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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?"
" 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.
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.
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
Unless there's something you're not telling us, you've just proposed to throw away the two best solutions to your problem (a lab and a laptop cart) for no reason other than the geek factor. I'm sorry, but I just can't see what your aim is. Well, I can. First of all a lab is probably (time) shared amongst 5 or 6 classrooms. Hence its impractical to use the lab as a classroom.
The laptop cart, is obviously expensive and more time consuming to set up than a fixed desktop class room (albeit with a smaller monitor).
I have used a classroom with CRT monitors beneath a glass table , tilted at a proper angle, with full powered computers. (This was ~ 7 years ago, and financed by a huge grant by a big corporation). And this was incredibly useful, especially when the instructors made good use of the computers(though this was in a college environment). The point is I agree with the point that a fixed compact desktop solution can easily increase the teaching efficiency in a class. I dont really get the point of having a battery operated machine at each desk, I would rather go with rewiring the room so that each desktop has a AC
"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.
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.