Thank you to Philip for sending in this great article from The Register that explores how kids are using the Pi in ways its makers hadn’t even anticipated!
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.
At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups – eager for the respect of their peers – shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.
I was one of the lucky few who got their hands on one of the first Raspberry Pis to hit Australian shores. That first Pi gave me all sorts of ideas of a world where powerful computers had become cheap enough to put almost anywhere. It’s giving kids the same ideas.
For the last few years I’ve been a judge for Young ICT Explorers, a nationwide competition and celebration of kids who get bitten by the IT bug. Back in 2013, we saw a range of web-based projects, with one or two Arduinos thrown into the mix. Last year, a few more Arduinos, and a single Raspberry Pi project. That project – with the most sophisticated crontab I’d ever seen, and also built by an 11 year-old – won the big prize.
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