Repurposing Retired Faculty Laptops to Make Engineering More Accessible

This abstract is for a Full Paper in the category of Innovative Practice. In Electrical and Computer Engineering programs, we are increasingly seeing a digital divide between students who can study and work on assignments 24/7 from powerful laptops, and those students who are forced to rely on the college's fixed, limited access computer labs to succeed. This paper discusses a proposal to address this problem in a low-to-no cost way at California Polytechnic State University by issuing underprivileged students laptops that have been recently retired from faculty use. The paper looks at the cost implications (and opportunities) of performing a light refurbishment on old faculty units, and provides benchmarks of retired faculty machines against newer faculty laptops across a number of common Electrical Engineering computation tasks.