Recently, students at Orono have seen a shift in the display technology in each classroom from the old Smartboards to the new ViewSonic displays. This shows some signs of investment towards improving the educational experience digitally by the school. However, the current laptops the school offers for students to check out are very lacking.

These laptops are Dell Chromebook 3100s. Powered by Intel Celeron N4000, they reach 9% of the CPU multicore performance of Apple’s M1 processor according to CPU Monkey. The minimum specification chip recommended by the school for Macs is M1 and for Windows is the Intel Core i3. Websites such as CPU UserBenchmarks and CPU Monkey also show the Celeron being hammered by the i3. This identifies a problem.

Students are receiving extremely underpowered computers as their school machines. The school’s listing of personal device recommendations should be updated as it lacks the latest laptop chips from Apple as well as the Intel chips the company used prior to building its own.

These are not just benchmarks either. Having to switch from my own personal device to a school computer for a day’s use in the past, I was falling behind on my assignments because the Chromebook provided would take excessively long to boot up and would show a white screen for many seconds between basic tasks such as entering new websites. Dell Chromebook 3100s are also only capable of achieving a mere 187 nits of brightness. This is extremely dim, especially for being the screen students look at every day for multiple hours. 300 nits is the bare minimum that anyone would accept as their display’s peak brightness if given the option. The ability to read text comfortably and see colors accurately decreases too drastically with less brightness than that

One could claim that if students really cared more about the device they use, then they would spend the extra money on higher-specification products. But the fact is, many can not afford to put that much money into a device, and families in Orono may choose to spend their money elsewhere, despite students’ laptops being extremely important for their education.

So, what should we do about this? The school currently appears to believe that students are not capable of taking care of a device they do not own and parents are not willing to risk spending large amounts of money if their child damages school property. I would disagree with this as the improved educational experience on a more future-proof device is a significant upgrade with the slight risk of having students possibly break a more valuable device. By the time students are in high school, they definitely deserve this change as school work intensifies and responsibility improves. This means it is the responsibility of the school to act.

Orono Schools should invest more money in higher-end computers for their middle school and high school rentals that students can use for the 7 years of school to improve their educational experience and productivity. The school can cut costs on other items like textbooks which are barely used as they often have an alternative online making the stacks of textbooks in many classrooms useless. The school can also invest less on buying books for the libraries as those have online alternatives.