I'm always extremely disappointed by the marketing of extremely expensive engineering kits and robots towards education. Most of the practical learning to be had is in figuring out how to make the thing work.

The kits become little more than elaborate toys with a few extra steps added to make the student feel like they did something. However, all they did was follow instructions. For at least 90% of what engineers do on a regular basis, following carefully tested instructions is not one of them.

"what we were seeing was the "hacker phenomenon," that, for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural." [0]

What you're describing is something that comes naturally to you and almost every person on this website. Kids who think that way will likely end up in engineering of some sort regardless.

The rest need this sort of guided approach to even show them that they could even possibly do this sort of thing and it helps move that percentage up.

Although, that being said I don't really think much to the Pi-Top 4 at all. You'd definitely have a more valuable empowering experience holding an actual board and plugging wires directly into it, the end result would be the same and I feel they smoothed out the wrong part of the experience.

[0] http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/#smalltalkAndC...

There is a significant issue of retention for students. You typically want a "training-wheels" sort of experience to capture the student's imagination early on. Will it be the last tech they ever but? Obviously not. But having options other than "build stuff from scratch" is super important to growing interest in any particular industry.

Written by a guy who experienced a hell of a lot of criticism 20 years ago for writing games in JavaScript and now is the lead VR product engineer for a company.

I'm confused why this is actually relevant to the Pi-Top, which has always had a strong educational focus.

For someone who is in their teens and is eager to gain practical experience without dozens of hours of scrubbing YouTube and practicing programming basics, these kids are a solid idea. Further, I think the notion of pushing hard to differentiate itself from transitional machine form factors and work on a rugged"standard compute unit" is a very interesting experiment.

I'm not sure it's for me. But I've built a little Pi case with a charge controllers, a battery, and a screen just like this and I liked the result. This is certainly nicer than what I cobbled together and the idea of making a standard compute form factor for projects is really good.

I'm more than a vaguely capable software engineer, which is probably why this is still attractive. I have little patience for DevOps- and SysAdmin-type tasks. I think "reasonably motivated" part is the value-add here. If I'm just a hobbyist, and my inclination is towards having a grass-roots experience, then yes, I'll source the parts. But if I'm just trying to get something done (especially if I don't have a 3D printer), then I often just want to get things in a prefab package.

While I can see why someone might think this, from your comment I suspect you have never tried using a Pi? The value in these kits is not really in avoiding devops or sysadmin tasks, the default Raspian Linux distribution intended for the Pi is largely as ready out of the box for development work as any of these kits are. Most of them just ship Raspian anyway!

I have the original Pi and used it for a few basic things. I'm curious to try out the new Pi 4, because I found the original Pi to be too overpowered for what I would normally use an MCU for, but too underpowered for what I'd use a PC for.