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I can talk to managing Pis in an educational setting, and honestly, it is less bad than expected. (Disclaimer: No longer a school sysadmin. But was for a number of years.) First some comparisons. Kids are seriously rough on technology. We had a fleet of about three hundred laptops, two hundred iPads, and two hundred Pis in the junior school. In a year, we'd end up with about a hundred laptop screen replacements, two hundred keyboard replacements and about a hundred hard drive replacements. About ten "I accidentally dropped the laptop in the river"s. We'd cycle the laptop out for a brand new one at four years, if it survived. In the same year, about sixty iPad screen replacements, ten or so battery replacements, and twenty or so river dunkings. Only ever had one hard drive failure, apart from water damage, but the iPads were on a short two-year upgrade cycle. The Pis were used for the robotics clubs (optional) and programming (compulsary). Pis aren't great for kids and robotics due to lack of protection on the pins for dumb mistakes. We had about twenty fizzle the mysterious smoke every year. About twenty more than experienced SD card failure in the year, usually related to yanking a power cord, not direct write failure. We also had a couple students a year who snapped theirs in half. All in all, the cost of maintaining the Pi fleet was negligible besides the rest. |