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One Desktop per Child - miniPCs for Schools?
gwjenkins asks: "I'm a teacher in charge of IT in a small school. We would like to bust out of the computer lab model but don't want a trolley of laptops wheeled from class to class. I've drooled over wi-fi PDAs but just can't afford a set for class (and the batteries drain too fast). In a classroom, space is at a premium and teachers won't use a technology that takes too long to set up. Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab. I would love to have a desk-based solution. Can you run a wi-fi mini-pc (sitting under the desk) from a 12-volt rechargeable battery (also sitting under the desk) with a 7" LCD (sitting on the desk), that boots from flash card into FireFox? No wires! No setup time! Has anyone done this? How? Alternatively can anyone say why this is silly?"
Sure. Built it and sell it. I'd buy one. Or thirty-five.
" Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab. "
And I remember the days when the first question was. What are you using it for? Then the second was finding the proper software. And then the hardware was considered, last.
They're called laptops. But that said, little kids don't need laptops or desktops at their desks. They can use them just fine in a computer lab.
What do you think kids of yesteryear did? Sure we had a computer in the classroom. It was an Apple ][ and you had to share it with 23 other classmates. OH NOES!!!
I just don't think a kid in school will learn "more" or "better" by spending money putting computers at their personal desks.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Sooner or later, OLPC will actually ship, and some commercial vendor will license the hardware design and sell it commercially without any nonsense. Probably before the big deals involving governments actually get very far.
I would love to have a desk-based solution.
Ah, then you want one of these. And don't even tell me that's not practical. Because it totally is. And by practical, I mean awesome.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"I just don't think a kid in school will learn "more" or "better" by spending money putting computers at their personal desks."
It worked for the Jetsons.
Have you checked the one laptop per child project ??
http://www.olpc.com/
http://www.laptop.org/
Or else try a search for
tablet thin client
It's silly because the cost of a battery is more than the cost of running power to each desk. This includes the cost of a laptop (on batteries) over a desktop - if you're going to buy a laptop, you pay a premium for the fact that it's portable, and happens to require a battery to do so. Not to mention, even if you have batteries, you still have to charge them somehow.
And once you run power to every desk, you might as well run ethernet. The cost of a switch and the cable (and the fact that ethernet jacks are not on-board pretty much every motherboard) is still lower than a good quality access point and PCI wireless cards.
So basically you end up with a lab, which, of course, is not portable from classroom to classroom.
$ of Lab in every classroom > $ of laptops on a trolley from classroom-to-classroom > $ single lab shared by every classroom
And anyways, I agree with other posters here for the most part, learning computers is important, but you still have to learn the basics by hand/on paper first. If a generation of kids STARTS learning addition and subtraction using a calculator/computer, I can't imagine what they'll be like later in life, and later when doing real math.
Speak before you think
If the typical current draw of a system is known, discerning the required battery is pretty straight forward. Sealed lead acid batteries are the least expensive and best performing way to go when it comes to relative performance. I cannot recommend any specifically efficient hardware, but I suspect that 'new' and 'mobile' will be the operative words in portable all-day systems, and those two usually indicate 'pricey' as well.
The largest sealed lead acid standard out there is 80 amp-hour. 80AH batteries are ginormous and probably excessive. Something like a 33AH SLA battery (pdf spec sheet) will probably hold up all day and is portable by nature. The battery usually has a handle as part of the case and weighs about 25 pounds. It is typically found powering a wheelchair. Sealed lead acid batteries like to deliver current, absorbed glass mat (AGM) varieties handle abuse, and they are designed to have regular discharge-charge cycles while handling overcharging. As far as power density goes, they are the most cost effective. Replacements will be readily available. Their size and shape lend the battery to being mounted to things (like desks). SLA 33AH AGM batteries are almost exactly automotive group U1 size, which are used in small tractors, so ABS plastic casings and brackets are widely available.
If your systems have a known average power consumption, all you need to do is multiply current at 12V (amps) by desired run time (hours), and add 20% to allow for battery aging or heavy use. Round up to the next highest battery capacity in amp hours. Simple stuff, I know. The next step will be your charging procedures. While batteries can be chained in parallel and charged, the best way is for each to be charged independently. You will have to consider the time allowed for each battery to charge against its capacity to discern the correct charging solution. For a 33AH battery, a charger that can achieve 6 or 7 amps per battery is ideal but it needs to be automatic. If a second set of batteries is added per system, a 3/4 amp non-automatic charger could be employed as other batteries are in use; battery "tenders" are commonly used for motorcycles and such and are inexpensive. The charging systems would be a near-one-time cost and the main expense would be the biannual replacement of derelict batteries.
IANA battery engineer, just a tech, but I hope this sheds some light. as an aside, NICD and NIMH cells are rated to 1.2 volts per cell, and Li-Ion/Li-Poly are 3.6 volts per cell. I sincerely doubt that a lithium based powered solution could be cost effective, because nobody can service them and they are not widely available in non-proprietary formats. Cool idea!
FairTax baby!
You sound like you are describing 'Origami', or the 'Ultra Mobile PC' (UMPC).
They are expensive now, but the idea is to get the price down to (I believe) around $500.
Alternatively you could just let the kids join their PSP's to the school wireless network.
I take it you've never actually paid a professional to install (and wire) a distribution center, then run the wire to each desk, then to wire an outlet at each desk?
Not to mention that doing so locks the classroom into a single configuration.
CS should be a mandatory item in schools, even elementary.
We cannot think about 21st century without serious CS courses in schools.
But I'd prefer to spend more money in having more motivated teachers and better programs.
Then you can build a wired CS classroom (or two) with the usual desktop PCs that are becoming cheaper and cheaper. And I'm sure pupils would love the idea to do a walk to a different classrom.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
We used to use sun rays at our old school. They cost like $250 bucks a piece and we were able to remote login to a windows server through solaris. I also would be curious to know if anyones ever tried to use some of those mini-itx boards. I think you could probably build a system for under $250 and those things have at least a 1ghz processor. If you ran Linux thats plenty.
A Laptop cart would probably be your best option. The cart will allow you the portability to bring the computers to other class rooms, rather than being in a static place, offers a place for them to charge when not in use, as well as offers a secure place to lock away the laptops when not in use. In addition to the portability, you don't have to worry as much about the systems, since you can lock them away when they are not in use. Setting up mini PC's would either make it much more difficult to set up to make them portable or would be at risk for more damage if they were left on each and every desk (not that laptops are excluded from rough and uncaring use).
are going to be a pain in the butt considering how many laptops you'll have in the classes. Keeping track of this on top of the students worrying about saving before the battery dies or it dieing during class and they can't take notes anymore. It'd be a whole lot easier to run power cords to all of them, which don't take up too much space as they could be run just under the desk, where you planned on having the batteries anyways.
Printing is something to think about too. You could have them all wirelessly connecting to a printer or they could e-mail themselves their notes and printing in the aforementioned lab later.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
I just think that you could get a really cheap "Damn Small Machine", goto here http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Syste ms
really cheap computers with usable hardware AND you can get LCDs here
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/TFT_LCD
LCDs are 7 Inches! And run on only 9w.
I would think this is a pretty good solution.
I think a better solution is a single PC and a projector. The teacher could either drive the PC, or get a student to. This is much like previous technology (film strips, movies, record players...) in the classroom.
Also, it's a lot like the real world (meetings).
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
"Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab."
That won't be what they are doing most of the time when computers are in the classroom, trust me. My school has a cart of laptops to every classroom as well as a smartboard and projector (it's a DoD school; they sickly waste immense amounts of money). Virtually none of the time we use the computers are we actually doing work.
However, with that said, the best solution is laptops. A laptop is itself a mini PC, and if there were such a thing as what you are looking for, it would be likely to cost the same price as a laptop designed merely for networking.
I don't see a problem with carting laptops around from class to class; that's what my school did at the beginning of the year before they purchased more carts over the winter break.
I think that the lab is always better anyway; my last school in the states was dirt poor, but threw all their money into the vast number of AP classes they have (28 now) as well as other classes that the building was literally crumbling from neglect before I left (they might build a new one in a few years), and they didn't have that much technology. Everyone went to either a computer lab or the library to use computers. Some classrooms were computer based rooms filled with really old computers (like Windows 95 or 98), but most had no computers at all except for the teacher's personal networking desktop.
When people went to labs or the library, sometimes there just weren't enough computers and we had to share or wait.
I have no problem with the labs, and I don't see what the problem is with rolling around carts either, which I happen to find a great idea; on each cart are 25 laptops, a wireless router, and a laser printer connected. When the cart was rolled into a classroom, all you had to do was connect two wires: the main power wire and the ethernet cord. I would say one laptop cart per five classrooms should suffice; not every classroom will be using the laptops at once, and if the education is that bad that they have to make up for it with constant technology use, then you have much more troubles than the future of IT in your school.
But the computers should be used in the classroom sparingly; I take on the view that calculators in the math class only make things worse. Back in the day everything had to be done by hand. I personally prefer doing everything by hand instead of pulling out my calculator (in most cases it's faster anyway).
If an EMP blast ever hit our nation, the people that can write without spell check, compose without an electronic thesaurus, do math without calculators, and research without the internet would become gods of society.
First off, I don't fully understand what this guy is proposing: having a set of small desktops and monitors to drag between classes is hugely inefficient compared to laptops. You'd need keyboards, mice, the boxes themselves, and the monitors, and then have to power them. A laptop "cart" would save space since they'd all be the same size and could fit in a slotted arrangement that would be much easier to transport.
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Another thing you could do with the laptops is have some sort of charging station for batteries (I don't know if these exist or not -- your way to make your $millions). For instance, one class gets the laptops for the hour, uses them, then returns them and puts the batteries into a charging station on the trolley with another set ready to go for the next class. The trolley is plugged into the wall in each room it goes into. This would eliminate the need for powering them with what are essentially car or motorcycle battries, although laptop batteries do die after awhile... Depending on your school's network setup, you could either have wireless installed throughout the school, or have an AP on the trolley that plugs in when the trolley is in a classroom, and then hooks into an Ethernet jack in the wall. Maybe a couple APs on different channels since 30 kids fighting over one could get nasty.
Actually, after researching this for a minute, I found this:
http://gem.compaq.com/gemstore/SubFamilies.asp?Pr
I guess HP will make the millions on the idea, but you could be one to implement it.
Welcome to first grade! Here's the laptop you'll use for the next 6 years, it will save the school money on books. Don't drop it, or get paste stuck in the keys, or you automatically fail.
God spoke to me.
That is exactly what the person in the article is looking for, a small mesh network capable self powered cheap and tough laptop designed for kids.And seeing as how it is for a school, have the school apply and see if they can get them in quantity. It might have to be the elected schoolboard though, the project only deals with governments. And I don't think they could get anything like that at that price anyplace else, in the 100-150 dollar range, not that is a complete machine, wireless, self powered so you don't have to worry about batteries or plugs or chargerts, etc. Even the cheapest miniPC still needs a screen and keyoard and mouse, etc.running up the price The OLPC machine is perfect for this purpose.
The model you are proposing is based on an environment with no infrastructure, and no need to train users in any "modern" applications.
To walk into a room with wired Ethernet (thanks President Clinton/Vice President Al Gore), in-exhaustable power (thank you Mr. Edison), and decide to deploy computers in a 1:1 ratio with their own power supplies and tiny displays makes no sense. The vast majority of the day students will have their computers turned off, so they can listen to the teacher and learn. To deploy expensive computers and have them turned off is not cost-effective.
If you took 5-8 PIII-1GHz desktops, gave them 15-17" flat panel displays and full-size keyboards and mice, you would do very well for your students. Each desktop would be more than adequate for the actual stated purpose (research, and running trivial educational programs, WinXP runs fine on such a desktop) and cost in the neighborhood of $300/each. For $500/each you could probably get a modern computer from a Dell or HP vendor if you have the money. If money is real tight, you can probably buy your PCs at a great discount from the local universities and/or othe school districts with more money.
I don't understand what purpose the battery at each desk provides - every night you need to charge the battery, which means either running a battery to an outlet, or running a power cord to each desk.
You really need to think about how much time your children will spend in front of the computers *working* on the computers. Computer Labs make sense in many cases, a handful of computers in each classrom makes more sense, and a laptop per child is complete overkill, unless you are going to completely overturn your curriculum to base it on every childs computer, and provide replacements if they fail .
Ken
"Alternatively can anyone say why this is silly?"
Because students learn less when there's a computer in front of them. There's a place for computers, and computer education, and learning to use them as tools. It's not in most classrooms.
I can "imagine what they'll be like later in life, and later when doing real math." I taught high school math and computer science for 6 years. I'm now teaching high school physics. When not teaching, I've been an aerospace engineer and a programmer. Calculators came into common use in the mid-70's (at least that's when I purchased my first calculator). Since then, we have raised a generation of students that use a calculator for simple arithmetic. In my experience, that would be single digit addition and subtraction. Then we introduce graduation tests and no child left behind (i.e., ignore all children and real problems in favor of political rhetoric) and expect high school teachers to fix all of the problems. I have yet to see any widespread use of technology that did anything but train students to use technology. And none of the students I have seen need to learn how to use technology. They desperately need to learn how to think. How to analyze and evaluate. How to read. I would estimate 15 to 25 percent of my urban high school students read at what I would call a grade school level. And their arithmetic skills are similarly stunted.
Computers in the classroom are a colossal waste of money and effort. The costs for hardware, software, and the time you spend keeping them running just aren't worth the little bit the computers will add to the students' learning experience.
Educational software? They're more like video games. Teachers? Most of them can barely use the technology. The kids? They'll be distracted from the person in the front of the class who's paid to teach them history, math, science, and social studies.
Buy books and teach the kids to read. Buy pencils and paper and teach the kids to write. THESE are the tools they'll use the rest of their lives, and the formal communication skills they'll learn will serve them better than any amount of Google-based "research" they'll do.
I'm an IT professional, and it frustrates me to no end to see schools throw away thousands of dollars on technology they never use. All the while my kid can't bring a science book home because there aren't enough to go around.
We do have courses in the mechanics of writing, composition, and art.
We don't need a class in "computers." Word processing mechanics can be taught in the English class. Spreadsheets and databases can be taught in math class or any class that uses data collection or statistics. We browsing and using encyclopedia software can be taught in any class that uses research methods. High-level "how computers work" topics can be sprinkled in science, math, and social studies classes.
Computer programming and computer science should be an elective or after-hours class for those students who are interested. Most students won't bother until middle or high school.
For the original author of this thread:
I recommend sticking with computer labs or a laptop cart for occasional use and a small bank of shared computers, maybe 4-5 per classroom, for daily use.
If you are going to go with one computer per child, I'd go with a ruggedized laptop or better yet, a ruggedized, stripped-down laptop that boots from the wifi network, flash, or CD and just runs a web browser. Most of your apps should be web-enabled. Those that aren't can be run through a remote-Windows-terminal-services or remote-NX-Windows setup. The idea is that you want your laptops to be "drop-in replaceable" so if one gets broken a student can use a spare and pick up where he left off.
What does such an environment take?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"I take it you've never actually paid a professional to install (and wire) a distribution center, then run the wire to each desk, then to wire an outlet at each desk?"
/. since it's obvious the teacher didn't even google the topic because there's several of sources with information about running PCs from 12 volt car batteries.
The only way the battery idea would work is if they used large batteries, like car batteries, and even those would likely need to be charged after 8-16 hours of use. The teacher really wants to run around swapping out 20 lbs batteries every other day?
Also i'm a little confused why this is on
And the teacher should have asked the experts on putting PCs in cars over at dashpc.com or at least googled "car computer" for ideas on other PCs running from a 12-volt source. We might be pretty knowledgeable, but we're not all trying to run PCs on 12 volt batteries like guys in the mp3car forum is.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
They sell a silent diskless computer that could probably with little modification fit your needs!
Matt Anderson John 8:32
Then make [computers] part of they're learning experience.
1. schoolkids2. computers
3. ???
4. learning
So, if you'd like to share your unique insights on educational psychology, I'm certain the other experts in the field would love to learn how to do this.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It sounds like your students will eventually need laptops so that they can do their homework on computers. It's going to take a few years for such a reality to occur.
My suggestion is to start turning more classrooms into inexpensive computer labs. You could try bolting cheap laptops to desks and rely on wireless networking to ease wiring expenses. (For example, you might be able to buy refurbished centrinos that are good enough for web browsing.) It's going to take a few years before the computer industry can provide the product you're looking for, at the price and durability that you need.
No, I will not work for your startup
Are you thinking on how to secure those little boxen? Cause if it's not secured in a steel cage (datamation) it's gonna walk.
What I've done at my school was use Betwin to have one tower serve 4 stations. That is, one tower, and 4 monitor/keyboard/mouse. Most students don't realize that they're sharing one computer, and it's fun watching outside techs try to figure out what's going on.
> Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab
iPhone. It has the full Web, including modern Web applications, and it has rich HTML email with styles and photos. It replaces the PC the school wants them to have, the phone their parents want them to have, and the iPod that the kid themselves wants to have.
How much work are you going to do to put Google and text-editing in front of a kid? That is ridiculous when we have the CPU power of a 1999 computer and a wireless network connection in any phone you can buy today. Even the so-called free ones. What's required is to add the true Web and Email to the kid's phone, as well as audio video so they can access educational Podcasts, enough storage to keep the files they're working on, and easy PC attachment so they can use the lab effectively. Enough battery to get through the day, easy recharging between uses, easy to add a second battery just like an iPod for power users.
Kids are mobile. That's what we forget. They are ultra-mobile. If you want them to use this stuff you will be more successful adding it to the pocket computer(s) that kids already have, rather than the PC they don't.
The only complaint you can make is the price, but there are many economies. The price will go down as manufacturing ramps up, the Apple Store for Education will sell iPhone cheaper still. There is very little administration because Apple manages the software through iTunes. It replaces a phone and iPod also not just a PC, so you can find the money for it from different pockets so to speak. And you can expect them to run for 2 years with only user admin, no IT help, just like iPods and Macs.
Further reading:
The Diamond Age or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1996)
by Neal Stephenson