The $9 computer that will change everything #edtechex

Forget OLPC’s $100 laptop or the $35 Raspberry Pi, because here comes the $9 CHIP computer.

Bye bye digital divide and the haves and the have nots. Students can use the $50 CHIP pocket as a portable computer for home and school use, or plug their CHIP into a monitor for $10 more. Districts that are outfitting their high schoolers with Chromebooks will be able to outfit the entire district with CHIP Pockets and still have money left over for training.

Biggest downside I see is the fact that it doesn’t have Flash.

Full disclosure, I backed this Kickstarter :slight_smile:

It’s tough to say how this will impact education. Early adopters will see immediate application to work students complete. The question I have: Is the device powerful enough for students to complete their work without it crashing?

$9, how can you pass up that price?

I would worry about the processor speed, RAM, and available storage.

Without messing around with it, how much coding does a teacher or IT department need to know to make it more functional?

I love the idea but the computing power educators and students are used to doesn’t seem to be there.

From what I read, it should be 10-20% faster than the current Raspberry Pi B+.

It’s running Debian, so it shouldn’t take too much to support. We have 600 1:1 Linux laptops that aren’t that difficult to manage.

I hope you’re not implying that if Google Docs don’t run then it’s not worth it. :smile: The CHIP should be able to do what the Pi does now, run Chromium, Minecraft, and Scratch, for example. Is that powerful enough for students and teachers? I don’t know.

Last night I dumped the current Debian distribution for the Pi on my B+, and will play with it to see how the performance holds up.

It would be great for setting up a Print Server or such as we are moving more away from the large, expensive servers to more cloud-based resources.

Ok, props to @ScottKinkoph because if the CHIP isn’t a lot faster than the Pi Model B+ then it will be a lot harder to integrate performance wise. Minecraft runs swimmingly on it, Chromium (the open source version of Chrome) not so much.

But without the web, could it still be useful? Has the web turned into a monopoly where it dictates what happens in the classroom? (Hmmm, that sounds like the next #edtechex topic!)