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Refurbishing PCs For Charity?
Used PC Guy asks: "I'm trying to run a program to recycle PCs for charity to give to underprivileged kids. Trouble is, these kids have never seen a PC. What should I teach the kids if they're about 14-21? Should I teach Windows, Linux or both? What hardware should I be requesting, and what's the best way to test the influx of hardware that's coming in quickly, efficiently and reliably to make sure won't need servicing within another 6 months?"
Depending on the availability of software, I'd stick with Windows. As much as we'd like to think Linux is going to get big as a desktop OS , it isn't definate, and will probably be a long way down the road, especially in the US. Although if for some reason you don't have the copies of windows that came with these PCs (which is likely the case), and windows-like Linux distro would probably be best. At least that's my 2 cents (as a big Linux/UNIX user).
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Use some sort of software that erases everything every time the computer reboots - like deepfreeze. Then instruct the users to save everything to a seperate partition. That way, you won't have to do as much security support work. If they really haven't used a computer before, they won't know what they're missing. This can increase the number of computers you can support a lot.
Simon's Rock College
The operating system doesn't matter that much. Teach them how to use the internet in a responsible way, avoinding obviously dangerous websites, how to write e-mails in a matter people will appreciate, etc.
Learn them how to use the mostly used things: word processor (a typing course would help as well), spreadsheet, even the stupid slideshow creation :) Any office suite will do, it's not that much of a difference when they got the main points.
Learn them how to install software! How to deal with all the popups you get when installing this, it really is something you should get a hang of, and you'll need it often later on.
Learn them to use html, make a website, get to understand the stuff that's behind it.
And the coolest would be: learn them to program a bit! I played with LOGO when I was a kid, it really helped me later on.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I spent about 2 years trying to teach computer skills to kids and adults in a developing nation, and I learned a few things about this kind of work.
If licensing is available (or doesn't concern you), you may as well start by teaching Windows, at least for basic mouse and keyboarding skills. You'll probably have inconsistant hardware in your systems, but as much as I hate to admit it, Windows makes it easier to present a consistant interface.
Once the kids learn a little about computer basics, you can start teaching them some more advanced skills. This is where you can turn your problems on their side... You'll probably quickly accumulate piles of unusable components, but these can be valuable teaching materials, since you can use them to show the kids what's inside the computer. As they learn more, you can get the kids to help you test, assemble, and repair more systems.
If you can teach the kids to do your work (requesting donations, testing, building, repairing, and teaching), then your project will be successful and sustainable.
I wasn't able to teach all the students how to build computers (we didn't have enough 'junk' components to try that), but I did get them to go from no computer experience to making simple webpages (using only notepad) and useful spreadsheets.
A few more tips:
1) Observe what the kids do and adjust what you teach accordingly, especially to avoid time sinks (Word, with all its clipart, wordart, and fonts proved to be a big waste of time).
2) Try to find innovative ways to teach file management. This is not intuitively obvious to most kids, but it is important, and can get to be a problem when they start producing hundreds of documents
3) Internet / WWW are probably more trouble than they're worth.
4) Ban floppy disks
5) If you don't have a LAN, a USB Flash drive and some simple scripts can be good for quickly copying materials to each machine.
Well, tinkering and tweaking may teach you to be a better geek, but for someone who's just trying to do something creative in a non-geek area of expression, being forced to tinker and tweak can be really frustrating. What got my goat was that the original poster pointed to this as a benefit: "Frustration builds character!"
My feeling is that we geeks will always find things to tinker with--some kids with donated PCs will undoubtedly download a Linux distro and start hacking away. Other kids might want to write the next great American novel, or even just read it on the internet. Erecting roadblocks to these aims, even in the name of computer literacy, won't help anyone.
Show them that instead of Firefox, they have IE, or they can download Firefox for Windows. Show them they have Paintbrush instead of Gimp, but they can download Gimp for Windows or buy Photoshop. Show them they have Outlook instead of Thunderbird, but etc... Show them they have Notepad or Word instead of the 50-some editors in Linux. Show them they have freecell-hearts-minesweeper-solitaire instead of the 50-some games on Linux. Be sure to point out that they can no longer switch to alternate virtual desktops, have their pick of ten different window managers, or have all the software they want for it free. Teach them the new keyboard combination "Ctrl-Alt-Del", and remind them that they have to pay attention to virus reports now, because they apply to them.
Of course with my kids, nobody did this with them. They just saw and learned Linux at home, saw and learned Windows at school, and took it to be the natural order of things. Young minds are open; let's not spoil it. They'll be old and mean and dumb just like we grownups soon enough.
I don't know about you, but I got over 10 years worth of hardcore computer experience, some of it paid, some of it educational, and some of it gaming - on machines that didn't have 233MHz in TOTAL - two machines at 1MHz apiece, a 4.77MHz machine that I only had part time access to, a 16MHz machine of my own that I loved, and a 40MHz machine that I later upgraded to 133MHz. Got a four year degree in software engineering at a university in the process, as well as working my first real paid job as a newbie software engineer and newbie network admin. I learned to program in like six different languages (Pascal, C, Basic, Assembler, pseudo SQL (dBase / Foxpro) dabbled a bit with Fortran, COBOL, Ada), learned to network computers via ARCnet, Ethernet for Novell Netware (several versions), learned the concepts of structured programming, several software design methodologies, concepts behind computer graphics, audio, user interface design, and played about 5000 hours of games - all on machines that didn't have 233MHz or 64M of RAM if you added up the processor speeds and memory of every machine I had through that entire decade, and all on machines with 640x480 or less of resolution (most of them had much less) - and no Windows 2000.
If the intent is to provide kids an opportunity to play the latest games and run the latest software, then a 233MHz box with 64M of RAM isn't going to cut it.
If the intent is to provide kids an opportunity to experience and learn 'computer science' aka operating systems, networking, database, programming languages and software development theory, then 233MHz with 64M and an 8M video card and 14" SVGA CRT is ~plenty~ of horsepower. And probably free, too. Computer science isn't all surfing the web, Instant Messenger, MP3z and Doom III. I'd wager that about 80% of all the software engineering knowledge on the planet could be learned and used on a monochrome (amber or green) display. There is a world of difference between keeping a kid busy on a Windows XP machine with multimedia and the Internet, and teaching him the fundamentals of computer science.
Approach it from this perspective and the actual OS is a lot less important, all things considered.
Load "*",8,1
I agree with you on the hassle of broken hardware though - maybe what they need to do is have the kids amass like a ton of machines, go through each one and break it down into components (video cards, hard drives, sound cards, memory, keep the case/ps/mobo/cpu as complete units, etc), catalog it, build a few test boxes to pop the different components into to sort the working parts from the broken parts. Actually, the nice thing about older hardware is that the points of failure are real easy to identify : dead hard drives don't respond, power supplies that don't power up a box, CPUs with dead fans - anything else would probably be ok (most of the time) and have them build their own boxes from the parts boxes, hand picking parts. That way, they learn how to trouble shoot their own machine and will be able to identify issues in the future and fix them, not be intimidated and be comfortable going in to fix (or upgrade) their box in the future. Walk them through installing the OS a few times with different OS's and a wipe/reinstall won't intimidate them either.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer