I think they could have done a lot of good work by giving lots of kids chrome books and setting them up with dirt simple EC2 vms + awesome remote editing software. That way you get to keep the chrome book intact with default settings, run everything through the browser (which means you can skip the chrome book for kids who have computer access) and give them real computing power + the benefits of remote development (frequent backups, standardized auto-updating environments, etc)
As a note, 'remote editing' need not imply a browser-based solution: emacs with TRAMP can edit remote files as though they are local, and sshfs can do much the same thing. NFS could also work, of course, although I don't know what it's performance is across the Internet.
Hmm, you make a really good point. Then the system requirements become super low, at the cost of requiring stable / reliable / reasonable internet connectivity.. seems inevitable longer term but not sure about the kids and schools that were targeted.
Having a development environment and editor in the browser is definitely the way to go for students learning to code. Updating a browser is significantly easier and cheaper than purchasing a new machine. Kids learning to code shouldn't have to worry about specs, software installation, and OS configuration.
Nitrous, Cloud9, Koding etc... all have free tiers. We're working on Nitrous and definitely will continue to support students as best we can. We recently launched a native chrome application, and honestly with our chrome application a $200 chromebook can be a pretty amazing development machine, even for professional developers.
