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

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.