Dear Pert
I respectfully disagree with your opinion.
The Point of the Arduino CTC programme is not just "buy a box full of hardware" but it's a complete solution based on a box of hardware, documentation , teacher training and an online learning system. The big value is that teachers receive training and continuous support before and during the time they teach the CTC class.
We've extensively tested this in the field with tens of thousands of students. It's a SOLID teaching programme , not just a random selection of stuff cut and pasted from the web.
Moreover the CTC teaches Programming, Electronics, Robotics and more. We spent a LOT of time designing it to be gender neutral and taking full advantage of the years of experience we have teaching kids and adults.
About the Arduino 101, it's a very powerful device but it's also the youngest member of the family, some bugs are expected (Spoiler alert not even the AVR Arduino Core is entirely bug free) We're expecting a new release of the 101 software sometime in august. This is not a problem for the CTC because schools that are teaching using it receive support directly from us online. I think this is a good compromise in order to take advantage of a dual core processor with bluetooth le, 6 axis motion sensor and a neural network!
Intel had discontinued some boards as they do normally. The Arduino 101 is an Arduino product so it will continue to be supported in the future.
So yes, one can grab some chinese clones, get some random materials online and teach but there is a big difference between that and having a properly supported programme with tons of material developed by experts.
I'm happy to explain in more excruciating detail why our solution is high quality and provides PROVEN teaching value.
m
pert:
I just took a look at the "Arduino CTC Kit 101" and I would strongly urge you to not buy that. The reason for this is the kit uses the Arduino 101 boards. Although the specs on that board look good, the support (both official and from the community) is not good at all. The documentation has serious issues that have been reported to Arduino but not fixed. Intel has discontinued their other two Arduino boards so I would not trust in the future of that hardware and/or their support for it.Although the AVR based Arduino boards don't have the specs of the more modern ones, the support is very good. For learning the ATmega328P boards work very well. Once the students have advanced enough to need more memory or performance it should not be very difficult for them to transition to other Arduino boards.
I don't see any AVR CTC kits available in the store. That might be a better option but only having 6 hardware kits seems pretty limiting for a standard classroom. I guess groups are fine but ~5 student groups seems too large to me. You also have to consider the very likely possibility that some of the hardware will be damaged over time. Of course you only really need to buy one CTC kit and after that you can purchase additional/replacement hardware so the price will go down but the CTC kit will eat the whole grant so there is no money left to buy more hardware.
I estimate that you could put together a nice hardware kit for $40 max per student/group. This means you could buy 50 of these for the price of the 6 that come with the CTC kit. Of course that leaves out the training support part of the package. The value of that would depend on the quality of the support, which is unknown, and how much you need that support. You can always get support here on the forum for free and there is an enormous amount of free information and code for Arduino and the AVR based boards specifically available elsewhere online. Of course Arduino should give the same level of product support regardless of whether you buy 50 Nanos or a CTC kit.