Comment by csmithuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csmithuk | Hacker News Reader

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I don't wish to hijack this thread but tying the Raspberry Pi to education is terrible if you ask me.

I agreed about the Raspberry Pi being the best device for education right from day one. That was until my father bought my daughter one for her birthday and I ended up being the resident "fix it guru" for it.

The thing teaches you merely how to jump through funny shaped hoops to get something working rather than anything realistic or helpful. Most of it is google-fu and copy and paste. When you do finally get there it's a baron land of absolutely unrealistic, undocumented crud that can't self-serve. Plus it barely works and browns out to start with resulting in USB-hub jiggery-pokery (and that only happens because I actually understand how USB works).

For ref, I have 20 years' of Unix and Linux experience (right down to writing kernel drivers) and it was painful getting it off the ground so I'm not approaching it blind.

Being critical (constructively!) of this results in the RPI forum thread being deleted which in itself an affront and a general recommendation against the things.

Could it be that you were exited about fiddling with rpi yourself? I don't have children but I guess it's difficult to deliberately not help them (too much) solving problems which are inherently interesting to you (grumpy neckbeardism can't hide that fact, you obviously still care about this).

I think rpi (culture/ecosystem) is still absolutely the best thing, it's literally the perfect AppleII/C64 for today. Today is also more complex and more stuff is possible but there is also Unix which at least tries to be simple.

I've given one of my rpis to my 13 year old neighbour and he is regularly meddling with it. It's likely that he is also constantly failing but that's what is needed in order to learn, it certainly was the case for me when I started (I'm still failing after many years, that's a reality).

Where you could make a difference is just by saying you'll be there to answer some questions ... now and then. Encouragement and enthusiasm!

> I think rpi (culture/ecosystem) is still absolutely the best thing, it's literally the perfect AppleII/C64 for today.

Really? In many ways RPi is far more of a closed, proprietary system than the common desktop PC.

True we aren't at Apple II level, open hardware would be great but as I said the whole culture surrounding it as well as the documentation which exists is really good. It's still a very cool project which succeed to get this ball rolling, obviously there is room for improvement.

Not particularly excited. After spending a number of years with embedded systems, my tolerance has faded a little. We tried the "follow the instructions" and no help thing to start with. Unfortunately we were blessed with only a composite video cable which is to be fair, a flipping nightmare of reading inconclusive LED states and fumbling around in the dark with no video output. That is where the documentation stops and years of prior experience of embedded systems and knowing what to search for kicks in. Each step came with its own pile of crud to deal with. Each hoop jumped through chips a little bit of interest away. The inevitable question that gets asked is:

"Dad: is this what your job is about?"

It's not and never has been.

The perfect Apple 2 / C64 (or in my case, BBC Model B) was the one that you opened the box, plugged it in and it worked the moment you turned it on without fail, every time and never poked you in the eye unless you told it to.

I still think the (partial inspiration for the Pi) i.e. the BBC Micro is still a better starting point than the Pi itself. Well documented, relatively simple, very powerful, forgiving and the ability to write high level (basic) or low level code (assembly) from the get go from the books that came with it, can play games on it and if you screw anything up, just restart it.

I won a grant to build, donate, and maintain Raspberry Pi computers to rural schools in South Africa (about 7). It was a large project. Absolute nightmare. In the end I just started buying second hand computers and installing XUbuntu (much higher performance, much lower cost). I donated the Raspberry Pis to a university engineering department and managed to buy double the expected number in second hand computers for rural schools, feel much better about it. Raspberry Pi is simply a gimmick for those that love that kind of thing (which is fine), but it should NOT be marketed as a way to get kids to learn programming, or as a replacement for a computer. It's simply too expensive, and does not cater to the educational needs of those struggling to learn programming/IT.

I'm interested to hear in the problems you had and how getting 2nd hand computers turn out to be lower cost than the Pi. Do you have a write-up of your experience somewhere? Couldn't find anything on your HN profile.

The standard RPI os seemed crap to me too that's why i switched it to Arch.

Hardware wise the USB hub is probably the weakest part in it and that's where they have the most issues.

Plus the fact that some hardware part are undocumented because their proprietary.

Try not to be the "fix it guru" all the time though since if your daughter can always ask you to do it she will never bother to learn herself.

Yes the RPI could use a bit of improvement. It needs better X performance and a restart switch. But the RPI is the best small computer out there with the most support. Give it a few iterations and improvements and it could really be useful at home.

My problem is that in 1982 you could really impress your kids with simple programs. Now my child wouldn't be impressed unless you create an 3D princess game. The hurdle to catch a child's imagination is 10x higher.

"Jump through funny shaped hoops"

sounds like it fits perfectly into education then. It's much like a lot of the working world as well. A lesson in grit perhaps? A lesson in our tenuous grasp in technology. At least it's something that can be held in your hands and not a group's invented agreement about how something should be (grammar) or subjective watered down recounts of reality (social studies).

lucidguppy: you appear to be hellbanned.

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