Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

whitequark.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#51

Post by jlgreco »

zxcdw wrote: post #35

I can almost relate. Consider comparing Raspberry Pi to say Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum. Anyone familiar with programming 8-bit home computers of the 80's knows how simple they were by their hardware and how easy it was to grasp them. What was(and still is) great about them, is that any kid(regardless of age, as long as they can read) was and still is able to learn how the computers work . How many kids these days ge…

When I was a kid I got my indroduction to programming on TI graphing calculators. They are unfortunately expensive (though pretty much every American school has boxes of them sitting around already) and lack the pinouts that Arduinos have (there is an IO port which isn't great, and USB which... is ok.) but they are otherwise fantastic for this purpose.

The TI-BASIC on them is dreadful slow so after you cut your teeth on it and learn the basics of just what programming is, you are encouraged to switch to assembly. In the case of most of those calculators that will be Zilog Z80, of early PC fame. On the higher end calculators you get Motorola M68k's, which you can also program in C fairly easily.

Plusses over Arduino are the keyboard and screen. Downsides include the lack of shields. Anyone who really gets into it is probably going to want to get an arduino anyway, unless they really lack an EE muscle.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#52

Post by flyinglizard »

judofyr wrote: post #32
s_henry_paulson wrote: post #7

Using this logic nearly all school computers are "unsuitable for education" It's silly to describe your one-off use case and then extrapolate that to such a degree, that this can only be called sensationalism.

Yes, all school computers are unsuitable for education of embedded programming . Yes, the title didn't say so, but whitequark didn't submit it here with that title. If you read the post and the title in the context of whitequark's blog it should be pretty clear that he's talking about embedded programming.

Linux programming on embedded systems is much more closely related to PC Linux programming than it is to "bare metal" embedded programming. If someone wants to pick up embedded programming, they should start with an Arduino.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#53

Post by wmf »

judofyr wrote: post #32
s_henry_paulson wrote: post #7

Using this logic nearly all school computers are "unsuitable for education" It's silly to describe your one-off use case and then extrapolate that to such a degree, that this can only be called sensationalism.

Yes, all school computers are unsuitable for education of embedded programming . Yes, the title didn't say so, but whitequark didn't submit it here with that title. If you read the post and the title in the context of whitequark's blog it should be pretty clear that he's talking about embedded programming.

Even embedded programming doesn't require the level of openness that he's whining about.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#54

Post by slantyyz »

regularfry wrote: post #4
mrmagooey wrote: post #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.

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

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

You might be right, but context matters.

Me pulling my "cranky old man" card-- As Louis CK says, "Everything's amazing, nobody's happy."

My first computer was a 4K Tandy Color Computer, which cost something like $400 in 1982 (a significant expense at the time for my parents), and I learned to program in MS Basic.

To me, the Raspberry Pi is a huge win. It can do a million more things than I could do as a kid, and it's not relegated to loading code via cassette tapes or typing (we had to copy code verbatim from magazines back then).

That the device is so inexpensive makes the barrier to get into programming lower than it has ever been... Amazing.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#55

Post by flyinglizard »

grimboy wrote: post #50
flyinglizard wrote: post #26

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 (…

>esoteric open source architectures with no applications in the real world Why does an open source architecture have to be esoteric? It could just as easily be conventional. We don't know for sure that ARM will be as popular in the future. Presumably aim isn't to teach individual intricacies but rather the overall concepts.

First, what's being taught should be applicable to the real world. That means that if you are to produce useful and productive graduates, getting them familiar with ARM is much better than anything else out there.

Second, even if you had a similarly performing architecture, unless some major manufacturer with deep pockets picks it up and fabricates a chip around it, there's not much you could do with it outside of FPGA experimentation (for something that can mimic the power and peripherals of the Pi, with all its shortcomings, you're like to need a multi $k Virtex FPGA).

Third, ARM is friendly enough to its partners and the ecosystem that it won't be going away for a long, long time. It's a reasonably open company as far as documentation goes, and do their share of community contribution. ARM was smart enough to grant architectural licenses to the only companies rich and smart enough to make their own architectures (Marvell, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and a few others), so they can spawn their own variants while still retaining standard ARM compatibility.

I don't see any company seriously threatening ARM's dominance for at least a decade. If you want to do embedded systems or mobile (and soon servers) low-level, you need to know ARM.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#56

Post by nessus42 »

zxcdw wrote: post #35

I can almost relate. Consider comparing Raspberry Pi to say Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum. Anyone familiar with programming 8-bit home computers of the 80's knows how simple they were by their hardware and how easy it was to grasp them. What was(and still is) great about them, is that any kid(regardless of age, as long as they can read) was and still is able to learn how the computers work . How many kids these days ge…

> Yet, this is the exact stuff the kids are interested in! They want to learn how it works.

Speak for yourself! When I was a kid I was more interested in computers than anyone I knew, and I was the first kid I knew to own my own computer, and yet most of the educationsal stuff I could find on computers was the sort of stuff that explained all about registers and CPU cycles and the like. I had ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in that stuff, other than a quick overview of how a computer is even possible. In fact, I found all this low-level stuff being foisted on me as incredibly tedious. I also had a motorcycle when I was a teenager, and I found all the nonsense about registers and CPU cycles to be like trying to explain to me how a carburetor works when what I had asked was how to do wheelies.

I was much more interested in high level languages because they let me see how I might potentially accomplish amazing feats. I found Basic to be tolerable, but the first thing that I found to be truly inspiring was APL, due to its mathematical elegance and its providing a vision of amplified productivity. And you can't get farther away from the hardware than APL!

On the other hand, later in life when I went to college, I did find it very interesting and inspiring to learn how to build (and to actually build!) a micro-controller out of nand gates and an EEPROM. Registers, CPU cycles, and the like, are the monkey in the middle. Too low level to be fun, and too high level to let you feel like you really understand things at a fundamental physical level.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#57

Post by jaggs »

DanBC wrote: post #41
zxcdw wrote: post #35

I can almost relate. Consider comparing Raspberry Pi to say Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum. Anyone familiar with programming 8-bit home computers of the 80's knows how simple they were by their hardware and how easy it was to grasp them. What was(and still is) great about them, is that any kid(regardless of age, as long as they can read) was and still is able to learn how the computers work . How many kids these days ge…

>These days there is just simply no suitable platform to actually play around with Have you seen the Maximite computer? ( http://geoffg.net/maximite.html ) Searching HN shows several references (a couple from me) about this interesting device. It should be really easy to emulate a Z80 / 8080 era CPU with nice graphical outputs for address lines and everything else. And being emulated means that single-stepping this d…

>These days there is just simply no suitable platform to actually play around with

http://www.redferret.net/?p=33596

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#58

Post by rwmj »

gaius wrote: post #48
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…

I dunno, they came enough schematics that you could interface anything you wanted to the user port and read/write to it with what we now call memory mapped I/O. RS232 was a universal standard, the most you would have to do is physically make up a cable. Both the Beeb and the C64 came with a manual that explained to you how to patch the OS (via vectors). On the C64 you could even switch the entire OS out and get its e…

The original article wants the equivalent of an open source Z80/65xx/68k, fuse settings for all the ULAs, schematics for all custom-designed chips, and open source ROM disassemblies.

1980s home computers didn't come with these, even though they had (for the time) very powerful custom graphics and sound chips (eg. Amiga [1]). Of course, some of it was reverse engineered, and some of it has been released long after the fact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#59

Post by regularfry »

slantyyz wrote: post #54
regularfry wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>> It's a win, just not as big a win as it might be. You might be right, but context matters. Me pulling my "cranky old man" card-- As Louis CK says, "Everything's amazing, nobody's happy." My first computer was a 4K Tandy Color Computer, which cost something like $400 in 1982 (a significant expense at the time for my parents), and I learned to program in MS Basic. To me, the Raspberry Pi is a huge win. It can do a m…

I'm not arguing with any of that. If I try to draw a comparison between what got me excited about 8-bits and what's available on the RPi, I still see a disconnect. There was a visceral connection between POKEing a memory location and a pixel going black on my Spectrum, and that's just not there with the RPi. There's a big black lump of Broadcom-stuff between me and the screen.

Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education

#60

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

TomMasz wrote: post #27
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.

Entrepreneurial opportunity!
Post reply on HN