[Cumpiler69]

>but in part so the world where a lightweight low-consumption device can open some doors for connectivity and learning, this looks like a great solution

I hear this repeated over and over again in RPi threads, but nobody ever provides any proof of developing nations using RPis as affordable desktop computers apart from some PR articles every now and then involving partnerships and donations.

This feels more of an opinionated viewpoint or stereotype from clueless westerners from rich countries they have on developing countries. $50+ for a RPi might be affordable computer for you when your average computer at home is $700+, but for people in developing countries even $50 is A LOT of money and they're not gonna spend it buying RPis.

As someone originally from a developing nation, most people there use x86 PCs or laptops from the used market or rescued from e-waste imports and repaired because they're much cheaper (nearly free) and more abundant than a new RPI 5 based computer, not to mention more versatile in what SW they can run.

Or, more recently people started using old Android phones to learn on because they're also cheap and abundant and can be used for coding/tinkering. But RPis, not so much.

The OLPC project intended to provide cheap computers to developing countries also failed in part because, just like a RPI as a computer, westerners don't understand the market of developing countries and do product development from their own privileged perspective.

This isn't meant to denigrate anyone's work or effort, just wanted to share the reality in the field that I encountered.

Oh and BTW, even in the rich west where I live now, a RPi5 is pretty expresive and impractical for a general purpose computer when you can find Core i5 laptops with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs for that money on the used market. And it comes with display and battery to boot and can be used on the go.

[whywhywhywhy]

It's because in reality it just doesn't work that way, the reality of what education really needs is ways to collaborate on documents and sync those back to teachers, ways to broadcast or watch recordings of lessons and most of all reliability and control. In reality these needs are better served by Chromebooks or Android tablets. The fact that the Pi is a real computer and runs the real version of Python on a real OS while meaning a lot to the "maker movement" and hoddyist hackers it means nothing in the reality of teaching a child how code works which would probably be done more successfully in a web app and a web based Python interpreter or the wider reality of using a computer for work outside of code (most of the curriculum).

Personally I wish the world was different and those things mattered but in the reality of education it doesn't and as time goes on it feels more and more like the education manifesto of Pi feels opposite of reality. Take this like from their release:

"during the early days of the COVID pandemic, when we worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver thousands of Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kits and monitors to young people studying from home in the UK"

Like what use would that have been? The systems can't run Zoom, not powerful enough to handle Google Meet, they can't handle videostreams competently enough for a conference, they don't have a microphone, don't have a camera like how would this have helped anyone learn during COVID when the main requirement was video conferencing.

[Cumpiler69]

>Like what use would that have been?

Advertising, PR, virtue signaling and maybe getting some kids into some embedded linux development who will then grow up and use the Pi in commercial products at work.

Win on all fronts for the RPi corpora-, sorry I meant foundation.

[naikrovek]

You have a very myopic view, intentionally or not.

[Cumpiler69]

Maybe you can detail and clarify my view on why you think that is?

[ajb]

Yeah that quote is a bit nuts.

The reality is that the pi isn't a general educational product - it's a computing educational product. And that is fine. If a kid wants to learn about programming, about what goes on under the hood, it's a fine addition to their locked down school Chromebook.

[Cumpiler69]

>about what goes on under the hood

But you can do that on a regular laptop/computer running Linux sine that's what RPi also runs. You don't need an additional RPi to learn what's under the hood of a device running Linux.

[cdt5050]

And that gets really, really complicated when you have 1 teacher and 200 students to teach that week, each with a different hardware configuration, differing skill levels, devices in various states of repair, etc.

RPi is pretty much the cheapest way to get a brand new, standardized device into the hands of each of 200 students, then give the same curriculum to each student that will work the same, with predictable errors the teacher is going to be more ready to troubleshoot, instead of trying to figure out why some kid's PC segfaults because of an error on a Broadcom device that was only available on devices manufactured in May of 2014 (but sold in September of 2017, the ones manufactured 05/2014 but sold before 9/2017 are perfectly fine) when he tries to use any function using sin in Python (but the libc one works just fine).

Schools have historically paid a premium for this, like the Basic Stamp, which was really just a PIC microcontroller preflashed with some other stuff on the PCB to help it run, and sold at a crazy markup, but was well integrated into a standard curriculum that gave every student the same starting point and something that a teacher could easily help hundreds of students with. It's also kind of why Arduino became so popular -- did the same thing, but a fraction of the cost.

[ajb]

One good reason is that you can try stuff that would screw your laptop. Whereas with a pi it's just flashing the card again.

I used to work for a company that sold pi kits for schools, you could let 7-9 year olds try stuff that teachers and parents would not let them do to a laptop. Totally breaking a computer and fixing it again is a great experience, but not one you want to have on your primary machine

[alxlaz]

Yeah, I'm going to second that. I've lived in (technically I am from what used to be a "developing nation" at the time), worked in, and worked with people from, "developing nations", both in education and industry. It's just not how things work.

The Pi is a good educational platform for e.g. Western organizations that need to kickstart education programs at a scale. It's infinitely easier to ship 100 Pis than to locally source 100 similar computers and set them up. And it's as good a platform for introducing people to computers as any, I guess. But it's not the kind of platform that gets "grassroots" adoption.

First off, if you live in a developing country, you want access to technology with wide-scale application (and the opportunities it brings). Realistically, what you want is something that runs Windows 11 or (dare dream...) macOS, that you can use to write mobile apps and games, web apps that target interesting and "hot" technologies and markets, learn system administration for contemporary platforms and so on. That alone kind of excludes anything that's not x86 or a Mac.

Hipster platforms for retrogaming and "radical simplicity" is something that engineering professionals in well-off countries can afford to do as a hobby. But if you're learning programming in the hope that it will be a development opportunity (for yourself and your family, or for your country, no matter what form it takes, whether you want to emmigrate or stay and develop your local industry) you want to learn things with real industrial relevance. The few Pis I've seen used in a scenario like these were almost exclusively embedded devices, largely because the Pi is an easily-available embedded platform, making it easy to outsource development for it.

But other than that? No, once you factor in shipping, currency conversion and all the accessories you need, a Pi is about as expensive as a hand-me-down laptop that can run a lot more software, with a lot less hassle, and isn't a fire hazard you have to be careful around with and/or fit into a makeshift case (because, if you have to scrounge money for a 50 USD Pi, even a 10 USD case is going to be kind of expensive).

[mark_l_watson]

I would add Chromebooks to your list of Windows and macOS computers. Chromebooks support video calls, are versatile, and offer a ‘good enough’ Linux system for educational use and light weight programming.

I use a $9000 macOS setup in my home office (stuffed Mac Mini and Apple’s very nice studio monitor). As a backup I have an older, but still very nice System 76 Linux laptop. I joke to my wife that everything I need to do, I can also do on my less than three hundred dollar three year old Lenovo Duet Chromebook - just not as efficiently. I had a friend who was a software developer for the Apache Foundation, paid well by IBM, and he only used a tiny NetBook laptop, little keyboard, tiny monitor, and he argued that using minimal hardware removed distractions.

[naikrovek]

> nobody ever provides any proof of developing nations using RPis as affordable desktop computers

Just because they're not widely used for that now doesn't make them unsuitable for that. They're an option, and options are good.

[lukeck]

This is a really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

In your opinion, what would a product that successfully provides low cost computing in developing markets look like? Is one even needed?

[cdt5050]

Nah, the lack of hardware is a real problem in developing countries, and is something that OLPC and Raspberry Pi are well suited to solve. But hardware is the easy part -- the much harder part of the problem to solve is the lack of human capital in computing education, and that's the part of the equation OLPC missed.

For example, they sent hundreds of thousands of laptops to Uruguay, but they hardly got used for education because the teachers just simply didn't know how to use them or integrate them into the curriculum. But Uruguay continued the OLPC model under the Ceibal project, and it's only just now, ~15 years later, after teacher training regarding technology is far more widespread and teachers have far more experience in utilizing computers in the classroom, that it's starting to show effectiveness. And the OLPC model is considered a success in Uruguay, but it took over a decade of persistence to work itself out.

So this is actually something that RPi is tackling head on -- the Raspberry Pi Foundation is actually working hard to develop curriculums meant to address challenges in developing countries, like poor internet connectivity (which means a curriculum designed to be self-sufficient), and then also putting a lot of effort into training educators. This is before they even try sending Raspberry Pi's out, and largely is designed around using the already limited computing devices they have (not RPis) because a lot of those governments are unwilling to invest in computer education (because they have bigger problems to worry about and consider things like every student having a computer to be a luxury when nutrition is a more pressing matter on the quality of education).

Frankly, even the idea of "most people there use x86 PCs or laptops from the used market or rescued from e-waste imports and repaired because they're much cheaper" is a fair bit of a luxury and lacking understanding of the challenges of computing education in developing countries once you leave the cities and start looking at rural populations. In Mexico, nationally, 45% of households have a computer and 56% have an internet connection. Once you go to rural areas, that's ~20%. And that's before you consider socioeconomic status and the disparity in access to computers and internet. Some stats put the lower-income Mexicans at 5% computer ownership nationally.

In Rural Mexico, it's normal for a computer lab of 30-50 computers to serve a school of 500-1,000 students, or for schools to have NO computers and instead send students to nearby schools occasionally to utilize their larger computer labs for learning computer skills, and that's the only computer access they realistically have. This is really a great use case for RPi's, but like I said -- the hardware is the easy part to solve. The fact of the matter is if you sent a crate of RPi's or any other computer to these schools, they'd sit in the boxes for years because they don't have the infrastructure or the human resources to start using them. And that's actually the part that RPi Foundation is focusing on first.