[japhyr]

I have dealt with this directly, so I'll share a bit of perspective from experience rather than just saying "deal with it".

I was teaching high school math and science in the late 2000s, and I wanted to start teaching some introductory programming classes. But at that point in time we had an aging fleet of 10-year-old Windows machines. There were 30 of them sitting on the edges of our classrooms, and about 3 of them worked reliably. In one semester, I taught students how to install Linux on these machines, and then I taught an introductory programming class. It worked because I had 8-12 students to work with, and they were eager to learn about how computers work; they weren't focused on programming in particular. Our whole school (~30 students in a small alternative school) ended up using Linux for two years until our district reinvested in new machines, and in ongoing maintenance.

This is a nice story and everyone feels good hearing about it. But the reality is, there was about a 50/50 split between time spent focused on programming and time spent focused on fixing old hardware and maintaining Linux on that older hardware.

This kind of solution is not as scalable as many people like to think. Sure, random people can take an old machine and choose to run with it. And you can do this with groups on occasion. But if you're mixing people with new machines and people with 10 year old machines, you're almost certainly going to lose many of the people on the older machines. Things will take 2-4 times as long for them, and if you're slowing down to support them you're going to lose the people who are on the newer machines and ready to focus more on the content of the course.

There are other solutions. For a coding school, I would want to identify the lowest-spec new or recent machine that will work well for the given curriculum, and find a way to get enough of those machines to loan to students.

[hnthrow12345]

Thank you so much for this response. Completely agree with everything you're saying.

I was getting quite sad about the other responses. It feels a lot like survivorship bias to me. Kinda like "I suffered through this, so others should also be able to suffer through it".

I don't see why everyone else here seems to think it's fine to put students through this hell.