Yeah there are lots but even the poorest can afford a RP, which is more and more is better.
Even the richest parents would think twice about allowing little alice to throw her laptop off the roof.
As a kid that grew up without a lot of stuff and my parents struggled to get me my first computer (Oric 16k). It changed my life. I think the RP will change more lives and open up more avenues to genuinely poor kids who want to experiment.
Great ideas are not just generated by middle/upper class kids, us working class kids have great ideas too.
I realise this is a great generalisation and we live in a 'class-less society' and money goes up as well as down and some kids will indeed use RP to record their sisters undressing and some kids will try and snort their RP up their nose BUT it's a genuine opportunity for ALL kids and I endorse it.
Kids who do have their own laptops available are going to be gently hampered by choice-paralysis. What programming language do they learn[1]? Where do they start? What do they need to get to start?
They're also going to be gently hampered by having various incompatibilities - the programming environment will cause some stuff to not compile and while that's a great learning experience it's not what you want someone to be faced with on their first "Hello World" example. Note that all those home computers that people started on, typing listings from magazines, did not have those problems.
And advanced learners are going to be gently impeded by the OS not letting them get access to the hardware. I made a simple DA converter out of resistors soldered to a D25, which I used with NO$GB emulator. Building that DA was useful for me, and seeing the data lines on the D25 made the concept a lot more real. I guess this is possible under Linux or OSX or Windows but it's harder than just selecting addresses and sending data to them.
[1] My answer to those questions is to just use "Learn Python the Hard Way"; perhaps having a version tailored for young people and the Raspberry PI. Once they've worked their way through that they have the confidence to start choosing editors etc.
And many teenagers don't have a laptop of their own, and even if they do, or have a computer they can use in the house, it doesn't mean that it is theirs to break, and perhaps fix.
And yes, surely some have >1 already. So what? How does the fact that some kid has 3 computers do anything for a kid who has none?
