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Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

whitequark.org

1–10 of 68 posts

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#2
Urgh, this is not "Unsuitable for Education", it's unsuitable for one pretty narrow (albeit central to the system) educative purpose around System-on-Chip's and GPU's.

Kids can still have a fully working linux system hooked up to their tv for $35, which regardless of the OSS status of the hardware is still a win for education in my opinion.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#3
Yes, any device you can't resynthesize from VHDL is completely unfit to introduce middle school children to programming. I mean, who ever managed to understand even the tiniest bit of python without mentally reducing it to the electrical patterns in the circuits of the CPU?

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#4

Urgh, this is not "Unsuitable for Education", it's unsuitable for one pretty narrow (albeit central to the system) educative purpose around System-on-Chip's and GPU's. Kids can still have a fully working linux system hooked up to their tv for $35, which regardless of the OSS status of the hardware is still a win for education in my opinion.

It's a win, just not as big a win as it might be. Still, a win is a win.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#5
> Also, if you want the Foundation to send more documentation to you, they require you to provide a business model.

No they don't. That section talks about broadcom, who are the ones who you will need to give business info to to buy the chips. The foundation don't manufacture, sell or provide documentation for the chips.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#6

Urgh, this is not "Unsuitable for Education", it's unsuitable for one pretty narrow (albeit central to the system) educative purpose around System-on-Chip's and GPU's. Kids can still have a fully working linux system hooked up to their tv for $35, which regardless of the OSS status of the hardware is still a win for education in my opinion.

It's a win, just not as big a win as it might be. Still, a win is a win.

the diference between the big win and win is so nugatory as to be pointless for the use case the Pi is designed for.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#8
Rasperry Pi is not using ARM's Mali GPU, but from what I hear ARM is pretty tight about the documentation for that also. I guess for a company that makes its money only from their IP and nothing else, they want to keep it quite protected. I still wish they were more open, though.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#9

Urgh, this is not "Unsuitable for Education", it's unsuitable for one pretty narrow (albeit central to the system) educative purpose around System-on-Chip's and GPU's. Kids can still have a fully working linux system hooked up to their tv for $35, which regardless of the OSS status of the hardware is still a win for education in my opinion.

Totaly agree and a computer is after all two parts the hardware and the software and the ability to change both and add on both with such a cheap setup is utterly perfect for break and play style education and that is how alot of people learn.

Another way to look at it is the the Author thinks everybody should learn to drive in a Porche. We all know 99%+ of us don't and start of with a cheap almost end user car and that is what the Pi is in many ways, cheap, effective at what it does and for those who want to go further then they will at least have the foundations to move on with solid grounding.

Sure some parts operate on closed source low-level hardware but who's to say that might not change later on down the line and to lambast it on that one area is missing out on so much.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#10
post #3

Yes, any device you can't resynthesize from VHDL is completely unfit to introduce middle school children to programming. I mean, who ever managed to understand even the tiniest bit of python without mentally reducing it to the electrical patterns in the circuits of the CPU?

I hope you plan to open source that joke otherwise nobody will get it.
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