Kind of ironic isnt it?

Australians hails from a prison colony, 165.000+ convicts where sent to Australia because the British prison facilities was overburdened. ...and now they themselves become the supressors, where law and monitoring ever citizen becomes the daily agenda. Sends a cold shiver down my spine, and to think that I actually considered moving there one day, I guess I dodged a bullet there.

Kids can learn anything they want to at lightning speeds.

That is...if theyre interested, and thats the crux.

Most kids are social, and if you tell them that they should learn Linux, there has to be a reward waiting for them for doing so, if not, youll soon discover that kids are very intelligent, and ask straight away: Why? And then most adult will do adult reasoning, and explain why THEY would use Linux.

Try telling kids you do that for moral reasons, for geek reasons, and the kids will go - meh...

some of them who actually try it out, will do pretty well at it, possibly better than you ever did the first time you tried it, but then one of their buddies comes over with a USB stick or a cd with a new game, and it doesnt run. The kid gets ridiculed by his buddies for not making it work - and voila - back to basic (Windows re-installed), plays games...reward!

It's socially acceptable to be connected to Facebook and install even advanced apps on their smartphone, why? Because they can instantly get gratification by impressing their friends with something cool THEY ALSO CAN DO as well - social, everyone can install their app!

However, when do you see the kid fiddle with his Raspberry pi - and present it at school, something cool on the projector perhaps...but how many have a projector handy? How many actually wants to do what he just did in class...when it require a series of complex actions such as:

- Purchasing the unit
- Waiting forever for it
- Convincing the others that this is easy (most kids like quick rewards, making something simple that sounds complex and wows others)

If you present them with a very long technical installation procedure, this in itself may not be the reward.
I remember how I got into technology in the first place, it was actually video games.

Someone told me I could make those Arcade games I played at the corner-bar - myself - in my very own home, that triggered me. And the tool back then was a Commodore 64.

The good thing with a simple embedded system like the C-64 is that you:

1) Turn it on
2) Program
3) Run!

FUN!

How do we do that with the PI?

Was that you just turned it on, and with no complex setups - you could code anything you want and save your work straight away. I still have a SX-64 for that very purpose. Sure, I could download and IDE with all kinds of complex setups, libraries, variables from hell and beyond, and pre-window code and +++++++ libraries I have to know by heart before I can even get that far, but it KILLS the instant idea and the moment that "not everyday coders" would have. Here's an example. I was faced with a question yesterday, Im an old 64 Assembly coder, and I saw a string I had a theoretical solution to Decrypt in my head. But I ended up downloading all kinds of programming languages, just to find out that I either needed some extra dev-kit of some sort, or a 100 other co-dependencies just to make it work, by the time I got that up and running - my personal gusto and "buzz" was totally gone. If I had my 64 by my side here and now, problem would be solved - right there and then. (Yes, I know about the 64 emulators, I have them on my cellphone of course) :) But the point still stands. A device like the Raspberry PI - should have an EMBEDDED, possibly made in assembly, entirely library free - instant programming language, ready to use then powered up. Straight away. If it was that simple, we could have the home-brew revolution of the C64 all over again, and no...I dont think "PCs built with embedded 64 would do it, like the Amiga One etc..)