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I see where you're coming from, but these are gross exaggerations in the vein of infomercials depicting performing mundane tasks without their product as nearly impossible.

First, the software could be packaged as an OS image for the pi itself, eliminating a fair chunk of your list, but second, the alternative presented on this page is to assemble the hardware from a list that includes resistors.

Surely if you can manage that, you can wrangle an iso.



There are a whole heap of gotchas that don't seem like a big deal if you're a savvy adult programmer, but are showstoppers if you're eleven years old and just getting into proper computing.

The Raspberry Pi is a very useful thing, but Eben Upton will freely admit that it was the wrong solution for the intended audience. It's just too complex and too brittle to work as a "modern BBC micro" for educational use. The lessons learned from RPi led to the BBC micro:bit, a much simpler Cortex M0 development board that has been a roaring success in British schools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Bit

The BASIC Engine isn't a suitable educational tool as-is, but it could become very useful if it's offered as a commercial product with HDMI or VGA output.




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