“Grandpa is getting pretty old. Out there all alone on that farm, he has no one to look in on him, just to see if he’s ok. He’ll use the landline, but he’s beyond of the range of mobile, and he’s never been really great with computers. No Skype or emails. Grandpa does have internet. So I built this for him.”
Fingers fly across the keyboard, and now I’m reading the source code for an index.php page, another marriage of convenience between HTML and PHP. How’d this girl – all of eleven years old – learn to do this?
“A lot of it was trial and error.” Both she and her project partner blush a bit. “The PHP bits were kinda hard. But we found a lot of stuff on Google,” she confides.
Neither girl had written a line of code before this. They knew nothing about how to build a computer-controlled camera, or drive a computer-controlled display. But with Google’s help – and Raspberry Pi – they prevailed.
When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they’ll do the rest.
Look here, these kids are using sensors on a Raspberry Pi to read the air quality of the room, alerting asthmatics to seek an environment less likely to give them breathing problems. Over there – because sometimes the referees miss goals – a netball-crazed 11 year-old girl used an ultrasonic sensor and Raspberry Pi to create an automatic scoring system.
Consider three ten year-olds who fussed and fiddled with LittleBits – a mashup of Lego with the Internet of Things – until they found just the right combination of pieces to create a system that allows you to know whether that sushi tray gliding by on that continuous track has been sitting around a little too long to be safe to eat.
Each of these projects solve a real-world problem. They’re not speculative: they’re prototypes. The Raspberry Pi has proven to be more than just a way to get kids into IT. It’s broadened their canvas of possibilities. They can look at a problem, dream up a solution, and make it so.
Make way for ‘Pi Club’ (not its real name): The not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, makers of the wildly popular $35 Raspberry Pi microprocessor, and the U.K.-based volunteer-led charitable organization Code Club, which runs after school programs to get kids coding, are merging — with the latter becoming a subsidiary of The Pi Foundation.
The idea being to advance the core mission of both organisations, which in the Pi’s case is also about getting more kids involved with tech. Albeit that the Pi’s success thus far — with some seven million+ of its microprocessors sold to date since launch in 2012 — has mostly been a result of (adult) makers seizing the chance to use low cost hardware to power their projects.
But while big kids have powered Pi sales, the Pi Foundation still wants more school-age kids to get tinkering.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
We are a professional review site that has advertisement and can receive compensation from the companies whose products we review. We use affiliate links in the post so if you use them to buy products through those links we can get compensation at no additional cost to you.OkDecline
2 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined
Kids don’t want to code. They want to solve problems us oldies can’t perceive
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/27/the_raspberry_pi_is_succeeding_in_ways_its_makers_ialmosti_imagined/
“Grandpa is getting pretty old. Out there all alone on that farm, he has no one to look in on him, just to see if he’s ok. He’ll use the landline, but he’s beyond of the range of mobile, and he’s never been really great with computers. No Skype or emails. Grandpa does have internet. So I built this for him.”
Fingers fly across the keyboard, and now I’m reading the source code for an index.php page, another marriage of convenience between HTML and PHP. How’d this girl – all of eleven years old – learn to do this?
“A lot of it was trial and error.” Both she and her project partner blush a bit. “The PHP bits were kinda hard. But we found a lot of stuff on Google,” she confides.
Neither girl had written a line of code before this. They knew nothing about how to build a computer-controlled camera, or drive a computer-controlled display. But with Google’s help – and Raspberry Pi – they prevailed.
When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they’ll do the rest.
Look here, these kids are using sensors on a Raspberry Pi to read the air quality of the room, alerting asthmatics to seek an environment less likely to give them breathing problems. Over there – because sometimes the referees miss goals – a netball-crazed 11 year-old girl used an ultrasonic sensor and Raspberry Pi to create an automatic scoring system.
Consider three ten year-olds who fussed and fiddled with LittleBits – a mashup of Lego with the Internet of Things – until they found just the right combination of pieces to create a system that allows you to know whether that sushi tray gliding by on that continuous track has been sitting around a little too long to be safe to eat.
Each of these projects solve a real-world problem. They’re not speculative: they’re prototypes. The Raspberry Pi has proven to be more than just a way to get kids into IT. It’s broadened their canvas of possibilities. They can look at a problem, dream up a solution, and make it so.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Foundation And U.K.’s Code Club Merge For Global Push To Get Kids Coding
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/pi-club/
Make way for ‘Pi Club’ (not its real name): The not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, makers of the wildly popular $35 Raspberry Pi microprocessor, and the U.K.-based volunteer-led charitable organization Code Club, which runs after school programs to get kids coding, are merging — with the latter becoming a subsidiary of The Pi Foundation.
The idea being to advance the core mission of both organisations, which in the Pi’s case is also about getting more kids involved with tech. Albeit that the Pi’s success thus far — with some seven million+ of its microprocessors sold to date since launch in 2012 — has mostly been a result of (adult) makers seizing the chance to use low cost hardware to power their projects.
But while big kids have powered Pi sales, the Pi Foundation still wants more school-age kids to get tinkering.