It pleases me to see you mention the PSoC 4. I think it's a highly underrated educational tool due to the software stack used to develop on it. If they were to open up the platform I know several places that would love to use it when teaching kids about hardware and software development.
Building an rpi-based education platform might be a good candidate. Though I'm not sure what the killer feature there would be, and there's already the pi-top in that space.
I like the idea of using it from an educational point of view. One of the big problems our coding clubs face, when using a Raspberry Pi, is that they need all the peripherals disconnected from their standard PCs and used with the Pis.
This way Code Clubs and CodeDojos can use existing IT infrastructure to get their kids into doing some electronics projects, at a very low price.
Good point. Anything is better than the office driven computer classes. The PI does indeed provide strong educational benefits to improve insights at the electronic level.
My only complaint, and weighted by the fact that the rpi team did deliver on most feature, quality and cost while so many ventures failed to even finish prototypes, is that the SoC is a monster. So no kid will ever use it to go further than python and gpio. A stupid forth CPU would be as good for electronics, but also teach some mathematical programming ideas (recursion, trees), basically the whole computing fundamentals.
I think it makes sense to mention the potential influence of raspberry pi on education here, it's potential that is to provide far greater accessibility to a superior coding/learning platform in education. The next few generations might just be raised as linux users.
There are endless possibilities. Kids would likely appreciate something like creating a console game emulator or wiring up hardware sensors to the raspberry pi.
A customer in Singapore gave me a Raspberry Pi as a parting gift when I left for home, and I enjoy it immensely, including the Pixel desktop: minimal but all the functionality to run programs and work.
Off topic, but I wish the Raspberry Pi would be widely used in schools here in the USA. Having programming languages, Wolfram, etc. already installed and the neat gadget aspect of the Pi might encourage more kids to experiment with computers and not just play games. At least that would be my hope.
Just look at all the plug and play breakout boards available for this at launch. This is going to be huge for kids learning microcontroller programming (which is of course the pi foundation's raison d'etre.
It has the ecosystem. Not just the technical side, but it has mindshare in education. There will be more people who know what a Raspberry Pi is than an SBC.
Meh, I mean they are aiming it at education which I think is great, but I doubt many kids would know what to do with Raspberry Pi if you just handed it to them.
My impression is that the main interest in it has been from older people who like to hack on hardware.
This is the kind of stuff that I've been waiting to see on the Pi. It was touted as a "learning tool" by the foundation, but was co-opted by the hacker community as a cheap but full-fledged computer to hack with, completely overshadowing the teaching tool aspect.
Does anyone have any good recommendations for resources / projects for a computer-interested 12 year old? I was thinking of buying a Pi4 for my niece who is “getting into computers” but I fear my tastes in what constitutes interesting or age-relevant content might be out of touch.
I also, look at the various books that they sell on the Raspberry Pi site, and worry that they’ll be out of date pretty quickly.
If anyone has recommendations for educational materials or projects that I could help my niece with, I’m sure others on this thread are looking for similar ideas. This new all-in-one device really feels like a well timed gift with lockdown and holidays.
You bring up an important point, I think, unintentionally. Kids may be able to 'screw up and fix' the software components, but it would be very cool to also allow the same interaction with the hardware.
I feel like maybe a version of the RaspberryPi that ships assembled on a breadboard with replacement parts - more expensive, of course, to cover the increased manufacturing costs and extra parts - would be extremely useful to anyone interested in hardware design. (Of course there are other kits that do this, but I think that there would be some benefit to RaspberryPi offering it as well.)
My, overly-impassioned, exaggerated point is that the RPi is no better that many other competing devices on the market and should me measured solely on technical/business merit. The popularity of the device has spawned a product category of itself. However, at this point in time, claiming something about education is total rubbish. Take the old Pi, run ARMv7 QEMU on it et voila you have the new Pi. There is nothing new to learn, to grow, to probe questions about. The GPIO of the device could just as easily be be provided by a USB breakout board, etc, etc. Cypress had a $4 PSOC prototype board and if anyone (especially Cypress) bothered to develop open-source tooling for it, it would have be a far more useful device to learn from.
(As an aside: thank you to HNer asb and colleagues for the lowRISC project. Also, thank you to people like "bunnie" and "xobs" for Novena. These are real people, with real projects working with the best of intentions.)
I will always love raspberry pi's, they are well supported and great for quick and cheap prototyping. I have used them to teach children how to code (They really enjoyed working with sensehat), research at university, and at work for rapidly prototyping. The size is also easy to work with.
There are better SBC's out there, but raspberry pi is familiar.
I really hope the recent IPO doesn't change too much...
There's more to the "education" thing than you are realizing.
Even if kids only use them for XBMC clients -- they have to learn how to write the image to the SD card and then boot it, etc. Might not be much -- but that's time better spent than just killing more bad guys in CoD.
There have been plenty of blog posts by the foundation detailing how students are using RPi's in schools. There's been a few times someone has written into one of the Podcasts I listen to and talked about using RPi's in education right here in the US. Playing with GPIO pins is a great way to get kids excited in circuits, computing, tinkering, etc.
There have also been some good examples of taking RPi out to remote areas in Africa and what-not and building a basic computer lounge where people can come and get online, some for the first time in their lives. Now that's inspirational, and educational.
There's a lot of copy-cats of the RPi out now -- most of which are slightly more expensive but offer higher performance. It's important to recall that before the RPi, small form factor SoC boards existed -- but usually were twice, three time, or more the price. The relatively cheap cost of the RPi started all this.
Hm, nobody is mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Isn't this their target audience? Is it too slow, Raspbian not good enough for what they want to teach, or what's the reason?
(I'm not a teacher nor have I tried to use a Pi (although I own one, haven't had the time to play with it yet); I'm just wondering.)
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