Single Board Computers (SBC): The Future of Next Generation Pedagogies in Pakistan

ARM processors have taken over the mobile industry from a long time now. Future of data centers and the IT industry is estimated to make use of ARM Processors. Projects like Openstack on ARM are enabling use of ARM in data centers . Single board computers (SBCs) based on ARM processors have become the norm these days. Reason for their popularity lies in their cost effective and power efficient nature. There are hundreds of them available in the market having different sizes, compute power and prices. The reason for their popularity is largely due to the rise of new technology called IoT (Internet of Things) but there is another perspective where they can become handy. Low Price and Power Usage of single board computers makes them top candidate to be used for teaching many courses with hands-on experience in developing countries like Pakistan. Many boards support full Linux distributions and can be used as general-purpose computers while many of them are open hardware based. In this paper, we have reviewed the famous options available and tried to figure out which of them are better for teaching what kind of courses.