I won a grant to build, donate, and maintain Raspberry Pi computers to rural schools in South Africa (about 7). It was a large project. Absolute nightmare. In the end I just started buying second hand computers and installing XUbuntu (much higher performance, much lower cost). I donated the Raspberry Pis to a university engineering department and managed to buy double the expected number in second hand computers for rural schools, feel much better about it. Raspberry Pi is simply a gimmick for those that love that kind of thing (which is fine), but it should NOT be marketed as a way to get kids to learn programming, or as a replacement for a computer. It's simply too expensive, and does not cater to the educational needs of those struggling to learn programming/IT.
I'm interested to hear in the problems you had and how getting 2nd hand computers turn out to be lower cost than the Pi. Do you have a write-up of your experience somewhere? Couldn't find anything on your HN profile.
