Good for young kids to learn computer, programming, etc. It comes with free Mathematica.
There are also limited game option, which is good from parent's perspective.
There are also limited game option, which is good from parent's perspective.
I see nothing good in limited game option. It was inspiring to play game and then want to also program some game. Or to crack that game. DOS games are easier to penetrate with ArtMoney and IDA than modern garbage with closed source servers. So it makes sense which games are playable on device, not playability of games as is.
Parents may spend some time with kids in network DOS games, discuss how it was to experience it first. And that Raspberry Pi, what is it good for? It does not have DOS legacy, it does not have Amiga legacy. It is disconnected from all great stuff of the past, and does not have own charm. Its games are either emulators or some open source games ported to ARM. An architecture that is new on desktops and who knows how long will it be. There is Windows ARM, but it does not run on Raspberry Pi. There is Mac OS ARM, but also won't run. Proprietary ARM is pushed to be replaced by RISC-V, so should we tie ourselves to ARM if it is doomed?
I mostly see Raspberry Pi in hardware. MT-32Pi for Roland sound emulation in ITX-Llama. PiStorm for fast CPU emulation in MiniMig. Not primary CPU for desktop. I don't know what to discuss with kids in Rasperry Pi. No past and no future.
I have at different times put out windows, mac & rpi as "lounge computer" used by kids (5, 7, 9 and their friends) and their main complaint with rpi is DRM issues, that's pretty much it.
Kids who have used multiple devices understand they can physically look different and the things you click on are in different places. Also updates can move stuff around. Things are just randomly different sometimes for fundamentally un-knowable reasons.
The operating system primarily exists to provide a button that launches a web browser; computers as a skill is ability to open the things you want despite bad ui/ux.
A browser is a thing that if you type in "crazygames" lets you play games. The other important buttons / magic words are "netflix" / "disney" / "youtube". Spotify also a core request.
Median child (<12) doesn't know what an operating system is, advanced kids will know about "apple" being different from "windows" but usually won't have a coherent mental model of why that would be. Engineer's kids know what Linux is.