hnthrow12345

Thank you so much for this response. Completely agree with everything you're saying.

I was getting quite sad about the other responses. It feels a lot like survivorship bias to me. Kinda like "I suffered through this, so others should also be able to suffer through it".

I don't see why everyone else here seems to think it's fine to put students through this hell.

This is actually a pretty cool idea. Unfortunately they only have 8 gigs RAM, not sure why, maybe there are multiple configs.

I think the alternative is buying proper laptops for about 1000$. Let's say they're good for about 4 years, that's $250 per participant (it's a yearly course).

Definitely in the budget. It's just that my boss thinks it's not necessary.

Thanks for your suggestion. I think not using an IDE isn't the best idea, since then they've never used it when they start their first job. They're complete beginners. While I agree it's important to understand the fundamentals (and I do in fact teach them how to compile just with javac), I also think it's important to be familiar with modern tooling.

No, unfortunately no SSD. I think that's the main problem actually.

The courses are government funded, so people without programming background.

> Learning to make do with older, limited hardware can be a very educational and even enlightening experience.

I'm not sure about that. I think for beginners, there's so much complexity already... it's going to be very tough for them.

Thanks for your suggestions.

I think the main problem is actually the lack of an SSD. Opening programs, files and compiling takes just forever.

I showed this to my boss but he just thinks it's not a big deal.

I don't know, without an SSD, I think it's going to be quite a pain. I don't think upgrading 10 year old models makes sense economically.

Thanks for the suggestions!