News Iain Duncan Smith: Make computers easier to use

Coming from politicians who in general have a terrible understand of the new technological world, it may have some reasonable points to it but until politicians understand new technology everything else can wait.

 

Truth. Although it was a good ~15 years ago, all I can recall of my IT lessons for the 3 years I had to study it was how to generate a graph from a basic spread sheet, and how to insert a picture into a word document.

Make IT lessons compulsory at GCSE level and suddenly you have a generation of young people who are computer literate & will remain computer literate for the rest of their lives in all likelihood. As the current generation get older and the previous one snuffs it, there will be fewer and fewer 'old people' who don't know how to use a PC... or tune a TV & Freeview box.

Willingness to learn and general aptitude go a long way, but meaningful training from an early age is a real help & boosts future job prospects.

 

I think by the same rationale IDS should change his first name to Ian. The extra I in his name clearly confuses portions of society...

 

I don't know, computers and UIs are becoming so intuitive now it's hard to argue they're difficult to use, at least compared to wrestling with Windows 95

 

That's the idea. The point is to make them as cheap as any other text book, so that schools can afford to kit out classrooms with them or even hand them out to students.

The only trouble I can see with Arduino however is that the official IDE uses Java, and there are questions as to whether Java will run on the Raspberry Pi... Although, depending on the final board design and the ease/complexity of programming it, it may be possible to do everything the Arduino does with the RasPi natively. There are GPIO pins, which should make it into the final board design, and there will also be expansion boards available. It may be possible to use the RasPi as a microcontroller/robotics platform with no additional hardware. Might be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - a full computer doing the job of a teeny and comparatively slow microcontroller - but it would cut down on cost.