[sakura_k]

At Microsoft I work with an organization named TEALS (Technology Education and Literacy in Schools) which places volunteer software engineers with schools to teach intro computer science & programming classes to high school students. The program has greatly supplemented the intro CS teaching resources available in the Seattle area.

However, the volunteers run into massive roadblocks with school IT departments. Want to install a new browser or (a god forbid) an IDE on lab computers? Expect at least a semester of hand wringing.

This isn't the fault of the IT staff, it's a result of massive underfunding of public education. Everyone does the best they can but school employees are stretched so thin already that it's very hard to drive change to computing resources that are a prerequisite for computing education for those students who don't have access to their own DEV environment.

Long story short: school systems that are strapped for cash don't have the capital resources to bring an alternative architecture up to parity as a teaching tool. They don't even have the resources to support volunteer teachers.

[Falkon1313]

I don't understand. How much funding does it take to install a browser (or even an IDE)? Do they really save money by wasting an entire semester or more doing something that should be so quick and simple?