Endless Computers Introducing $299 "Hack" Laptop To Teach Kids To Code

[dkasak]

What happened to letting kids be kids? seriously, besides this being just another way to milk people of $$$

Duh! If kids want to learn some coding, and there is no hardware around for them to immediately use, this is a great way for them to get into it on a very lean budget. They'd have to have supportive parents, of course. What would you do if you theoretically had kids? Kick them outside and tell them to learn turning tricks on the street?

[Vistaus]

No we haven't. Hell, Apple has a global initiative for creating millions of future programmers with their Swift platform and XCode has this entire set up to do just that, not to mention every school now has access to it in the US and growing around the world. Sorry, but BASIC to make a text calculator or a schedule/grades report back when computing was a hobby and an insane amount of time wasting just to do that isn't what kids are learning today. More importantly, the idea that this world is lacking for programming is absurd.

We need to get them to understand the applied sciences [where everyone in them has to eventually learn 2 or 3 languages to do a lot of their data analysis and collection], not make everyone create social network apps, games, games, games!

By the way, a $300 laptop is a POS. Back in '89 my painful 80286 was $3k with 4MB of RAM. Schools are building out platforms for students. A better solution is to get the K-12 system to buy each kid a laptop as part of their curriculum ala Universities which add it to their tuition and fees. From there a more capable system can be purchased, a recycling system can be put into place and systems will be upgraded every 3-5 years until they graduate.

Yea, we know it's a POS 'cause you only like Apple stuff anyway.

[rabcor]

It's based around an Asus E406MA

• 14 inch laptop
• FullHD
• 1920x1080
• RAM: 4GB
• Color: Star Gray
• Up to 14 hours of battery life
• Weight: 2.86 lbs
• Ports: MicroSD, 2x USB 3.0, Headphone combo jack, HDMI

So it's a Celeron with 32GB eMMC - so I presume an Atom-based Celeron. It'll probably suck even for Minecraft TBH. They'll be asking for a proper console within a year, but at least they'll be able to type up their homework and do internet research.

How much was the first computer your parents bought you? $299 seems more than reasonable, assuming that what they are promising actually happens - otherwise you might as well just buy the original hardware, pre-customisation.

You can get a good computer for $300... go up to $500 and you can have one that plays most games just fine too.

[N-iX]

I beg to differ. In my country, there's more demand for software developers than we can offer, so they have to hire foreign people to do it, but even that's not enough. So yeah, in the right country, you *can* make money with software development. Barbers lol, well, in my country, there's a barber/hairdresser every three houses or so (not literally, but you get my point). So no need for those.

Completely agree! In Eastern Europe many companies make big money in outsourcing services for Europe and USA. And quantity of IT-graduates every year is really high. You can check this information here: https://www.n-ix.com/it-outsourcing-...market-report/

[sdack]

First World problems...