dhicks6345789

Here in the UK, allotments are currently back in fashion - garden-sized strips of land assigned to people who rent them for a small amount each year. Currently in demand again, especially in cities where flat-dwellers might not have their own garden - you can spend a few hours a week getting out of the house and getting some exercise / fresh air. A traditional allotment does take a bit of a time commitment, and of course not every day is sunny, and free allotments in some areas are very limited, so maybe combine allotments with a farming robot. Get a parcel of land, maybe a way outside town (but accessible via public transport), split it up into allotments that people can farm daily remotely or come and visit for a nice day out. The sort of thing a farm with a farm shop or pick-your-own operation could diversify into - rent out strips of land for remote users to tinker around on, handle shipping them their ripe produce for a reasonable fee.

> all I really want is a slug laser

Even better: a slug-hunting robot powered by fermented slugs:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/tmp/slugbot.html

The project is from circa-2000, I remember being impressed by the idea at the time, and I'd have thought slug-hunting robots would be more of a common thing by now - turns out robotics for agriculture are hard.

I'd agree that, in a teaching context, it's vital to have a consistant hardware / software experience - especially with beginner users, even different keyboard layouts are going to cause confusion. The Pi 400 is a great device, nice and compact - if you get the starter kit you just need to add a monitor / TV. That does somewhat assume someone has a bit of room, though - some space to plug in to what might be a shared TV. The really nice thing about Raspbian is that is does actually work on older laptops (with a couple of catches - no free Matlab), so, if you have an older laptop available and can spend a bit of time setting it up, you can give someone a very similar experience on a more all-in-one device.