Sounds idyllic; but what are you going to run? The latest Office suite? Photoshop?
Whatever you answer, the cost dwarfs the device, and swamps its processing power.
So, we're talking about teaching kids to use some special kid-computer with software/tools they will never encounter ever again. What tools are these? A BASIC interpreter?
Why don't you go look up Linux, that way I don't have to list tens of thousands of applications, including dozens of language implementations. If you want someone to learn software development, or computing in general, Linux is a far better starting point than Windows or OS X.
Yeah, yeah. Lots of open-source half-baked projects with no support and incomplete features. Advertised as "photoshop replacement" or "complete IDE" but turns out, missing critical features, crash right and left, won't work on modern hardware etc etc.
Been down that road, burned more times than I can count. I wish it were true, but I don't fool myself into believing it.
You do realize that with the exception of one or two of the IDEs, the "mac dev tools" run or originated on Linux or other similarly now free systems, right?
In 6th grade I learned programming on a $100 computer with 1/1,000th the speed of this and 1/1,000,000th the memory and, yes, a BASIC interpreter.
Load DSL (Damn Small Linux) on this, get gcc set up with a decent minimal text editor, and yes I'll start them with C++ from the ground up - akin to how I started, but with industry standard tools from square 1 and more introduced as they progress.
Whatever you answer, the cost dwarfs the device, and swamps its processing power.
So, we're talking about teaching kids to use some special kid-computer with software/tools they will never encounter ever again. What tools are these? A BASIC interpreter?