RPi Education

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Doing a project at school or have a Raspberry Pi Club? Add it in this section to allow others to follow your progress!

A key aspect of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's aims is to encourage education - several groups, including Computing At School aim to bring Computing Science back into schools.

The Manual

A manual is currently in production by members of the Computing At School working group. This began on the 13 October 2011 and is due to be ready for early March 2012. The manual is aimed at the project's target audience, children, so that they can take their "First steps in Computer Science".

For the first release (~January/February 2012), there will mostly likely be very minimal documentation. A 'schools' release is due in June/July 2012.

Your Projects

Please add details of your group and what plans you have for the RPi or provide a link to your homepage.

University of Manchester - School of Computer Science

We want to use the Raspberry Pi with a simple hardware board and set of downloadable activities to use it to encourage young people (or anyone else) get into embedded computing. We're currently looking at piface for the interface board and trying to come up with little activities to do. We've got some ideas but would love some more if anyone else wants to get involved.

We already run Linux workshops for schools and the National UK Schools Animation Competition, which uses Scratch.

Educational Links

Programming languages

Items in bold specifically support the Raspberry Pi device

• http://www.kidsruby.com/ - Have fun and make games, or hack your homework using Ruby! Just tell your parents or teachers you're learning Ruby programming... ;)
• http://scratch.mit.edu/ - Graphical OO-based visual programming environment.
• http://www.alice.org/ - Similar to scratch AFAICT
• http://python.org/ - The original 'designed for teaching' language of the 90s
• http://lua.org/ - Small, extensible and fits in your head
• BBC BASIC - The original 'designed for teaching' language of the 80s - A large number of implementations are listed here: http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic.html
• http://basic256.org/index_en - Another BASIC variant with integrated IDE and simple graphics.
• C/C++ via GCC + CMake build system for advanced use.

Communities

• http://madlab.org.uk/about/ - The Manchester Digital Laboratory
• The Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network, UK - This covers all the red tape that is necessary when working with children, as well as networking with other like minded volunteers to share ideas.

Software suites

• http://gcompris.net/-en- - GCompris is a high quality educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. Confirmed working on alpha boards.
• http://www.sugarlabs.org/ - The Sugar Sweet, a desktop environment used on the XO one laptop per child.
• OpenSUSE Linux for Education (LiFE) - an open source Linux operating system with educational software.

Libraries/applications

• http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2006/02/games-perl.ars - Developing games with Perl and SDL
• http://www.pygame.org/ - Simple SDL wrapper for Python.
• http://docs.python.org/library/idle.html - The Python IDE that comes with Python.
• http://love2d.org/ - Something akin to pygame for Lua.
• https://github.com/ntoll/RaspberryPy - An interactive set of programming lessons for Python, written in Python. To be built at PyconUK (http://pyconuk.org) during the sprints. :-)
• http://www.khronos.org/openvg/ - OpenVG vector graphics library. Natively supported by GPU(?)
• Hackety Hack - an open source application that teaches coding in a simple manner.

General resources

• http://www.cs4fn.org/ - Computer Science for fun
• http://computingatschool.org.uk/ - Computing at School Working Group
• http://en.literateprograms.org/LiteratePrograms:Welcome - An MIT project to develop programs which are self describing.
• http://www.happynerds.net/view/linux - External site listing educational programming resources for children.

Articles/opinion pieces/trade bodies relating to education

In the UK:

• http://royalsociety.org/education/policy/computing-in-schools/ - The Royal Society's Computing in Schools project
• http://securiously.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/do-we-really-need-to-teach-our-kids-to-code/ - Teaching the skills associated with programming rather than programming as an aim in itself.

General:

• http://www.edutopia.org/programming-the-new-literacy - Programming is the new literacy
• http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/three-things-we-have-to-teach-in-schools - Ben Goldacre's list of "Three things we have to teach in schools"

• http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/teach-our-kids-to-code.html
• http://www.osnews.com/story/6282 - An article on the command-line as a good interface for new users.

Direct action

• http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/15081 - A petition to the Department for Education about teaching programming in schools (UK only).