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?"

Comments

How soon does OLPC ship?

[Animats]

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.

Battery $ wire $

[gregmac]

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.

Re:Why it's silly

[iMaple]

So you have a lab, but you don't want to use it? I'm confused.
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 /DC supply. Batteries have a high maintenance and are expensive. If this is a school, I expect the students will use the computers all day long (if not then as the parent suggested, just use the computer labs!)

exactly-the OLPC machine

[zogger]

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.