also, the trainer she is describing is already pretty much targeted to the given audience. Lisa indicated she is in an associate (i.e., 2-year) computer technician program.

in a one-semester course, which i took as an electrical engineering junior, and which i taught the lab for as a grad student, we coded around one small program per lab session, poking hex code on a 6800 board. maybe half the students were not computer science minors, and so had not taken any computer programming courses since Fortran (they took thermo and systems courses instead). a lot of the students got wrapped around the axles trying to code a simple nested counter. i only got heavily into assembly coding because my senior project group bought a microcontroller board and i was the only C.S. minor in the group.

i am thinking it is not much use to buy a ferrari if you are going to only drive it around the block once a week. (well, maybe you don't want to scratch the paint. :) and your bad luck if you bought an Edsel (Triscend)!

a company that is pouring thousands of dollars into development h/w probably wouldn't blink at replacing a few boards every few years. a school is a different situation. no matter what the extra features are, the students are just going to poke a few programs in and run them.

(re monitors, i have worked on some projects where you needed serious justification, including a few months of fruitless debugging, before you could get approval to have a h/w engineer hook up a logic analyzer; s/w engineers need not think about touching the high-value hardware. other places, i could hook up an analyzer or o-scope on my own. in the first case, a monitor would be one of the few tools available for debugging, warts and all.)

if the students wanted to be AHEAD of the game, they could purchase their own boards and play with them :). or even sign up for one of the contests that come up once in awhile and get a free board. but that doesn't really justify replacing a labfull of trainers.

james