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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?"
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.
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
I want to agree with this, I really do, but things have changed since you and I used computers in school. You're talking about an Apple II, so you've got a few years on me, but I remember having maybe two 286 systems available to a class of 30 students when I was in grade school, and you know what? Some of us grew up to be pretty handy with computers despite that.
The major difference is that back in the days of Apple IIs and 286-en, we were using computers in school to learn about computers. I remember learning DOS commands and doing lines of "asdf jkl; dad sad fad lad" and so on in some curses-style typing tutor. It was all about building skills required to use a computer.
Now, those skills are somewhat of a byproduct. The computer is the tool it's supposed to be, not the subject. Most kids have a computer at home already and are pretty familiar with it's basic usage. The technology now simply enables different methods of learning. You just can't timeshare an outdated piece of junk between 30 kids now.
In "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", some douchebag jock dude says "The future...it's...computers..SAN DIMAS HIGH FOOTBALL RULES!". Now, I'm not sure if San Dimas Football's record warrants such a statement, but the future is now, and it *is* computers. However, just knowing the bare minimum (like a grandma who knows how to check her email and nothing else) won't cut it in the workforce. Students need WAY more exposure to using computers for everyday tasks than we ever got timesharing the ugly beige monsters of our day.
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.
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!!!
Yeah, but life back then sucked compared to now. I wish I had been born a decade later just so that I would never have had to deal with:
trudging to the library to get info for a report
hand writing essays
typewriters
not to mention non-school related things like:
snail mail
print newspapers
lack of instant free porn
Just because we had to put up with this crap doesn't mean kids should still have to. Or maybe they should... lil' bastards.
And that's exactly what the article does, it says the children need away to search data in the class rooms, they only need firefox for this. So, Lets build a cheap wifi computer that they can easily use in classrooms, and that are mobile enough that you don't need 30 computers per classroom.
grade school == small kids == not exactly best use of computers. Think about it, your short stories in grade 2, were what? Maybe 100 words long at most? That exercise wasn't just to get your grammatical syntax juice flowing. It was to also get your hand used to handwriting, etc.
Same thing with math. We had "mathblaster" [with the gamepad thingy] back in my day. But we were expected to know how to add 17 to 23 by long hand. Why? So we could understand the mechanics of arithmetic. Sure kids have computer at home nowadays (damn brats!) but that doesn't mean all of the classwork should be on one.
That "star trek" future with the PADDs everywhere doesn't work IMHO. There is something to be said for doing things manually at the formative stage. That and the budget hardly calls for it. We can hardly pay the damn teachers, keep fresh books on the shelves, etc. Buying laptops for each student is hardly the best budgetary move (especially since as you pointed out, they have computers at home).
It makes sense in third world nations [e.g. OLPC] since the laptop is their gateway to knowledge. It replaces the books and other resources that they don't have [but should].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
"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.