[robfitz]

I looked into this a bit (I wanted to take the same ideas and package them for elementary schools to teach to students).

Vending machines are far from ideal, although they're still plausible if you have a friend who owns a car repair shop or something similar with a few steady workers plus customer traffic.

If I was doing it today, I would take one of the single-serving coffee machines. Some of them have coin slots, pricing controls, and protected inventory. They're a bit expensive to buy individually (a couple grand) but might make sense to share the responsibilities and decisions among a class or a group of family friends.

Because of the smaller footprint, also easy to add to a teacher's lounge, office, etc and it's possible the manufacturer would cut you a break for doing something so PR-able, especially if you turn it into a repeatable school program.

Drop me a note if anyone decides to pursue something like this -- I'd be happy to help where I can: developing the curriculum, yelling at suppliers, or coming up with new lower-cost hardware.

[patrickk]

Good thinking on the coffee machine. A former housemate worked in a corner shop and mentioned that the coffee machine had the highest percentage markup of anything for sale there, in the order of 1000-1200% if memory serves me correctly.

[joelhaus]

My father leases/finances equipment and occasionally gets the used machines back after the term expires. Was thinking that a website positioning the vending machines as a great learning tool for kids would be an interesting way to sell them. Depending on the popularity, I imagine you might even be able to build some web applications that would help the kids manage and find locations for the machines (a sort of marketplace for machine owners and location owners). There's the possibility of upgrading the machines and even adding NFC support to older ones too.

Am looking into how many machines I can get my hands on now...

[joelhaus]

It turns out that they don't lease vending machines, but he does have connections with manufacturers. Feel free to reach out if anyone is interested.