Really bad idea. And I don’t think they’ll last a couple of years: they’ll either break down after a few months, OR, kids will lose interest once the next high-tech thingy comes along and their mid 2012 obsolete iPads start looking like an old dinosaur.

I’ll tell you an anecdote from my years in grad school here in California. We had undergraduate students who had been exposed to computers and high technology literally since Kindergarten or earlier. However, the students struggled and had a really hard time learning to use Excel and the like.

On the other hand, we had foreign grad students that had only very limited exposure to computers in their college years (this was almost 20 years ago).

Funny thing is, the foreign grad students learned everything about computers very quickly, and had to patiently teach and tutor the American undergraduate students who struggled with software.

How come the group with NO computer experience in childhood and only very limited experience in college could learn so quickly (even after the language barrier), while the domestic kids who always had computers had a hard time?

The reason is that if you learn elementary and intermediate math very well, then you are well-equipped to learn about hardware and software. But if they teach you dumbed down math, then you’ll always struggle with computers, even if you had them since pre-school.

Flu knows about this… he told us before about how his foreign-born wife can do math in her head effortlessly, etc.

iPads for K-12 students? BIG, HUGE, waste of money.