCs in schools already where we can install programming languages (Beebem here!) or allow USB Linux sticks to be used under supervision.

 

We need time in the timetable and competent teachers.

[Earthling]

Doesn't say when he's bringing out an updated version of 'Frontier - First Encounters'...........maybe he's not going to.

[pshuttle]

Want Frontier! Want Frontier!

[Earthling]

It plays ok on XP, but the gfx is so carp, and I couldn't get any of the sound to work. Maybe he's going to bring out a *nix version to go on his USB PC for $25.

[Arthur]

Just noticed this on their blog...

 

The alpha boards are here!

 

[CyberNerd]

might make good thin clients/web browser machines

[trevj]

Seeing as some of you miss RISC OS, has it been noted that there's interest in getting RISC OS going on the Raspberry Pi device?

[Haptic]

Just noticed this on their blog...

 

The alpha boards are here!

 

 

I bought that Tee from Last Exit! Kudos

 

Joe

[trevj]

Seeing as some of you miss RISC OS, has it been noted that there's interest in getting RISC OS going on the Raspberry Pi device?

Raspberry Pi To Embrace RISC OS on OSNews.