The main touchy-feely moment for me here is that a notoriously closed, $17-billion company was brought around by a friendly, gentle approach to convincing it to be more open. Group hug for Broadcom.
Same could be said of their (albeit paltry) wifi open driver support since 2011. They at least have one now, for very few chipsets. Doesn't work with any of the half dozen Broadcom NICs I have in my "junk parts" bin, though.
A kid being able to save for and buy a computer that is all their own is a good experience for getting them enthused about learning with it.
The board is just a tool though. The real strength will be in creating a common experience and specific learning systems that teachers can use, share and improve and have a frame of reference that could work worldwide.
Some teachers are able to create a syllabus and teaching around programming already, but I'd say they're in the minority.
The education stuff will hit in September when the new term starts.
Right now everyone is in the process of creating materials to teach, getting the units out there and making sure teachers have the knowledge they need to get started.
Raspbian has made the browsing experience much better, but for a lot of teaching activities, making JS heavy sites work is not key.
Entirely depends on how well we do with this one. We hope to release something more, um, tasteful in the future. We started with the loud/retro/child-magnet case to start with to make a bit of a splash and make a statement about doing things a bit differently. And because we could :)
There are gaps in there for airflow around the ports and through the case over the chip and power. We've run it for 24 hours and it the result was it got warm on the bottom, so we've added bottom vents to the design which exhaust around the SD Card. We're happy the Pi won't choke.
