Raspberry Pi: Anyone planning to get one?

I have a second generation mindstorms kit and my plan is to eventually get kids to interface the pi with it. I disagree strongly with your comments about programming, at the moment the only computing they do as part of the curriculum is Microsoft office whereas in my day we were taught how to program. That has had a serious effect on the number of those who graduate in computing as it's dropped by half since my time ten years ago. Programming however isn't any less important, I don't see why you think it isn't relevant as I think it is a more important skill now we have so many computing devices which still need programs written by programmers.

It's not programming in general that I'm opposed to in schools, it's low level programming (maybe a slightly more inclusive definition of low level programming than most people use). Teaching kids to do anything interesting at all in Java or C or whatever will occupy a whole class (time slot) for a school year. Teaching them to do interesting stuff in Mindstorms or some other fairly abstracted and very easy language takes only a few days and is likely to spark interest for more in depth stuff in some of the kids.

Are you trying to start a computing class or are you trying to wedge some computing into a science class? If it's the former you're right of course, and I misunderstood you in your previous post.

The other thing we did in school, at around age 12, was building our own websites, partially in some quasi-wysiwyg program that I can't remember the name of but also partially in raw html. Just about any topic was allowed, for example students who were in a band could make a website for that band, and the sites were hosted on the school's servers so they could be shared with friends and family. Unfortunately (in this case) the bar for what is accepted by people as a half decent website is so high now that it might be discouraging to students when after a few lessons all they really know how to do is hyperlinks and img tags and a few other basic things.

What I'm trying to say is that students' very first experiences with programming shouldn't be something where they will mess up because of a missing semicolon or misplaced curly brackets. Something like Mindstorms (maybe not the best example but I don't really know what else is out there these days) has logic and algorithms and problem solving and all the stuff that's fundamental to and interesting about programming, without the high learning curve of code getting in the way.

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Originally Posted by Steven P Jobs

I'm not sure teaching kids low level programming makes all that much sense at this point. There are much more relevant ways to get them excited about Math, Science, and Engineering. It seems kind of like forcing kids to read Shakespeare and thinking that it'll make them appreciate literature, that's just not how it is.

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The third world isn't as under-developed as some may think.

However, I do agree with you. The problem is, the west, the UK especially, are full of arrogant fools, who think they know how to solve other countries problems, how they should be educated, how they should live and their beliefs, when their own countries have massive problems of their own and severely dysfunctional societies.