All they needed was light bulb screw base, a microprocessor, a wifi chip, and a bitcoin mining chip. This could all be controlled with an iPhone.
Yep, because that's more readily accessible than a single USB port and a single open-source executable which can run on almost any platform. Not that I don't like educational tools - the stick miner I'm building is more or less deliberately that - but when I think about "I wanted kids to be able to do it" I don't immediately think about access to mains power and $300 smartphones.