Today, on top of that, every child is given their own personal laptop.
N.B. this is for public schools -- paid private schools have it even better and/or can demand students to bring their own iPad.

Which depresses me even more - even better? They can neither program, type, nor do handwriting with it.

You can do all of the above with an ipad. Admittedly the typing won't be great (true for any tablet) but add a bluetooth keyboard and you're sweet.

I use my ipad for taking handwritten notes at work every day.

The poor kids can't even use a decent touch keyboard like Swype! (Plus the way it's anticompetitive, catering to just one company - rather than "must have a laptop" it's every school saying "must have a Samsung laptop".)

Whilst I wouldn't go as far as saying people should learn in a GUI-less Linux, it does depress me to think we'll have a generation of students well educated at posting to Facebook and playing Angry Birds, with children's education fees going to Apple.

I do agree though that computers are plentiful. And if schools have got money to throw on non-computers from Apple, they're not short of money.

I don't think Hodgman meant iPad (as in the Apple product) specifically and more tablet in general (could be wrong there, but that's what some schools are opting for in NZ).

And being realistic here, we're not expecting kids in these classes to produce a AAA game or an enterprise app. We're talking about teaching them an understanding of how computers obey one command after another.

And being realistic here, we're not expecting kids in these classes to produce a AAA game or an enterprise app. We're talking about teaching them an understanding of how computers obey one command after another.

QFE.

It's exposing everyone to the basics.

This thread is kind long and I am getting into it kind late, but I want to add something that I did not yet identified in my overview of the thread.

Currently we are experiencing a big rush of computers and embedded systems in our lives. The right word I am aiming here is ubiquitous computing.

I think most of you agree that the future we are looking for is something where the systems are so natural in our lives we won't event notice it.

Okay there is maybe a SciFi utopic model for this kind of thing, but analysing our current life model I would like to point out the following:

- A regular person (in the sense of someone without much computer skills/knowledge) often is overwhelmed by the amount of information computers and systems present

- If the regular person understood the basics of how a computer work, maybe it would not scare him/her so much. A little bit of the "magic" would go away and leave space to reasoning and logic (which is good)

- A kid has a great potential for learning and less problems handling with computers

- So a kid is totally capable of learning the basic backend of computers and systems, and capable of achieving incredible things with it (I already pointed out in an older thread the potential of 9-13 yo kids hacking and programming incredible stuff)

Therefore, if we start implementing a course on computer systems / programming of some sort for our kids, this transition to ubiquituous programming will be a little easier and maybe we can find out some hidden geniuses out there too.

I think that the good things achieved by more people familiar with programming/systems organization overcomes the bad stuff.

I don't think Hodgman meant iPad (as in the Apple product) specifically and more tablet in general (could be wrong there, but that's what some schools are opting for in NZ).

And being realistic here, we're not expecting kids in these classes to produce a AAA game or an enterprise app. We're talking about teaching them an understanding of how computers obey one command after another.

QFE.

It's exposing everyone to the basics.