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> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is

by ux-app 10y ago

> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them to install native software is fine. I recently did a small unit on binary data. It was really handy for students to install a hex editor, inspect a flat text file in binary mode and map out the ascii table for themselves. I don't think that's possible on a Chromebook. I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook. I'm also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful.

deleted 10y ago
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dpark 10y ago
Thanks for clarifying. I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding. I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding. I think they can probably work there, but you're right that a "real" computer is a better choice for that.
- ecspike 10y ago
  There are a couple of Chrome apps that can run offline and do coding. I've used Caret and Advanced REST client on occasion for things. It gets a bit tricky if you need something that can't work without a real webserver but there's a lot of beginner stuff you can do with it. crouton unlocked a bit more functionality giving you the possibility of a Linux base layer, albeit likely not a great idea to have kids put the machines into dev mode. But that might be workable if staff did it. I've dogfooded a bunch of the Web Development content we make at Udacity using either a pure Chromebook or Chromebook + Crouton.
  - canuckintime 10y ago
    Please describe your PURE Chromebook setup to take the Udacity Web Development Course. Also is there a PURE Chromebook (or Chromebook+Android apps) setup to take an Udacity Android course?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Apparently ChromeOS devices are so useful that everyone has to force developer mode with Crouton to make use of them. Never got the point of a browser based OS.
      - toast0 10y ago
        A browser only OS isn't for everyone, but it does work well for the many people who literally never use anything other than their browser. If you know someone who never uses office applications and is always ending up with three layers of malware, a chromebook might be good for them. Video chat is a bit iffy too, if you don't care for google hangouts.
      - bitmapbrother 10y ago
        No, everyone does not have to force developer mode on. If you need the extra functionality then it's an option for some people. As for the point of Chrome OS, well, it's for people that don't need the bag of hurt desktop OS's provide.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    > crouton Correct me if I'm wrong but is this not the hack where every time you boot your system it tells you to press a key to reset it and if you press that key it instantly blanks the partition. This seem absurd even for an expert user to use full time let alone school kids.
    - carussell 10y ago
      That's not crouton. That comes from Google's coreboot-derived firmware. See https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/2014-firmware-summit https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/2014-firmware-summit It's true, though, that the whole process needs to be made more straightforward and easily circumventable. It's just not a part of crouton.
- Adaptive 10y ago
  I'm running a coding class right now that is almost entirely run over ssh on chromebooks to a linux server. Works beautifully. No fancy IDE, but lots of actual learning to code.
  - kaspiCZ 10y ago
    Have you considered online tools such as Cloud9, replit etc.? If so, is the problem missing features, workflow or pricing?
    - 0xCMP 10y ago
      Eclipse's Che is also very interesting. I hate the name, but it was super when I tried it.
    - criddell 10y ago
      If I were teaching, I would definitely look at something like Cloud9. I'm in the process of going through Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial based on Cloud9 and I'm blown away by how good it is.
    - carussell 10y ago
      FWIW, amid the talk about Raspberry Pis, the (fully open) BeagleBone Black/Green has a default experience for casual-tinker-friendly programming where it spins up an on-board Cloud9 instance for the user to poke around. It's slightly more expensive than its Pi contemporary, but that's expected when everyone keeps flocking to the Pi and the alternative can't make use of the same volume discounts and self-fund engineering to put new board revisions out every year. And even for all that, it's a popular alternative—you're not left hanging out in no-man's land with some exotic hardware. Check the hackerboards.com surveys from over the years that show it trailing the Pi(s).
  - willvarfar 10y ago
    Does X forwarding work? Or has someone got some kind of screen-scraping client that runs in a browser?
  - yoz-y 10y ago
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I would expand coding to include general computer use. Sure, you can teach biology or physics or English using whatever device is most convenient. But if you're trying to teach the workings and use of computers (i.e. what most people will have on computer classes), using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions.
  - ux-app 10y ago
    > using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions Absolutely. Most 12 year old kids don't know about file size units. Relative file sizes, converting between units etc. There's so much incidental learning that occurs too. The other day i was discussing file sizes with a student and we observed that there was a difference between a file's reported size vs size on disk. This led to a great little segue about physical disk structure, tracks, sectors and clusters. The boy was fascinated with some lower level detail. All that learning would have been lost if we were using a gimped cloud based FS.
    - criddell 10y ago
      > This led to a great little segue about physical disk structure, tracks, sectors and clusters. These days, those are abstractions as well. That's basically the API that the mass storage controller presents to the OS. I'm not sure you could explain a hard drive to a lay person anymore. Most of the time, I'm kind of surprised that they work at all.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions. Only if you are using them wrong; while I think iPads are poor tools forany purposes, including that one, from a UI perspective (or, at least, inefficient by the time you address the interface issues), iPads and Chromebooks don't restrict the ability to teach full-spectrum computing, as, they are perfectly capable tools for accessing and interacting with general purpose computers. Now, clearly, the exact details of how you use them in that teaching and th supporting infrastructure might be slightly different than if you were giving students PCs, but then, you need a network environment with educational infrastructure if you are teaching full-spectrum computing with modern relevance anyway, and the detail are going to vary by what you use on the front end. That doesn't rule out any front end choice, it just means that the front end choice impacts other choices.
- baldfat 10y ago
  We are possibly entering the age of thin clients for coding soon. With ssh and remote desktops being the best use of laptops and Chromebooks for coding. I do that now with a personal server that I remote into when coding at different locations. There is a HUGE divide between production and consumer devices that keeps increasing every year. People don't have multi-use devices. Many of my peers use their iPad for everything or even just their phone. Other than coding and video editing Chromebooks are pretty just as capable as a laptop in terms of production. Example: I needed to re-image my laptop at work (I have 3 desktops, 2 iPads and one laptop) and I realized that my use of the laptop is the same as a Chromebook. I had absolutely no files on the computer that I needed to get off before re-imaging. Everything was Bit Torrent Sync and Git and the rest were just a few programs that were easily installed or on the "cloud" aka Google and Amazon's computers. My own use of computers has always been desktop for video, image editing and coding (I need that screen space and a reference screen). I find laptops to always be very limiting for my production and that a Chromebook becomes a thin client with ssh and remote desktop. My $1,000 laptop is used like a $300 Chromebook.
  - jimbokun 10y ago
    But will the average school be able to afford and administer servers For every student to ssh into?
    - baldfat 10y ago
      One server and one instance could easily do one class if not hundreds of students. Actually to have it done with a container would be very cheap and wouldn't require a high tier server. So it would cost less to do Chromebooks with a server for instances when they need more horse power or build tools.
    - fuzzybeard 10y ago
      It should be cheaper than giving full desktops/laptops to students. After all, it consolidates all the computer power. The pendulum is swinging back to mainframes. Have 1 server for all the students and spin up VMs or a single Linux instance.
    - 10y ago
- carussell 10y ago
  Someone has undertaken getting VSCode builds for Chromebooks.[1][2][3] I understand that you're (probably) not on the VSCode team, but if you have any influence to get somebody who can reach out there, that'd be swell. Anyone using VSCode on Linux seems to be relying on MS's freely-downloadable-but-technically-not-OSS builds, and just building wrapper installers around that. I might be wrong. Something like diverse builds that aren't dependent on Microsoft would be the first step to getting VSCode into various distros' system images so you can do "sudo apt-get install vscode" on Debian or possibly find it in the default install on Ubuntu. 1. https://headmelted.com/why-we-need-the-best-tools-on-chromebooks-and-raspberry-pi-3ab4c10a611c https://headmelted.com/why-we-need-the-best-tools-on-chromeb... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956597 3. https://github.com/headmelted/code-builds/issues/10 https://github.com/headmelted/code-builds/issues/10
2arrs2ells 10y ago
A cloud IDE like Cloud9 (https://c9.io/ https://c9.io/) works well on a Chromebook. If I were teaching programming today, I'd probably start with something like GoMix (https://gomix.com https://gomix.com) or Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/) - neither of which require a download. Not saying there isn't value in installing native software... but it's amazing what you can do in a web browser these days vs. 2010 when I was teaching middle schoolers intro programming.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  To be honest though, I think these environments make new programmers go through the trouble of learning a platform which they can never ship a real application in; except maybe Cloud9. Scratch has been around for about 15 years now, and 12 years in a workable state. And while it seems superficially to be helpful (none of that fussy text editing!), I have never met a programmer who got their start in Scratch.
  - 2arrs2ells 10y ago
    I got my start in Scratch! And so did everyone else whose first programming experience was CS50 (http://cs50.tv/2016/fall/ http://cs50.tv/2016/fall/). Don't want to threadcrap too much, but I deeply believe that most programming in the future will happen in environments like GoMix, in the same way that a ton of programming today happens in Visual Basic.
    - fleshweasel 10y ago
      Do you mean Visual Studio?
      - SpaceManiac 10y ago
        GP means Visual Basic, probably as in the VB macros that you can write within Word/Excel/Access etc., in which there is surely a huge amount of code written by otherwise non-programmers.
  - 10y ago
ploggingdev 10y ago
> I'm also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful. Depends on the use case. So in your case where you teach programming, it makes sense, but there are legitimate cases where it makes sense to not expose the filesystem directly and disallow native apps. This has the benefit of better security.
- grovegames 10y ago
  I love my daily typing with the elevator. (me)->floor[6+1]
- ux-app 10y ago
  > there are legitimate cases where it makes sense to not expose the filesystem directly and disallow native apps. This has the benefit of better security. I always found the better security argument to be a red herring in a school environment and always pushed back against it. If a computer breaks then re-image it. malware spreading? Wonderful! There's an amazing learning opportunity!! The point is moot at my school now though as all students are required to bring their own device (Mac or PC), and of course they have full control over their own system. As it should be ;)
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    That's a much better situation than I've seen at many schools. Good on 'em. The school computer has been the worst one since the home computer started being practical.
- WWLink 10y ago
  It's a school, and people are there to learn. Knowing how to maintain a computer is a pretty darn useful life skill.
  - summarite 10y ago
    Indeed but in a class on geography it can make the teachers life easier if the students can focus on the 3-7 applications you want to use throughout the year and those are 1 click away rather than a download+install procedure away. Not every class will want/need to teach computer maintenance. If you want teachers & students to use tech it needs to be truly frictionless.
microcolonel 10y ago
I think jailbreaking is for when you're doing something the device manufacturer deliberately tries to interfere with. There's a package called "crouton" which makes it fairly simple to run a full Linux distribution alongside Chrome OS, as long as you switch it into developer mode (which is simple*). The trouble there is that it's not the sort of thing you would want to administrate in bulk. Chromebooks are capable of running custom operating systems by design. Granted, you need to void the warranty (take out the firmware lock screw) to make another operating system the default boot option, for security reasons. And of course, to manage custom images on Chromebooks for a general classroom environment could be hard. Personally I think that the idea of the "school computer" is terrible. Schools should issue laptops which are maintained and administered by the student; otherwise students are just being taught helplessness. The only problem with this is that school boards typically buy a wide range of abysmal proprietary packages which are usually locked to a single OS vendor.
- jayd16 10y ago
  jailbreaking is when you thwart a freeBSD style jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail
blipmusic 10y ago
This is so nice to read after having seen my sister's children receive laptops at school. No one was actually giving them any system knowledge. No programming, no "how does a computer work, what is a file...", no support/teaching on how software can help when e.g. writing an essay. Nothing. They were carrying 10+ kg (no joke) in their bags every day because of course they were forced to bring the (heavy) laptop to every damn lesson. There was no ultimate plan, no knowledgable teachers, just "the kids should have computers, right?". They could have received iPads, Windows or linux setups... Wouldn't have mattered since there was no plan in place. I'm at a point where I strongly believe schools should just hand out Raspberry Pis to students to tinker with instead. Add a proper curriculum and let the students fail, mess up their RPIs to get to know the system. Let them write simple scripts. Anything. RPIs are easy to restore. Maybe other schools are doing better over here, but when my nephew (growing up with minecraft/pokemon go on mobile only) didn't dare to touch most of the stuff on his school laptop due to being afraid of messing up I tried very hard not to scream.
- xyzzy123 10y ago
  I bet no one told you how to code though. I imagine that you probably had some proto computer some time in your past and spent a long time figuring it out? That the school system wasn't equipped to teach you anything but you somehow did just fine? It doesn't have to be like that of course and I suppose that there is some neuro elitist aspect to kids just fiddling with the things that interest them...
  - blipmusic 10y ago
    I couldn't call myself a programmer - most of what I've done are smaller things that help out at work - but I'm slowly improving. If you are implying that there is an abundance of resources out there, you are of course correct. It was quite different when I grew up. [Home] Internet was not a thing that existed and most data was analogue. When home computers became common I had to learn a bit about the system if I wanted to get some use out of it. I'm not saying user friendliness is somehow bad, it's what we should always aim for! We've come a long way and I like it here. I'm not that old, it's just that I had a childhood before home computers and internet were a thing. The school system back when did in fact teach me a bit about computers. In my case, in [the equivalent to] high-school when home internet started to take off, our curriculum came to include (very) basic computer science, (very) basic coding in ... prolog? (prolog might be incorrect) We created home pages in class from scratch in html. Not by choice, as most of this concerned every student at my school. Maybe I was lucky? In my nephews case, they were handed a computer, then absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing. They are still forced to bring the computer to every class but report hardly ever touching it at school. Maybe their bad experience is an exception. I hope so. Back then my teachers definitely weren't the best - or even good - at computer science but they were prepared to try and to learn together with the students.
smnscu 10y ago
> install a hex editor > I don't think that's possible on a Chromebook. First google result for "web hex editor": https://hexed.it/ https://hexed.it/ Took me 10 seconds to open, including googling for it.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  That relies on a Node.js back-end... don't think it's possible to install it onto a Chromebook. You'd have to have to go to the web page. If you have any experience with a large class of children, I'll bet you can guess how long most will be patient sitting in front of a web browser at school without thinking about loading another page.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    This doesn't seem like a tech problem, then.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      Not being able to install apps to a machine absolutely is a tech problem.
      - throwaway91111 10y ago
        Sure. Doesn't seem necessary on any level, though. Nothing about hex editing needs to be an app instead of a web page. If that were true, my computer education would have been crippling--especially in high school. I think you're projecting on your students.
taurath 10y ago
I think the key reason tablets were chosen wasn't that it was the best learning tool, but it was the best learning tool that won't cause a maintenance nightmare for school IT when kids go crazy with viruses and bricking their laptops whenever they were late for a homework assignment. Ipads are relatively hard to fuck up fron a software side, and if they do you just do a reset.
- xyzzy123 10y ago
  I suppose the utility of this depends on your definition of learning. No one I know "produces" content on an ipad but it's fine for HN comments or management emails. So maybe that's what we want to teach, not sure. In theory I suppose the lesson is that if you are a "regular" user, IT is brutally unhelpful, and put your content on removable media or cloud storage. This is not such a bad lesson, and the kids who care about owning their data will eventually figure the other side our for themselves. I still think using general purpose computing devices in general education has value, mainly because then the kids who don't see that at home will get a chance. When you do it's like the whole world changes if you're made like that.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    iPads with Apple’s stylus are amazing tools for illustration, hand-drawing diagrams, sketching out ideas, proofreading PDF files, taking technical notes, doing mathematical scratch work, and so on. Think of it like a notebook/scrapbook with pens/markers that doesn’t take any consumables, takes up less space in a bag, allows undo/redo, and makes sharing the products digitally a snap. Works best when used alongside a laptop, rather than as a replacement, at least for me. I certainly wouldn’t want to write code on it full time.
    - xyzzy123 10y ago
      Agree, it's wonderful except for thinking clearly about things and clearly expressing them in other terms than a diagram. And in the iPaid view of the world, if you write a responsive comment, only paid subscribers will see it. Because that's "premium content".
camillomiller 10y ago
Well, it appears that you teach something more akin to CS basics, which is definitively not suited for being taught on an iPad or a Chromebook, indeed... For the rest, I think both devices are fine, especially for younger students. The big issue is content created by the big players in school publishing, that might not be up to par or just come from a quick porting job of older paper content to digital.
daemin 10y ago
The schools I went to we had 1-7 in a primary school, and 8-12 in high school. Sometimes there's also college which is for years 11-12 (and sometimes 13), so it depends on which state and schools you go to. Also we never really did any programming at school what so ever when I did it, I learnt it all myself at home hacking around doing useless things on my home computer. The closest we got was learning a few features and formulas for Excel, and a bit of databases in Access. There was a tiny bit of Visual Basic as well but that might have been tied together with the Access stuff. What I found about your story most interesting is how you teach them how to look inside files with a hex editor. That sort of stuff seems like fundamental knowledge for people that use computers, and learning it could de-mystify computing somewhat.
- agmcleod 10y ago
  I'm not sure if that's something people should have to learn though. For example, not everyone knows how the engine of a car works, and that's okay. For using computers, I feel like getting comfortable with a phone or tablet is useful at a younger age, and maybe get introduced to a mac or windows machine when they're a bit older, provided those are still main stream by the time they get there. Not everyone needs to be a developer. Though maybe I'm wrong with the way automation is going :)
  - daemin 10y ago
    I know, I had the exact same thoughts while writing it, so it's heavily influenced by what I do. But on the other hand car engines aren't that complicated either, not a lot of people tend to look under the hood and tinker with their engine either. But at least knowing the components of a system gives you some confidence in using it. It's not necessarily the engine but knowing how to change a car tyre, or a light bulb is helpful and can feel empowering.
cptskippy 10y ago
Wow, that's impressive. Computer education in the 80-90s in the US seems somewhat lacking by comparison. For me 3-5th grade was Oregan Trail, 6-8th was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and 9-12th was typing using the Edit command in Dos and saving to a floppy.
- cgriswald 10y ago
  I think it depends on where you were. I was in Minnesota and we had these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC We had LogoWriter in elementary school. We were programming at a very young age without really knowing that's what we were doing. (We also had this typing software with monsters or something that was easily gamed; it didn't check for errors. So you could type quickly, erase everything you typed, then type it correctly and you'd get something like 350 wpm.) (I moved to a new district between elementary and middle school.) In middle school I vaguely recall doing some kind of programming on commodore 64s. In high school we had a BASIC programming class and also an AP Computer Science class in which we learned a little bit about programming Pascal. Some students did an independent study to learn C, but failed miserably - probably had no real support. But honestly, I learned the most when I would stay overnight at my cousin's house and hack away at my uncle's computer (PC w/ I think MS-DOS) unsupervised. I broke it a few times, but was always terrified enough to figure out how to fix it. He had a few manuals, and I went through trying all kinds of commands. Figuring out why UNDELETE never worked taught me a bit about how hard disks were used by the OS, stuff like that.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  For me, (rural PA, early 1990s) it was exactly that, but we had one teacher who was kind of into computers and they let him run--for grade 12 seniors only---a very, VERY basic programming class consisting of old (for the time) IBM PCs and UCSD Pascal. As the rest of the class was struggling to put the floppy disks in the right way, I spent the first week finishing up all of the year's worth of assignments so I could use the rest of the year to screw around and try to make games, write joke programs to mess with fellow students, etc. Fun class, got me excited about structured programming languages as opposed to BASIC, but pretty inadequate if your goal was to prepare future software engineers.
agmcleod 10y ago
If I can ask you, what do you find the benefit is of teaching this as a standard curriculum? It makes sense to me for people wanting to get into development or IT. But not everyone is going into tech, and may not benefit from it. Most non tech people I know only use a computer at work, and get by. Otherwise they use phones, tablets, etc. I agree that the iPad is awful for the kind of things you're teaching, but for standard school work, I feel like it or the chromebook (due to price and a keyboard) are fairly good choices. Thanks!
- mi100hael 10y ago
  By the time you get to your second half of schooling, isn't the point more to expose you to a variety of topics to broaden your base and allow you to explore what you like and what you don't? You could ask "what do you find the benefits of teaching this as standard curriculum?" about pretty much every middle/high school class: - Trigonometry? Most people don't need to know how to calculate the pythagorean theorem, only need to occasionally measure stuff with a tape. - Chemistry? Most people don't need to know the periodic table, only not to mix bleach and ammonia. - World History? Most people are never going to use all that Byzantine knowledge, just stick to more recent events. - Foreign Language? Most people are never going to need more than enough to get by on vacation for a week. - Music? You're never going to pick up that instrument again after graduation. Now that computing has become an enormous part of life, doesn't it make senses to pull back the curtain a little? It's not like it's going to do them any harm.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook. Sure, you can't do that locally on a Chromebook without breaking out of the default system paradigm (I'm not sure it's technically jailbreaking, but that's not really important to the point.) OTOH, if you aren't attached to locality, you can do most of it from a Chromebook without doing that, if you are running appropriate software on the backend to support it (e.g., for pretty much all but the "install VSCode" part, running something like Eclipse Che.)
NiceGuy_Ty 10y ago
I use a Chromebook as my primary college as a CS student in college. Look up Crouton, it lets you chroot into Ubuntu and Debian distros. From there, you can install native programs with ease, and you still get the Chromebook price.

by ux-app 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dpark 10y ago

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding. I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding. I think they can probably work there, but you're right that a "real" computer is a better choice for that.

ecspike 10y ago
There are a couple of Chrome apps that can run offline and do coding. I've used Caret and Advanced REST client on occasion for things. It gets a bit tricky if you need something that can't work without a real webserver but there's a lot of beginner stuff you can do with it. crouton unlocked a bit more functionality giving you the possibility of a Linux base layer, albeit likely not a great idea to have kids put the machines into dev mode. But that might be workable if staff did it. I've dogfooded a bunch of the Web Development content we make at Udacity using either a pure Chromebook or Chromebook + Crouton.
- canuckintime 10y ago
  Please describe your PURE Chromebook setup to take the Udacity Web Development Course. Also is there a PURE Chromebook (or Chromebook+Android apps) setup to take an Udacity Android course?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Apparently ChromeOS devices are so useful that everyone has to force developer mode with Crouton to make use of them. Never got the point of a browser based OS.
    - toast0 10y ago
      A browser only OS isn't for everyone, but it does work well for the many people who literally never use anything other than their browser. If you know someone who never uses office applications and is always ending up with three layers of malware, a chromebook might be good for them. Video chat is a bit iffy too, if you don't care for google hangouts.
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      No, everyone does not have to force developer mode on. If you need the extra functionality then it's an option for some people. As for the point of Chrome OS, well, it's for people that don't need the bag of hurt desktop OS's provide.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  > crouton Correct me if I'm wrong but is this not the hack where every time you boot your system it tells you to press a key to reset it and if you press that key it instantly blanks the partition. This seem absurd even for an expert user to use full time let alone school kids.
  - carussell 10y ago
    That's not crouton. That comes from Google's coreboot-derived firmware. See https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/2014-firmware-summit https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/2014-firmware-summit It's true, though, that the whole process needs to be made more straightforward and easily circumventable. It's just not a part of crouton.
Adaptive 10y ago
I'm running a coding class right now that is almost entirely run over ssh on chromebooks to a linux server. Works beautifully. No fancy IDE, but lots of actual learning to code.
- kaspiCZ 10y ago
  Have you considered online tools such as Cloud9, replit etc.? If so, is the problem missing features, workflow or pricing?
  - 0xCMP 10y ago
    Eclipse's Che is also very interesting. I hate the name, but it was super when I tried it.
  - criddell 10y ago
    If I were teaching, I would definitely look at something like Cloud9. I'm in the process of going through Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial based on Cloud9 and I'm blown away by how good it is.
  - carussell 10y ago
    FWIW, amid the talk about Raspberry Pis, the (fully open) BeagleBone Black/Green has a default experience for casual-tinker-friendly programming where it spins up an on-board Cloud9 instance for the user to poke around. It's slightly more expensive than its Pi contemporary, but that's expected when everyone keeps flocking to the Pi and the alternative can't make use of the same volume discounts and self-fund engineering to put new board revisions out every year. And even for all that, it's a popular alternative—you're not left hanging out in no-man's land with some exotic hardware. Check the hackerboards.com surveys from over the years that show it trailing the Pi(s).
- willvarfar 10y ago
  Does X forwarding work? Or has someone got some kind of screen-scraping client that runs in a browser?
- yoz-y 10y ago
TeMPOraL 10y ago
I would expand coding to include general computer use. Sure, you can teach biology or physics or English using whatever device is most convenient. But if you're trying to teach the workings and use of computers (i.e. what most people will have on computer classes), using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions.
- ux-app 10y ago
  > using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions Absolutely. Most 12 year old kids don't know about file size units. Relative file sizes, converting between units etc. There's so much incidental learning that occurs too. The other day i was discussing file sizes with a student and we observed that there was a difference between a file's reported size vs size on disk. This led to a great little segue about physical disk structure, tracks, sectors and clusters. The boy was fascinated with some lower level detail. All that learning would have been lost if we were using a gimped cloud based FS.
  - criddell 10y ago
    > This led to a great little segue about physical disk structure, tracks, sectors and clusters. These days, those are abstractions as well. That's basically the API that the mass storage controller presents to the OS. I'm not sure you could explain a hard drive to a lay person anymore. Most of the time, I'm kind of surprised that they work at all.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions. Only if you are using them wrong; while I think iPads are poor tools forany purposes, including that one, from a UI perspective (or, at least, inefficient by the time you address the interface issues), iPads and Chromebooks don't restrict the ability to teach full-spectrum computing, as, they are perfectly capable tools for accessing and interacting with general purpose computers. Now, clearly, the exact details of how you use them in that teaching and th supporting infrastructure might be slightly different than if you were giving students PCs, but then, you need a network environment with educational infrastructure if you are teaching full-spectrum computing with modern relevance anyway, and the detail are going to vary by what you use on the front end. That doesn't rule out any front end choice, it just means that the front end choice impacts other choices.
baldfat 10y ago
We are possibly entering the age of thin clients for coding soon. With ssh and remote desktops being the best use of laptops and Chromebooks for coding. I do that now with a personal server that I remote into when coding at different locations. There is a HUGE divide between production and consumer devices that keeps increasing every year. People don't have multi-use devices. Many of my peers use their iPad for everything or even just their phone. Other than coding and video editing Chromebooks are pretty just as capable as a laptop in terms of production. Example: I needed to re-image my laptop at work (I have 3 desktops, 2 iPads and one laptop) and I realized that my use of the laptop is the same as a Chromebook. I had absolutely no files on the computer that I needed to get off before re-imaging. Everything was Bit Torrent Sync and Git and the rest were just a few programs that were easily installed or on the "cloud" aka Google and Amazon's computers. My own use of computers has always been desktop for video, image editing and coding (I need that screen space and a reference screen). I find laptops to always be very limiting for my production and that a Chromebook becomes a thin client with ssh and remote desktop. My $1,000 laptop is used like a $300 Chromebook.
- jimbokun 10y ago
  But will the average school be able to afford and administer servers For every student to ssh into?
  - baldfat 10y ago
    One server and one instance could easily do one class if not hundreds of students. Actually to have it done with a container would be very cheap and wouldn't require a high tier server. So it would cost less to do Chromebooks with a server for instances when they need more horse power or build tools.
  - fuzzybeard 10y ago
    It should be cheaper than giving full desktops/laptops to students. After all, it consolidates all the computer power. The pendulum is swinging back to mainframes. Have 1 server for all the students and spin up VMs or a single Linux instance.
  - 10y ago
carussell 10y ago
Someone has undertaken getting VSCode builds for Chromebooks.[1][2][3] I understand that you're (probably) not on the VSCode team, but if you have any influence to get somebody who can reach out there, that'd be swell. Anyone using VSCode on Linux seems to be relying on MS's freely-downloadable-but-technically-not-OSS builds, and just building wrapper installers around that. I might be wrong. Something like diverse builds that aren't dependent on Microsoft would be the first step to getting VSCode into various distros' system images so you can do "sudo apt-get install vscode" on Debian or possibly find it in the default install on Ubuntu. 1. https://headmelted.com/why-we-need-the-best-tools-on-chromebooks-and-raspberry-pi-3ab4c10a611c https://headmelted.com/why-we-need-the-best-tools-on-chromeb... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956597 3. https://github.com/headmelted/code-builds/issues/10 https://github.com/headmelted/code-builds/issues/10

2arrs2ells 10y ago

A cloud IDE like Cloud9 (https://c9.io/ https://c9.io/) works well on a Chromebook. If I were teaching programming today, I'd probably start with something like GoMix (https://gomix.com https://gomix.com) or Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/) - neither of which require a download. Not saying there isn't value in installing native software... but it's amazing what you can do in a web browser these days vs. 2010 when I was teaching middle schoolers intro programming.

microcolonel 10y ago
To be honest though, I think these environments make new programmers go through the trouble of learning a platform which they can never ship a real application in; except maybe Cloud9. Scratch has been around for about 15 years now, and 12 years in a workable state. And while it seems superficially to be helpful (none of that fussy text editing!), I have never met a programmer who got their start in Scratch.
- 2arrs2ells 10y ago
  I got my start in Scratch! And so did everyone else whose first programming experience was CS50 (http://cs50.tv/2016/fall/ http://cs50.tv/2016/fall/). Don't want to threadcrap too much, but I deeply believe that most programming in the future will happen in environments like GoMix, in the same way that a ton of programming today happens in Visual Basic.
  - fleshweasel 10y ago
    Do you mean Visual Studio?
    - SpaceManiac 10y ago
      GP means Visual Basic, probably as in the VB macros that you can write within Word/Excel/Access etc., in which there is surely a huge amount of code written by otherwise non-programmers.
- 10y ago

ploggingdev 10y ago

> I'm also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful. Depends on the use case. So in your case where you teach programming, it makes sense, but there are legitimate cases where it makes sense to not expose the filesystem directly and disallow native apps. This has the benefit of better security.

grovegames 10y ago
I love my daily typing with the elevator. (me)->floor[6+1]
ux-app 10y ago
> there are legitimate cases where it makes sense to not expose the filesystem directly and disallow native apps. This has the benefit of better security. I always found the better security argument to be a red herring in a school environment and always pushed back against it. If a computer breaks then re-image it. malware spreading? Wonderful! There's an amazing learning opportunity!! The point is moot at my school now though as all students are required to bring their own device (Mac or PC), and of course they have full control over their own system. As it should be ;)
- microcolonel 10y ago
  That's a much better situation than I've seen at many schools. Good on 'em. The school computer has been the worst one since the home computer started being practical.
WWLink 10y ago
It's a school, and people are there to learn. Knowing how to maintain a computer is a pretty darn useful life skill.
- summarite 10y ago
  Indeed but in a class on geography it can make the teachers life easier if the students can focus on the 3-7 applications you want to use throughout the year and those are 1 click away rather than a download+install procedure away. Not every class will want/need to teach computer maintenance. If you want teachers & students to use tech it needs to be truly frictionless.

microcolonel 10y ago

I think jailbreaking is for when you're doing something the device manufacturer deliberately tries to interfere with. There's a package called "crouton" which makes it fairly simple to run a full Linux distribution alongside Chrome OS, as long as you switch it into developer mode (which is simple*). The trouble there is that it's not the sort of thing you would want to administrate in bulk. Chromebooks are capable of running custom operating systems by design. Granted, you need to void the warranty (take out the firmware lock screw) to make another operating system the default boot option, for security reasons. And of course, to manage custom images on Chromebooks for a general classroom environment could be hard. Personally I think that the idea of the "school computer" is terrible. Schools should issue laptops which are maintained and administered by the student; otherwise students are just being taught helplessness. The only problem with this is that school boards typically buy a wide range of abysmal proprietary packages which are usually locked to a single OS vendor.

jayd16 10y ago
jailbreaking is when you thwart a freeBSD style jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail

blipmusic 10y ago

This is so nice to read after having seen my sister's children receive laptops at school. No one was actually giving them any system knowledge. No programming, no "how does a computer work, what is a file...", no support/teaching on how software can help when e.g. writing an essay. Nothing. They were carrying 10+ kg (no joke) in their bags every day because of course they were forced to bring the (heavy) laptop to every damn lesson. There was no ultimate plan, no knowledgable teachers, just "the kids should have computers, right?". They could have received iPads, Windows or linux setups... Wouldn't have mattered since there was no plan in place. I'm at a point where I strongly believe schools should just hand out Raspberry Pis to students to tinker with instead. Add a proper curriculum and let the students fail, mess up their RPIs to get to know the system. Let them write simple scripts. Anything. RPIs are easy to restore. Maybe other schools are doing better over here, but when my nephew (growing up with minecraft/pokemon go on mobile only) didn't dare to touch most of the stuff on his school laptop due to being afraid of messing up I tried very hard not to scream.

xyzzy123 10y ago
I bet no one told you how to code though. I imagine that you probably had some proto computer some time in your past and spent a long time figuring it out? That the school system wasn't equipped to teach you anything but you somehow did just fine? It doesn't have to be like that of course and I suppose that there is some neuro elitist aspect to kids just fiddling with the things that interest them...
- blipmusic 10y ago
  I couldn't call myself a programmer - most of what I've done are smaller things that help out at work - but I'm slowly improving. If you are implying that there is an abundance of resources out there, you are of course correct. It was quite different when I grew up. [Home] Internet was not a thing that existed and most data was analogue. When home computers became common I had to learn a bit about the system if I wanted to get some use out of it. I'm not saying user friendliness is somehow bad, it's what we should always aim for! We've come a long way and I like it here. I'm not that old, it's just that I had a childhood before home computers and internet were a thing. The school system back when did in fact teach me a bit about computers. In my case, in [the equivalent to] high-school when home internet started to take off, our curriculum came to include (very) basic computer science, (very) basic coding in ... prolog? (prolog might be incorrect) We created home pages in class from scratch in html. Not by choice, as most of this concerned every student at my school. Maybe I was lucky? In my nephews case, they were handed a computer, then absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing. They are still forced to bring the computer to every class but report hardly ever touching it at school. Maybe their bad experience is an exception. I hope so. Back then my teachers definitely weren't the best - or even good - at computer science but they were prepared to try and to learn together with the students.

smnscu 10y ago

> install a hex editor > I don't think that's possible on a Chromebook. First google result for "web hex editor": https://hexed.it/ https://hexed.it/ Took me 10 seconds to open, including googling for it.

xiaoma 10y ago
That relies on a Node.js back-end... don't think it's possible to install it onto a Chromebook. You'd have to have to go to the web page. If you have any experience with a large class of children, I'll bet you can guess how long most will be patient sitting in front of a web browser at school without thinking about loading another page.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  This doesn't seem like a tech problem, then.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    Not being able to install apps to a machine absolutely is a tech problem.
    - throwaway91111 10y ago
      Sure. Doesn't seem necessary on any level, though. Nothing about hex editing needs to be an app instead of a web page. If that were true, my computer education would have been crippling--especially in high school. I think you're projecting on your students.

taurath 10y ago

I think the key reason tablets were chosen wasn't that it was the best learning tool, but it was the best learning tool that won't cause a maintenance nightmare for school IT when kids go crazy with viruses and bricking their laptops whenever they were late for a homework assignment. Ipads are relatively hard to fuck up fron a software side, and if they do you just do a reset.

xyzzy123 10y ago
I suppose the utility of this depends on your definition of learning. No one I know "produces" content on an ipad but it's fine for HN comments or management emails. So maybe that's what we want to teach, not sure. In theory I suppose the lesson is that if you are a "regular" user, IT is brutally unhelpful, and put your content on removable media or cloud storage. This is not such a bad lesson, and the kids who care about owning their data will eventually figure the other side our for themselves. I still think using general purpose computing devices in general education has value, mainly because then the kids who don't see that at home will get a chance. When you do it's like the whole world changes if you're made like that.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  iPads with Apple’s stylus are amazing tools for illustration, hand-drawing diagrams, sketching out ideas, proofreading PDF files, taking technical notes, doing mathematical scratch work, and so on. Think of it like a notebook/scrapbook with pens/markers that doesn’t take any consumables, takes up less space in a bag, allows undo/redo, and makes sharing the products digitally a snap. Works best when used alongside a laptop, rather than as a replacement, at least for me. I certainly wouldn’t want to write code on it full time.
  - xyzzy123 10y ago
    Agree, it's wonderful except for thinking clearly about things and clearly expressing them in other terms than a diagram. And in the iPaid view of the world, if you write a responsive comment, only paid subscribers will see it. Because that's "premium content".

camillomiller 10y ago

Well, it appears that you teach something more akin to CS basics, which is definitively not suited for being taught on an iPad or a Chromebook, indeed... For the rest, I think both devices are fine, especially for younger students. The big issue is content created by the big players in school publishing, that might not be up to par or just come from a quick porting job of older paper content to digital.

daemin 10y ago

The schools I went to we had 1-7 in a primary school, and 8-12 in high school. Sometimes there's also college which is for years 11-12 (and sometimes 13), so it depends on which state and schools you go to. Also we never really did any programming at school what so ever when I did it, I learnt it all myself at home hacking around doing useless things on my home computer. The closest we got was learning a few features and formulas for Excel, and a bit of databases in Access. There was a tiny bit of Visual Basic as well but that might have been tied together with the Access stuff. What I found about your story most interesting is how you teach them how to look inside files with a hex editor. That sort of stuff seems like fundamental knowledge for people that use computers, and learning it could de-mystify computing somewhat.

agmcleod 10y ago
I'm not sure if that's something people should have to learn though. For example, not everyone knows how the engine of a car works, and that's okay. For using computers, I feel like getting comfortable with a phone or tablet is useful at a younger age, and maybe get introduced to a mac or windows machine when they're a bit older, provided those are still main stream by the time they get there. Not everyone needs to be a developer. Though maybe I'm wrong with the way automation is going :)
- daemin 10y ago
  I know, I had the exact same thoughts while writing it, so it's heavily influenced by what I do. But on the other hand car engines aren't that complicated either, not a lot of people tend to look under the hood and tinker with their engine either. But at least knowing the components of a system gives you some confidence in using it. It's not necessarily the engine but knowing how to change a car tyre, or a light bulb is helpful and can feel empowering.

cptskippy 10y ago

Wow, that's impressive. Computer education in the 80-90s in the US seems somewhat lacking by comparison. For me 3-5th grade was Oregan Trail, 6-8th was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and 9-12th was typing using the Edit command in Dos and saving to a floppy.

cgriswald 10y ago
I think it depends on where you were. I was in Minnesota and we had these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC We had LogoWriter in elementary school. We were programming at a very young age without really knowing that's what we were doing. (We also had this typing software with monsters or something that was easily gamed; it didn't check for errors. So you could type quickly, erase everything you typed, then type it correctly and you'd get something like 350 wpm.) (I moved to a new district between elementary and middle school.) In middle school I vaguely recall doing some kind of programming on commodore 64s. In high school we had a BASIC programming class and also an AP Computer Science class in which we learned a little bit about programming Pascal. Some students did an independent study to learn C, but failed miserably - probably had no real support. But honestly, I learned the most when I would stay overnight at my cousin's house and hack away at my uncle's computer (PC w/ I think MS-DOS) unsupervised. I broke it a few times, but was always terrified enough to figure out how to fix it. He had a few manuals, and I went through trying all kinds of commands. Figuring out why UNDELETE never worked taught me a bit about how hard disks were used by the OS, stuff like that.
ryandrake 10y ago
For me, (rural PA, early 1990s) it was exactly that, but we had one teacher who was kind of into computers and they let him run--for grade 12 seniors only---a very, VERY basic programming class consisting of old (for the time) IBM PCs and UCSD Pascal. As the rest of the class was struggling to put the floppy disks in the right way, I spent the first week finishing up all of the year's worth of assignments so I could use the rest of the year to screw around and try to make games, write joke programs to mess with fellow students, etc. Fun class, got me excited about structured programming languages as opposed to BASIC, but pretty inadequate if your goal was to prepare future software engineers.

agmcleod 10y ago

If I can ask you, what do you find the benefit is of teaching this as a standard curriculum? It makes sense to me for people wanting to get into development or IT. But not everyone is going into tech, and may not benefit from it. Most non tech people I know only use a computer at work, and get by. Otherwise they use phones, tablets, etc. I agree that the iPad is awful for the kind of things you're teaching, but for standard school work, I feel like it or the chromebook (due to price and a keyboard) are fairly good choices. Thanks!

mi100hael 10y ago
By the time you get to your second half of schooling, isn't the point more to expose you to a variety of topics to broaden your base and allow you to explore what you like and what you don't? You could ask "what do you find the benefits of teaching this as standard curriculum?" about pretty much every middle/high school class: - Trigonometry? Most people don't need to know how to calculate the pythagorean theorem, only need to occasionally measure stuff with a tape. - Chemistry? Most people don't need to know the periodic table, only not to mix bleach and ammonia. - World History? Most people are never going to use all that Byzantine knowledge, just stick to more recent events. - Foreign Language? Most people are never going to need more than enough to get by on vacation for a week. - Music? You're never going to pick up that instrument again after graduation. Now that computing has become an enormous part of life, doesn't it make senses to pull back the curtain a little? It's not like it's going to do them any harm.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook. Sure, you can't do that locally on a Chromebook without breaking out of the default system paradigm (I'm not sure it's technically jailbreaking, but that's not really important to the point.) OTOH, if you aren't attached to locality, you can do most of it from a Chromebook without doing that, if you are running appropriate software on the backend to support it (e.g., for pretty much all but the "install VSCode" part, running something like Eclipse Che.)

NiceGuy_Ty 10y ago

I use a Chromebook as my primary college as a CS student in college. Look up Crouton, it lets you chroot into Ubuntu and Debian distros. From there, you can install native programs with ease, and you still get the Chromebook price.