Bash Street bytes: Do UK schools really need the Raspberry Pi?

So what's really that different to now from then?

So, this will 'only interest a small percentage of the schoolchildren' and 'therefore isn't really viable' is only a challenge in these modern times?

Back in the early 80s home computers were treated by most of those who chose to take any interest as a way of playing games, but everything else the computer could do was readily accessible; nothing was hidden from you if you chose to look any deeper, and some of those who did play games went exploring, usually to try and 'write their own games'. Out of a school of 300, I'd say only 30 or so kids took much interest at computers at school, and maybe 10 for anything other than playing games.

Now, most computers are treated as devices by to play games or "do something on the net", but everything about the machine is so abstracted that if you do want to look any deeper, you're likely to be out of luck. That same school of 300 would likely have 290 who use computers, but almost zero who have any way of delving beyond that tightly-controlled veneer.

Sure, the Pi and its ilk would probably not manage to get more than 10 or 20 kids interested in the guts of computers and computing, but even getting it back to the percentage from the early 80s would be a success; Those skills I learned had uses FAR beyond simply programming, so not even providing the tools to offer the chance to find out is a tragedy in itself.

Microsoft said “Where do you want to go today?”

In my opinion, that little flashing "K" in the corner of the screen offered far more potential.

Forget the past

One thing I see a lot of, particularly on here, is talk of life growing up in the 80s and programming on various computers, which "made" us the people we are today.

But things have changed spectacularly since that time, there is no evidence that a 21st century equivalent of what we had and did will work today, either with today's youth, or today's teaching practices and skills.

Did control technology O-level at school.

What a great course that was where the main themes where electronics, pneumatics and engineering structures. Rasberry Pi would be great for a course like that. I did a computer controlled burglar alarm using a ZX-81 !

meh!

Raspberry PI will fail in Schools for the following reasons.

1. IT is corporate Council driven these days, so Schools have less choice. Its all about saving money and buying something with only 1 use is no use. They want desktop PC's/Laptops/Netbooks because multiple schooling disciplines can use them.

2. Until its boxed up as a proper final product it won't get into Schools, it fails PAT testing, no protective insulation. The first thing a kid will do is drag a metal ruler across the main board and fry it and possibly themselves in the process.

3. You need to know how to code and the old saying still stands. Those who can, do! Those who can't, teach! Those who can't teach, teach PE.

@ "meh"

1. I've worked in various schools over the past decade and none of them have been "corporate Council driven". Academies are even further removed from council control.

2. PAT testing isn't always required, especially for new equipment.

3. No argument there! But I think the current curriculum is partly to blame. The IT teachers I've known have all been well skilled (mainly in software though)

Raspberry PI really needed?

I have recently joined the Pi owners club and am in the process of setting it up for use as a media centre. I don't really see what advantage it gives you in terms of learning programming if you already have access to a PC, it is simply a lower cost way of getting started. All schools must have an IT room by now so why is an RPi needed?

Also, I think it is dangerous to completely abandon the current curriculum. We do need more coders, but we also need everybody to be able to drive Office, understand how OS's work etc. RPis aren't the way to achieve this. The biggest RPi market so far seems to be fully grown techie geeks like me!

Horses for Courses

I'm working with some other schools in Cornwall on developing proper Computer Science / Programming teaching to replace the godawful Office-based GCSE ICT. We're taking a twin-track approach:

1) Scratch (probably up to year 8) and GreenFoot (year 9 and above) to teach proper programming on existing ICT suites - both can be installed by the ICT tech in a few minutes, and completely free.

2) Raspberry Pi to enable all kinds of 'physical computing' projects in DT, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Sports... Probably using only one or two devices for each project, not a classroom full.

So I agree with the article, I can't see the need for a suite of RPi's lined up in rows, it has far more value as a component for tinkering in the real world. What it has done, though, is lit up the entire debate and pulled things like Scratch and GreenFoot (which have existed quietly for years) into the limelight - all good.

capped at around 20 per cent of children

The number of children who have a sustainable interest in being in school is capped at around 20%

The whole point of school, of teachers, of classrooms, of curriculums, exams and the barbed wire fences is to keep the other 80% occupied for a day while their parents go to work.

To say that RPi is unsustainable because only 20% of kids have a lifelong interest says what about all the other subjects? What proportion of children interested in ox-bow lakes do you need to scrap the geography teacher?

10 echo This is boring

20 echo Let’s go play football / smoke fags

25 input answer$

30 if answer$ = "y" then Go to “The Park” else mode = "sulk"

The way I see it, education in the UK is geared to heavily towards the Arts in general. This is a general problem that won't be solved by these types of schemes. Decades of children (including myself - to an extent) thinking that reading and analysing novels, using "intellectual" words, is a substitute to a good technical education. Yeah I'm snob if you like.

But throughout my relatively young adult life, the amount of people I've met who think it means something that they've read Belzac novels or understand Dostievesky's (yeah I can't even spell it) modern meaning etc, means anything in the modern workplace, makes me feel a little disheartened. So you can write wonderful prose? Great. Can you set up a simple email client on your work place PC? No? Shall I do it for you, while you write a poem? Yes, I'm being a little flippant, but I've seen far too many UK graduates think they're "all that" when their so-called skills don't mean anything in a modern company.

And my point is, it isn't their own fault, to an extent. Our system teaches them disproportionately that quoting Shakespeare etc, is more important than understanding basic trigonometry, circuits, solving equations etc. I remember at my school one day we learned how to wire a plug. That was education, rudimentary, but far more of an education than Media Studies, General Studies etc. I doubt they even do that anymore. Again, yes I'm being an education snob, because that's what we need. Less Arts, more science.

Now the problem with any scheme such as the one described in the article is that there are very few teachers who know about programming. At least that's my experience. I remember my IT teacher used to read off a sheet about how to use Excel, and some DB program that I have forgotten (no, not Access). And she was actually a graphic design teacher IIRC. Maybe that's changed now, but I doubt it.

We need a top to bottom cultural reform to get people interested in computers and science. Unfortunately, history shows that British people are particularly averse to learning science. Yes, we have many great scientists past and present. But just look at Babbage for example. He was surrounded by people who though his ideas were implausible. We call them boffins, brainiacs, geeks. We learn to think of them as outsiders. If you're good at science and maths then well done, have fun living on the other side of the geek fence.

As an addendum, why are there no major UK IT companies? Where's our Google? Microsoft? Apple? Where's our Baidu even? We seem incapable of developing these huge, successful companies. Yeah we have some major corporations, but almost all of them are long established. Why are we incapable of making these companies? We don't really have an entrepreneurial spirit, like the Americans. And we don't have any eagerness and hunger for success like the Chinese. I'm not saying these things to put down the UK. But we really should answer these questions. And it al starts with our poor education system. I think its time we took education advice form the Koreans, Chinese, (some extent Japanese), and East Asian models. There's no shame in changing tack when you find yourself going off course.

Bah!

Way to miss the point, Mr Hill.

First, coding is not programming. Drag and drop app design for Android is just fancy scripting and you can't make a living doing that.

Second, why in Cray;'s name is anyone running around unplugging anything?

Third, so kids are not a "one interest fits all" proposition? Blimey! Whoda thunkit?

Here's a thought: Instead of looking at the Pi as just the ZX81 all over again, look at it as a chance to provide some kids - at a knock-down price so low you can expect some populations of kids to self-fund it much as I bought paper and crayons and God-alone knows what else over the years for my kid's schools - the chance to build and configure their own network using the Pi and some cables. Not a toy computer for hobbyists but but a very inexpensive component that could be used to teach people USEFUL skills for the future.

Class project: build and use a network MUD using the Pi. All you need is a big table, the cable, the Pis, a power supply and some monitors (old TVs will do in a pinch). The kids will do the rest.

No need to unplug all those MS Office boxes at all (not sure why this is being done in the first place).

Or they could just use non sucky monitors with a hdmi and a dvi.

The Pi doesn't offer anything over a standard computer with USB. What they need is imaginative programming software/language that is easy to learn but uses the same principals as proper programming. Bottom line is it needs to be quick and easy to see some result and keep them interested.

Re. Pi power problems

I recently bought a dozen of those Li-Ion mobile phone recharger packs, these come complete with interface plugs and a flying lead, even including a nice power indicator and switch.

Guess what, they power the Pi for days, and simply recharge over a USB connection.

One less problem, however the HDMI port is annoying,

Fix for this is to simply use the composite, which is more than enough if you connect it to any old cheap TV, even got it working with RISC OS today.

The big annoyance with the Pi is the lack of protection of the delicate components on the board, and the lack of heatsinking of the SoC which is easily rectified.

Kids learn science but aren't necessarily going to be scientists, they learn maths but most likely aren't going to be mathematicians or statisticians. They learn history but aren't going to be historians or archaeologists. They learn RE but aren't necessarily going to be priests or bishops and so on.

So what's wrong with them doing some coding when they probably won't all become programmers?

The RPi is not what makes today different

OK, there have always been games consoles, but Windows no longer dominates the market. People can easily experience different types of personal computer. Apple has the iPhone and iPad. There are Android phones, tablets, and even cheap netbook-class machines. The idea of the office being Windows-only is deader than a very dead doornail.

Maybe the Raspberry Pi hype was needed to wake the teachers up to that more general change. In my time, I've seen enough teachers who would have been best woken up by high explosive. I hope times have changed.

one place to watch

I'm a big fan of the Pi, but then I belong to a certain group of people who taught themselves to program on the first wave of home computers (ZX81, then C64). It's hard for me not to be enthusiastic for what the Pi foundation is attempting to achieve here.

Whatever all the naysayers may think and however loudly they decry the foundation's offering, I think it's very premature to pronounce judgement on it. It might not achieve the far-reaching goals that it's set itself (changing the character of UK education and bringing back, after a fashion, the halcyon days of the first home computing wave), I think that its true value is only going to be discovered by kids themselves.

While this measure of success is very hard to gauge, I think there's one place where we will see the Pi cropping up more and more, namely the Young Scientist competition and similar technology-based competitions. I think what sets the Pi apart is that it's not just confined to computer science. Thanks to the GPIO and the ease with which peripherals can be added via USB, I'm sure that the Pi will appeal to students with a preference for other fields.

It'll still probably take a while, but I'm pretty sure that over the next few years we'll be seeing plenty of innovative secondary school projects that include the Pi. Maybe that's not a great measure of success, but even if that's all that it enables, I think the Pi foundation's work will have been vindicated.

Logic

I think we need to go back to "Basic" coding, and perhaps even coding before that.

Flow Charts, Ladder Logic, and simple "Basic" programming is all that the children need. The lack of logical understanding is what hurts the most. There is a joy when you write your first program and the class watches as your whatever does whatever it was designed to do (In my day we had to type it all out and it took time).. When it was all said and done, the class of 30'odd that I was in had about 2 people who were highly computer litterate, and a 3rd who went to university to become a programmer "He's yet to write any successful work, but that's another story of my dissapointment of the tech sector"...

Teach children Logic, Perhaps even use electronic logic boards. Children may not see the fancy screen, but their understanding of the relationship between all variables is a lot better, plus it is much easier for them to use!.

Teachers do their usual thing - find fault

I remember when schools got the BBC Micro, some were never unboxed or access was so controlled that kids never got much out of it.

The lesson we should take is not from schools but from that generation when at home, inspired and prepared to spend hours - yes sometimes those hours were spent working out how to break copy protection - and in the process getting heavily into machine code.

In a 40 minute classroom session nothing much can be achieved - unless it's an inspiring and innovative teacher, then the kids will want to do more in their own time. Yes you can whine about the additional cost of a monitor, keyboard, mouse, memory card but who's not got left over keyboard and mouse from an old PC - or can get them cheap - charity shop or even new they don't cost much. Lots of domestic TVs have an HDMI socket (or converters are available). Next someone will point out that there are households where the additional cost of even a memory card is out of the question - that may be true but ask first how many of those have the latest 50 inch TV and Sky+, then look at the plus side of how many homes there are where the kids CAN make good use of a RasPi.

Don't waste time with kids that don't give a monkey's, we don't need the entire nation to be IT wizards, just a handful more Berners-Lees. No we don't need a nation of coders, we need a reasonable number of people with a level of understanding of what's possible to maybe design a software system, build a prototype and outsource the coding donkey-work to donkeys.

I welcome the fact that RasPi is doing better for home sales. The vast majority of schools are just clueless when it comes to IT that's the historic problem and it's not going to go away. Very few teachers can claim any credit for the success of the BBC and Sinclair generation, it always was and still is the case that keen kids know a lot more about IT than their teachers. My lad had to help out with using Excel. His "design a web site" project was rejected, he'd used CSS/Javascript for interactive navigation buttons teacher didn't understand and made him redo them in Flash. The school used and hence recommended Dreamweaver, so he wanted a copy at home - have you seen the price? So he suggested we get a pirate copy... Don't get that problem with RasPi.

The knee jerk response of teachers to such an anecdote is to dismiss it as "an isolated instance" - the problem is that there are thousands of such isolated instances. I'd turn it around to asy there are isolated instances of IT teachers who do make a decent job of teaching IT an many more who make it about as exciting as learning about the legislature of ancient mesopotamia.

RasPi gives kids access to an almost "disposable" tool, programming is only part of the story, add-on circuitry is part of the attraction. Think of it as meccano. A good xmas gift for a kid with the aptitude to make good use of it, wasted on uninterested kids. And as with Meccano dad may need to help - a second benefit of getting kids and parents working together.

Treat it like a musical instrument...

Coding & programming at their best have all the same characteristics of arts & crafts - there are multiple ways to get someonwhere and it usually helps if you've got some passion & skill for what you're building/drawing/painting/whatever.

When I learned to play violin, it started in generic music lessons with my class, and when I decided I wanted to focus on playing it, I started having after-school lessons with one of the music teachers.

I reckon something similar would be appropriate for the Pi - use Scratch & other apps on a PC to get identify the kids who'll be interested, then offer them the chance to get a bit more serious about it in after school actvivity where they won't be distracted by endless natter about the X-Factor & One Direction.

Nominative Determinism

Taygan Forth loves coding

Alex Blunt “You can have someone at your control.”

Why the Raspberry PI is correct for IT education

1. Standard and advanced eduction in the UK is aimed at training up the future workforce of this county, given that UNIX/linux is now the standard OS across all IT except PCs it is high time to stop training our workforce in Microsoft products. If you go the M$ route then as a business you are going to be paying through the nose forever whereas the opensource alternative is cheaper and lacks only trained staff.

2. Raspbeerry PI has joined the majority of IT systems and runs UNIX on an ARM so learning to code even down to assembler will provide an education in in the OS and environment that system for system is the most common and growing base in the world. RPi comes with everything you would expect from a linux system including all the free developement tools and as well as non-IT business tools, it isnt only scratch.

3. The RPi is around a fraction of the price of an x86 system and could even be provided free to families on benefits as the cost could be offset against the general move of Government services to the web.

4. System maintenance and the related removal of unnecessary ICT technicians would more than pay for schools the implement an all RPi. If the RPi gets corrupted then reflash the SD card, if the hardware fails then buy another. At £30 retail per unit that is a lot of broken RPi against even one ICT technician, given that the ICT tech currently spend most of their time fixing problems inherent in M$ products rather than hardware faults

5. RPi are assembled in the UK so a larger percentage of the system cost stays in the this country and the ARM is one of the few British IT successes we should be growing our own support for the CPU rather than sending all the money abroad.

An RPi education is what the present and future holds for both IT and business and fingers crossed will mean the return to bespoke business software systems rather than the current one size fits noone that falls over if you breathe on it. About time too

Multiple options...

The way I see it, the Raspberry Pi would be just one of the options available in a class.

Perhaps it would run a web server, that would then deliver content to a mobile application, teaching the kids about basic networking.

More exciting still, basic robotics - and push it a step further, a phone app that controls the robotics.

And the robotics is lego based !

I'm getting excited just thinking about the possibilities :)

Anyway, I hope the teachers are pre-installing these Pi's before unleashing the kids on them, otherwise it's going to be a *very* long and boring lesson. I installed the basic base packages along with a apache, sql etc. to create a basic home dev box - took 3 hours!

The Pi makes sense if....

a) you are going to use the GPIO pins;

b) you are going to use it for an purpose which cuts existing power use (eg - mediacentre box taped to the back of a monitor; works very well in that instance, plenty more too)

Its really not logical to use it for a general purpose coding device and I don't think that it should be viewed as such.

It is basically an embedded computer capable of running moderately complex tasks - its an ideal platform for control engineering tasks but its certainly not the ideal platform to create "apps", for want of a better word.

tl;dr needs peripherals on GPIO to make sense - that implies some electronics as well as coding; alternatively makes a great mediacentre with MPEG/VC-1 licences and uses about 8W doing it.

PS - I have one.