On 2/26/2013 1:42 PM, Chris Tofu wrote: > I haven't looked at the pi much, besides reading an article some time ago somewhere. At first glance I can't see how it can help a person learn hardware. No clue on that one.

The way that it helps with education and learning is that instead of telling someone to go buy and dedicate a laptop or other machine to a lab purpose, and download say a DVD to load it one can tell them to obtain a Pi and an SD card image to boot it on. There are several examples of lab setups where this is already done both by attaching adapters to outside things (relay boards, etc.) and another which attaches to a breadboard. The pi is not going to be the focus of the vast majority of these things, but will be the computer vehicle that delivers the educational setup. It can be the center of a lesson say to learn to program things that require only what it has to interact with, keyboard, mouse an display, plus for the model b adding in a network. Instead of picking up $25 random ecycled machine this is intended to replace that role. Also if the need arises in the right setting it can be the focus of the lesson.

One suggested in these threads, "what not to plug into the gpio pins". Screwing up that lesson costs you another Pi. I suspect there will be people who will jump in and plug thing in randomly, but they won't get far. I suspect most people will figure out what to do with what is there.