Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#21

Post by prof_hobart » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 11:57 AM UTC

smoyer wrote: post #17

Is there some way I can get back the time I invested in reading that article? I'm honestly not sure why this article has as many up-votes as it does.

How much did you read?

I got far enough to see the first section was about whether the internals of the CPU were open source and thought "Why would I care about that if I'm trying to teach a kid to program?". I then very quickly scanned the article to see if there was anything that was vaguely relevant to the average use that this is intended for, decided there wasn't and closed it down.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#22

Post by hermanhermitage » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 11:59 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #18

All this is pretty much the same as the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Vic-20, C-64, Archimedes and other successful teaching platforms. Sure, third parties disassembled the ROMs, and there were some schematics, but by and large these systems were closed and incompatible with anything else. Edit: Which is not to say, I don't think more openness would be a wonderful thing. But it's not necessary for it to be a success in sch…

This is an excellent observation. Might I also suggest that having some things closed or out of reach is also a fine way of encouraging people to dig in.

Some of the best young minds will search behind doors they are told not to look.

Its about getting the height of the hurdle just right!

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#23

Post by mvanga » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:01 PM UTC

The notion of Open Source Hardware is extremely slippery and while it can be argued on a moral plane, it doesn't work too well in practice.

Where do you stop when going down the layers of the stack? The article mentions OpenRISC but neglects the fact that the FPGA's that can run its HDL use proprietary, vendor-specific toolchains.

What about the peripherals? I don't know of any open source DRAM chips that could be used for the electronic designs. It's not a viable business model and never will be in such a competitive market I imagine.

In the end, the biggest value boards like the Raspberry Pi provide is accessibility. Every kid can have a computer of his own without worrying about getting scolded by mom for corrupting the disk. They give children a sense of control over these amazing machines which consequently allow them to dream up weird and crazy things they can do. Their real education lies here.

What else do you really care about? It's not the last and final RPi that will ever release! Things will only get better.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#24

Post by brador » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:10 PM UTC

Real reason: Finding a teacher who understands how to use or teach rpi is next to impossible.

Unfortunately, I believe Rpis sales were hype marketing that got out of hand. People thought they were getting a tiny usable computer at a great price. What they got was a bunch of chips that knowledgable people could use, yet the details go way over the head of the majority of impulse buyers. These buyers weren't missold, they just didn't have a clue what they were buying.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#25

Post by eckyptang » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:21 PM UTC

It's fine.

The bedrock abstraction (usable languages etc) is higher than the hardware. The hardware we don't care about. It's disposable. In fact, you can drag pretty much anything you can do from the Pi onto another platform and carry on.

If the languages chosen were pretty tied to the hardware, then I'd worry i.e. if people were using it to learn ARM assembly or were developing early UNIX versions on PDP11s. But they're not.

It's suitable for education only because it's very cheap, it's functional and the bedrock abstraction is higher than the hardware.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#26

Post by flyinglizard » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:22 PM UTC

The part about the ARM core not being open source is a joke. Would it be better to teach children and students about esoteric open source architectures with no applications in the real world?

The real problem of the Pi, and not just as far as education use is concerned, is the crap Broadcom chip. After working with Broadcom, I would never-ever-ever consider them if there is an alternative. They strangle open source (which is shooting yourself in the foot, really, being that the community produces the best drivers out there), don't release documentation and won't even sell you the actual part unless you were buying millions.

The chip itself is outdated, bug ridden (Synopsys DWC USB, anyone? I'm making good money debugging the drivers of this DWC USB for my customers - one with a proprietary ASIC and one with an obscure Chinese craplet chip - so I know first hand how bad it can get, especially with the earlier versions) and has very lacking, if any, documentation available.

TI are the polar opposite of Broadcom in these regards: they nurture the open source community and encourage it to use their processors (Pandaboard ES contains a very high end OMAP4460, same processor as Galaxy Nexus and the weird sphere Nexus media thingy), providing near complete documentation and lots of technical knowledge.

The Pi design team essentially chose a bad foundation just to grab some headlines with their lowball pricing. Now people are slowly realizing how bad of a platform it really is.

A side effect of the Broadcom attitude is that even with a full manufacturing file for the Pi, no one can reproduce the design when the CPU can't be sourced. So much for openness.

I'm waiting for one of the mainstream manufacturers (TI, Freescale, Samsung to a lesser extent) to pick this up and sponsor a super low cost, basic board. The benefit to their commercial customers from the creation of a broad community and code base would be immediate and immense.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#27

Post by TomMasz » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:29 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #13

The author does make a very good point about GPIO PIN protection and I'll agree fully with him on that a few extra resistors here and there would of not added that much to the cost and made something a little bit more forgiving, which is a good point for education. But it does open up a whole new add-on market for kits which in itself can only be good.

Having burned up my share of electronics, this is probably the only part of the article I thought worthwhile. A little daughterboard with GPIO pin protection and buffering for 5V would be a great way to introduce students to real world interfacing.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#28

Post by jiggy2011 » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:39 PM UTC

I don't think many kids are going to be using their raspberry pi to redesign the CPU or rewrite the firmware drivers.

The idea should be to make programming simple and accessible, perhaps being able to create some games or connect it to an arduino and make some fun toys.

I actually think that shipping it without a box is great idea, it demystifies computers a lot if you can see that it all just boils down to a bunch of wires and chips on a PCB. Making a custom case could also be a great Design/Technology class project.

Is it a perfect open platform? No. Is it a lot more open and inherently tinker able than a locked down Windows 8 PC or an iPad? Hell yes.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#29

Post by octotoad » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:52 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #28

I don't think many kids are going to be using their raspberry pi to redesign the CPU or rewrite the firmware drivers. The idea should be to make programming simple and accessible, perhaps being able to create some games or connect it to an arduino and make some fun toys. I actually think that shipping it without a box is great idea, it demystifies computers a lot if you can see that it all just boils down to a bunch…

"or connect it to an arduino"

As the article mentions, this doesn't seem to be as easy as it should/could be.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#30

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 12:52 PM UTC

mvanga wrote: post #23

The notion of Open Source Hardware is extremely slippery and while it can be argued on a moral plane, it doesn't work too well in practice. Where do you stop when going down the layers of the stack? The article mentions OpenRISC but neglects the fact that the FPGA's that can run its HDL use proprietary, vendor-specific toolchains. What about the peripherals? I don't know of any open source DRAM chips that could be us…

The complaint about lack of documentation is valid. Of course programming to the hardware is desirable; that's why you'd buy the thing, to do device control.