Personal Note: In
2013, I attended my first PyCon in Santa Clara, CA. At the time, I
was a complete novice at programming, but interested both because my
partner had been a Python geek for a long time and because I was
embarking on a new career as a freelance tutor, writer, and educator,
and wanted to learn about the educational potential of the open
source tech movement. At the end of the conference, the announcement
of a surprise gift to be given to each attendee was met with the kind
of enthusiastic, almost frenzied joy I have only seen previously at
rock concerts when an unexpected superstar steps onto the stage to
accompany a lesser known headliner (I would give an example here, but
it would certainly date me).
At the 2013 PyCon, each attendee got a Raspberry Pi—a tiny, adaptable, extremely affordable ($25-$35 USD),
yet very powerful, single-board computer that would prove to be a catalyst for the spread of computer
literacy to young and young-at-heart people worldwide.
Image credit: "Raspberry Pi B+ top" by Lucasbosch - Own work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The Raspberry Pi Foundation created the first marketable device in 2011. Their mission, "to
promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially
at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing”
makes them a natural ally of the PSF. According to PSF Director, Marc-André Lemburg,
“The PSF board thinks it's a great idea to get the PSF and the RPF
working together more closely, since we share similar goals and
there's a large overlap in communities, especially on the education
and young coders side.” Furthermore, Raspberry Pis have been used
to teach coding primarily in Scratch and Python, and they are rapidly
gaining in popularity. Currently, over 4.5 million Raspberry Pis have
been produced and shipped.
One of the most
imaginative and exciting of the RPF's educational programs currently
underway in the UK is a competition that will allow UK primary and
secondary school students a chance to do real scientific research in
space. For the competition, teams of students will devise experiments
and/or create software for Raspberry Pis that will be deployed
aboard the International Space Station by British European Space Agency Astronaut,Tim
Peake. The data collected will be downloaded to the students
conducting the winning experiments.
The RPF's and the
UK's commitment to teaching computing skills is further reflected in
their providing teaching resources to aid students in creating their
contest submissions. These resources will be further linked to current teaching curricula in order to
enhance education in STEM fields. Funding and collaboration are
coming not only from educational institutions like the UK Space Agency, UKspace, ESERO-UK and ESA, but also from UK industry. For more details, see AstroPi.
Stay tuned for a
future post on another education project involving Raspberry Pi:
UNICEF's Learning Initiative, as well as some info on the newly
released, quad-core, Rasberry Pi 2.
