So. What can we do about that? Well, libraries are generally in the business of providing ways of filling gaps and providing resources for people who don't have the means to independently acquire them. It's a thing that public libraries have historically done for books and movies and other sorts of storytelling media. In the context of programming decisions and the thematic elements of working with allocating space for community access, or getting community-owned objects (usually under the STEAM umbrella, so Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) library budgets are generally expended on all kinds of interesting materials, methods, speakers, and technologies for their spaces and their users.
Some librarians have been branching out into other objects than just media items, offering things like tool libraries or Internet connectivity devices, so computers for use outside of the library would be an excellent addition to all of those loanable objects, as alternatives to the managed computers provided by a workplace or a school to our users. However, I suspect that many organizations and libraries would also treat loanable computers as valuable assets that need to be managed, even if not necessarily monitored as closely as work or school devices might be. By treating these computers as manageable assets, a library would render them mostly unsuitable for solving the real-world problems of their users and patrons. It's an understandable impulse. After all, most public libraries don't have enough IT infrastructure, and they don't want to add, basically, "untangling machines from whatever the user last did that messed them up beyond the user's ability to fix" as an additional task. Making loanable computers that are resilient against user error is important, if the purpose of those loanable computers is to help users accomplish tasks through the normal use of their computers. But if the purpose of the computer is to help the user solve problems and get comfortable with using, breaking, and fixing technology, then the user needs much more space to mess up than a typical managed computer provides, up to and including full control over system elements. This makes people worry about loaning computers and liabilities if their loaned-out computer does malicious things or gets hooked up to botnets, but there are several libraries that explicitly forbid the illegal in addition to other actions as part of their acceptable use policy, so presumably they have talked through with their lawyers and figured out what their liability requirements are.
When computers get involved in the process of Feeling Around and Finding Out, there needs to be an explicit understanding that failure with computers is not only acceptable, but encouraged. As is finding ways out of that failure, changing settings, or opening programs to see what they do, or trying to install or create new programs to see what happens. All of that permission to play with a computer has to be backed by some method that can be invoked if everything goes completely off the rails to restore a working system from a garbled mess. For families and user groups that have only ever had managed technology, and who have had it impressed upon them that the technology is frightfully expensive, cannot be replaced with the funds that the family has, and needs to be handled with care, having technology that is meant to be experimented on will give them the opportunity to try things they wouldn't dare do on their expensive and managed machines. For users who have only ever interacted with technology in high-stakes, mission-critical situations, and who are regularly given messages about the unreliability and malice of technology, having an experimental object to try things on (and fail at) and not have to worry about what it's going to take or cost to fix them, or what they will lose by experimenting, can go a significant way toward changing them from being terrified of technology to working with it as a tool. Even if it's a tool that gets no benefit of the doubt, and potential hostility toward it.
Supporting these users will mean finding inexpensive ways of getting computing in the hands of users, and significant reassurances that these computers are meant to be experimented with, broken, fixed, and otherwise used as training grounds for figuring out how to get technology to do the things that the users want to do with it. At the moment of this presentation, options for low-cost new computers will likely be of the single-board computer variety. They usually need a display to go with them, which is usable. Most people have TVs that can serve this function and have the appropriate connectors to hook up to the single-board computer. If there aren't any low-cost options in the single-board computer department, used and refurbished laptops may step in to fill the void. One of hte biggest drawbacks to single-board computers and used laptops is that they generally prevent the user from being able to look at the hardware inside and tinker with that, one of the time-honored practices of the Flounder Around and Find Out method. At this point, though, the benefit of tinkering with hardware can be sacrificed in favor of getting experimental computers into the hands of users.
More importantly, and potentially more terrifying than getting appropriately cheap hardware, is the high likelihood that the operating system of choice for these machines will be Linux. Generally, neither single-board computers nor used laptops are likely to have an operating system pre-installed on them, and the costs of licenses for Windows or the Mac operating system, if there exists a version for that computer, will likely be far more expensive than the computer itself. Despite the popular perception of Linux as an operating system with scrolling characters and text-only interfaces, most Linuxes these days come installed with graphical tools to manage things like installing software and connecting to the Internet. And their desktop designs often closely mimic either the Windows environment or the macOS one. So, it won't be a completely foreign environment to begin experimenting with. Most crucially, no one has to go to the command line if they don't want to, which will make things less scary for everyone, at least for basic experimentation. Some tools may only work from the command line, but those tools are generally not going to be the first choices for people who are just beginning to experiment with computers and their new environments.
Loaning out experimental computers will also require library staff to have an easy method of resetting the machines to a working state after they have been thoroughly experimented with, and to make sure they are properly updated when they go out to the next person they'll be lent to. Library staff are sometimes equally as afraid of touching and experimenting with computers as their users and patrons are. So they also get to benefit from having to regularly restore and reset computers from their experimental states, using their installation media, their recovery modes, or disk image writing software. Having to interact with computers in these ways will prove to both staff and users that it takes a significant amount of effort to actually wreck a computer completely beyond repair, at least, without doing physical damage to it. Library staff may be worried about the first reset, but by the time they're doing their hundredth, they will have the process down sufficiently that they don't have to worry about what happened while the computers were out, so long as they can get to the point where they can reset and reinstall. Additionally, seeing firsthand how hard it is to unrecoverably wreck a computer will also possibly help them start thinking about their own problems and how they might apply computers and tools to at least some of them. The more that you are able to Flounder Around and Find Out, and then recover and reset, the more likely it is that someone will continue with their experimentation.
So: If we accept that experiential and process-based learning is better for most people, and that learning happens best when it's situated in the context of someone trying to solve a problem in their own lives and their own contexts, there have to be more opportunities for learners of all ages to not only experience these problems, to gather resources and attempt knowledge, and try to solve them, either partially or completely. School environments will help with some of this, but library environments and materials are more likely to have the latitude to tailor their programming options and their material availability toward solving these kinds of real-world problems. With the understanding that many lower-income families do not have access to computers to practice problem-solving and technological competencies on, libraries are also well-suited to expend resources toward acquiring low-cost computers with minimal management requirements that they can loan out for the explicit purpose of experimentation and problem-solving in their communities.
In short, because we're libraries, we have the ability to not only expend budget, but help people Fuck Around and Find Out.