Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
Truely Personal Computer Student Programin category Applications & Software
proposed by digitaldisaster on 30th January 2006 (accepted on 11th February 2006)
Project Summary
Recently there has been much talk about the affordable laptop computer program from MIT which aims to provide children in developing countries with a low-spec computer in order to enhance their education and for many years now American high schools have been issuing Apple iBooks to students as part of a similar program to enhance their education and in particular computer literacy. My proposal is a set of server and client side software applications forming an easy to use desktop environment and backend framework designed to facilitate a program where you can give every student in a school an EFIKA 5K2 based computer. To maintain an end to end platform from a single vendor the Genesi Open Desktop Workstation, Open Server Workstation or High Density Blade can be used to provide the server side of the solution.The student caries the machine based on this tiny board with them and it stores all of their work on an small IDE drive or, if you are worried about shock damage to the drive, an internal IDE compatible storage system such as a Disk On Chip or Compact flash card via a simple adapter. The student can submit their work to the teachers either via the network (wired or wireless) or a USB pen drive/card reader. Backups can automatically be taken over the network to minimise data loss with the failure of a unit and provide protection against the corrupting or accidental deletion of files.
The student caries the EFIKA between lessons and even takes it home. In each classroom and at home are a monitor as well as a USB keyboard and mouse which the student simply connects to and starts working on their own customised desktop stored on the device. This gives the student a consistent desktop environment at home and at school which they can customise as little or as much as they want. The low cost of the board also gives them their own computer independent of any that the family may own which can also be used for email, chat, browsing the web, simple games etc. and is free of viruses.
An instant-on/sleep feature could be implemented by having a menu option, desktop icon or keyboard shortcut to save the current contents of the RAM to the disk so the computer can just be unplugged and moved to the next lesson, home or a friends house where it can be plugged back in and once a lightweight OS and Dekstop Environment have loaded all the apps are restored automatically, thus giving the illusion they never went away without relying on a battery (like PDA\'s and laptops do) which could become depleted in transit as well as making the device larger and heavier. Alternatively EFIKA 42U\'s could be used but these would obviously cost more and are much closer to a normal laptop which means bulkier and more prone to damage. You can make the device even smaller and completely silent by using the 120w MiniBox PicoPSU and an external DC pack.
CRT and even TFT monitors are sufficiently cheap these days that it should be affordable enough to equip each classroom as a computer lab and give/loan each student an EFIKA 5K2. Keeping the device when the student leaves school can be used as an incentive to get good grades in final exams. Plain USB keyboards and mice are also hardly expensive and with 15\" TFT\'s you should easily be able to fit one monitor, keyboard and mouse for every student in a normal classroom and so be able to roll out the necessary monitors, keyboard and mice to each classroom without compromising on the number of students that they can hold.
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