Ideas for Avoiding Bent CF Slot Pins?

Question

I am a photography teacher, and this year I received cameras with CF cards. Within a week of letting the students use them, three cameras had bent CF slot pins. Does anyone have ideas for preventing this? Here are the ideas I've had so far, and some issues related to each:

• Require students to bring me their cameras, and I remove and replace the memory cards. The students use card readers to import. This is the system I am currently using and it was working well for a while. Unfortunately, I recently had two more cameras show up with bent pins. It turns out that high school students don't always follow directions. And while I do want them to learn this skill, this is a rather high stakes situation to do it.
• Hand out USB cables for importing instead of card readers. (This would prevent the need to remove the cards at all). I have used cables in the past, and one problem that pops up is that the USB ports on the cameras eventually wear out and do not connect anymore. This is likely from people attempting to shove the cable in the wrong way, or bumping into the cable while it's in the camera.
• Purchase WIFI memory cards. (Again to prevent the need to remove the cards) I know most of the options here are SD cards (not CF cards), but I have SD to CF adaptors, so that is not an issue. The problem here is that the WIFI adaptors in the computers in my classroom (which are desktops) are likely being removed this summer and everything is being switched over to cables. I am also concerned about having multiple WIFI SD cards all in the same room, and am unsure if students would be able to tell which camera they are connecting to.

Answer 1

The best solution, assuming you're stuck with CF-based cameras, is to start out the class by showing them pictures of CF slots with bent pins, saying "This cost us $xxx to repair; this year, if you break it, YOU pay for it."

That said, a better option is to avoid CF entirely for students. Hand out cheap cameras with SD card slots. There's a reason that (at least in current-generation cameras) only pro cameras still use CF. CF's mechanical design is terrible, making it highly prone to damage like this unless you treat it with a decent amount of respect. SD, by contrast, is much harder to break, hence the reason consumer gear almost exclusively uses SD, not CF, and has for at least the last decade. Heck, even the newer pro cameras have at least one SD slot these days.

Perhaps let students work their way up to the higher-end cameras after they've proven they can take care of the cheaper ones.

Or just move to newer pro cameras that have SD slots (e.g. Canon's 6D series, 5D Mark IV and later, etc.) and leave the CF slot empty.