Eben Upton explains why he saw a need for the Raspberry Pi – and what a difference a year has made…
Just before we launched the Raspberry Pi in 2012, I got talking to a neighbour about our plans to make a computer the price of a textbook. Working in admissions at the University of Cambridge, I’d noticed a worrying decline in skills among the 18-year-olds arriving to study Computer Science. Kids we’d admitted in the 90s typically rolled up with an encyclopaedic knowledge of low-level programming languages; the students we were admitting now were every bit as smart, but their experience was limited to web design and a depressing level of familiarity with PowerPoint – we were building a generation of rote workers who use computers to consume, not to create. Kids’ exposure to hardware at home in the 2000s meant exposure to unprogrammable gaming devices; or to family PCs, where Mum did the banking and you did your homework. PCs were much too important and expensive for children to ‘mess around with’. These were the lucky kids, too; 20% of homes in the UK do not have a computer at all. We thought we could try to address this problem by making a machine designed for learning, which was open, robust, interesting, and cheap enough to be useful in experimentation, where nobody would worry about the cost of replacement if it broke. My neighbour was nonplussed. “I can’t see the need. Kids today are digital natives! They know more about this stuff than I do! And anyway; why would you need to teach them to program? The computers do all that stuff for them anyway.”
From where he’s standing, he’s right. He can see a handful of newsworthy young people starting up successful online businesses and getting into the papers; he hears about his daughter’s school friend, who has made an iPhone app using web tools. And his kids are probably better at programming the Sky box than he is. But – digital natives? I’ve yet to meet one, and I spend a lot of time in classrooms these days. Who is going to build the back-end of those web tools in the future? Who is going to design the componentry inside the iPhone-like instruments these kids will be using in twenty years’ time? If it’s a generation of children whose educational focus has been on using tools rather than creating them, we’re in trouble.
Hands on
When kids are handed a Raspberry Pi, their first reaction is one of surprise. A bare circuit board is something they’re unlikely ever to have encountered before, unless they’ve broken a mobile telephone or watched someone mend a PC. They can handle the Pi, and point to different components on the board: here’s the processor, there’s the Ethernet chip. It gives them a sense that this stuff really isn’t as arcane or hard to understand as they might have thought. The price is low because we want to enable kids to own a Pi themselves, rather than having to share a classroom unit; we believe a sense of ownership (particularly of something that’s small enough to slip in a pocket, and whose casing can be customised by the owner) is a really powerful way to stimulate kids’ natural curiosity. We are not trying to turn all children into a zombie army of computer programmers. We are simply trying to make sure that those children who have an aptitude and an untapped interest in programming have the opportunity to find out that there’s a whole world of engineering out there for them to dive into; and to make sure that they have the help and support they need to do it if they want to. Programmatic thinking is useful to people in all works of life, not just engineers. We built the Raspberry Pi to be used in teaching about hardware interfacing as well as software, because we believe that hardware can be a real hook for kids in teaching them how to structure the things they think, and the things they do. There’s nothing you can do on a screen that’s as compelling as what you can do in the real world; so we run sessions where pupils can use a Pi to control sensors (detect when a parent is approaching your bedroom), respond to physical inputs (make a Jelly Baby scream when you squeeze it, or play a tune on some capacitive-touch bananas), or drive motors or solenoids. Schools are making theremins; sending Pis into the stratosphere on weather balloons; designing wearable computing; mini-jukeboxes; talking posters and tweeting chickens. There’s a hardware project out there that will appeal to every child, and because the Raspberry Pi community is so huge and so helpful, there’s support available for any teacher wanting to get this stuff in the classroom.
Part of this year’s plans for the Raspberry Pi Foundation have to do with formalising CPD for teachers, some of whom are completely new to computing, and some of whom are not, but remain nervous about working with a new platform. You’ll see more news about this later in the year, but there are already programmes out there for teachers wanting to do work with the Pi, like the excellent work being done by Alan O’Donohoe and Computing at Schools. We particularly want to see computing being introduced to children at a younger stage than is typical at the moment, and are working on introducing people starting the PGCE to the subject at Primary level.
We sold more than a million units in our first year, which is marvellous, but it’s not what the Raspberry Pi Foundation is all about. If we’ve done this right, we should see more young people going into engineering careers in the next decade or so, and more schools taking the teaching of computing seriously. In the end, that would please me more than any sales figures could.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eben Upton is co-founder and executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (raspberrypi.org)
