Re: Pi Forums

"I think element14 owes a lot to RasPi and its Foundation".

As a very rare contributer I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14 and the excellent after sales service.  Over the last 14 months I have purchased three Raspberry Pi. a self assembly Gertboard Kit, a PiFace Digital and most recently a BBB.  Every time Element 14 have done what they said they would do with very propmpt replies to any questions.  In particular Rachel has been very efficient and helpful.

Colin Gearon.

Colin Gearon wrote:

 

I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14

Very true.  E14/Farnell hasn't really put a foot wrong throughout the whole Pi saga, not significantly.

Their site collapsed during launch for a few days, but that was caused by RPF's entirely ridiculous concept of opening the floodgates to pre-orders at a single instant of time and requiring customers to compete.  This is not just the power of hindsight.  Every web service on the planet with the exception of Google and Facebook is likely to collapse when 100k+ people hit it within a few seconds, and subsequent recovery is prevented because of the retries.  I blame the collapse squarely on RPF's faulty planning.  The fact that  RS collapsed at the same time offers proof of that.  At worst, Farnell and RS were guilty of not telling RPF that such an approach was not feasible given their server capabilities, although competition between them may have prevented either party saying "We can't do that".  It was obvious though.  Even RPF's forum sysadmin could have told them that.  It was even checkable in advance with a load test script.

Once Pi became available, my only significant criticisms of E14/Farnell are that the export site provides substandard Farnell service (compared to Farnell UK), and that they haven't been fast enough at putting Pi on a regular product footing now that it is ex-stock.  This still hasn't happened, and that's a fault because substandard service should never be considered "business as usual" for Farnell.  Also, they could have volunteered a bit more information when people were asking for it, but none of these things are epic disasters.

So on the whole, almost full marks.

And in case anyone suspects that this is just being nice to our hosts here, I think we've made our feelings quite plain and unambiguous when we've criticised the dreadful handling of knode discussions for BBB, so we don't hesitate to highlight things that are are broken when they are.  This problem is still present, but the fault was acknowledged rapidly and an update is in progress for end of Q3 so we live with it, unhappily but patiently.

Well done E14 on Pi.

Sorry, but I'm not impressed with any of it. The R-Pi and its peripherals might be capable of wonders, but without some fairly basic documentation accompanying each item they're of little use. The forums might be of value to those who already know something about modern systems and software, but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

At times I feel like giving up altogether, but I was asked to help write a course for Year 8 and Year 9 pupils based on the R-Pi, so I'll persevere.

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.  I haven't been following it, but with the early part of my career being in academia and knowing the importance of engineering education, I do share your pain.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.  I haven't been following it, but with the early part of my career being in academia and knowing the importance of engineering education, I do share your pain.

Personally, I would say the educational release "has yet to materialize", or to quote Robert Service "a promise made is a debt unpaid".  Converting the herd of cats that is FLOSS into robust software that's easy to use by the masses is really hard.  You can make things easier to use by limiting their capabilities (Android), but then you'll have people screaming for features that aren't supported.  From what I've read, NOOBS is going in the right direction.

About a year ago the strategy was to let the developer community come up with educational stuff, but of course with FLOSS people will work on what's interesting for them and not work towards anything cohesive unless you have a foul-mouthed benevolent dictator.  So we have various packages that run on RasPi and some address various educational applications, but at this time it does require educators to climb a steep learning curve to deploy them.

As I understand it, RasPi was inspired by Eben's disappointment with the amount of programming knowledge shown by candidates for jobs at Broadcom nowadays compared to the 1980s.  Well, a lot of people have learned a lot of lore to get their RasPis to do useful things, so RasPi's been pretty successful towards that goal.  I don't know how much of that lore is programming -- a lot of it is system admin skills, but unfortunately you do need a lot of those skills nowadays.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.

It looks like this could end up being it http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4247

I thought it was just me, but there seem to be a fair few people pointing out problems in the comments.

John Beetem wrote:

 

As I understand it, RasPi was inspired by Eben's disappointment with the amount of programming knowledge shown by candidates for jobs [...] nowadays compared to the 1980s.

I'm always perplexed about that side of things given the high value that seems to be placed on scratch & python.  From what I see in the outside world, Java, C++, C#, PHP would likely be better long-term choices even if much more difficult to start with.

From what we know of Eben, he's not old enough to know what skills job candidates in the 80's had anyway. 

The 80's were very different from today, the instant gratification thing we see today didn't exist, and the kids were gaining their programming knowledge by teaching themselves assembly language programming on whaterer home computer they had access to. Instead of googling for a bit of code they didn't understand to cut&paste they were learning things the hard way.

I don't necessarily think we should go back to the 80's, but I don't believe the conditions that inspired that generation exist anymore, or that you can instill the interest in the upcoming generations with a GCSE course or a cheap bit of hardware.

So I'm not surprised by the lack of programming knowledge seen today, I see it as part of the continual change and evolution in computing. When you start reducing 'programming' to drag&drop, and I could be talking about scratch or VisualStudio here, you can't expect the skills to remain the same as they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. Things change.

Frank Lane wrote:

 

but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

Frank, can we help ?  

There's a good bunch of people here with some diverse experience and we're generally happy to discuss stuff.   As long as you're not too bothered about us wandering off topic a bit now and then

Frank,

The forums might be of value to those who already know something about modern systems and software, but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

At times I feel like giving up altogether, but I was asked to help write a course for Year 8 and Year 9 pupils based on the R-Pi, so I'll persevere.

Can you tell us more about what you plan to teach in this course?

For example, are you trying to teach programming?  Or are you trying

to teach electronics?   Are you trying to make the course specific to

the RPi, or general enough to teach on other platforms as well?

I have made some suggestions here:

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/23494?start=2&tstart=0

which you might find helpful if you're teaching programming.

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.

I would go farther than that.  Not only has the educational release not materialized,

after a considerable length of time, but it doesn't seem to be the primary focus of the RPF.  

If you look at where they put their effort, they are putting a lot of effort into features that

appeal more to hobbyists than education, such as the camera module.  And they are

putting a lot of effort into visual effects such as window transition fading, of interest for

non-educational use cases such as advanced multimedia playback, complex digital

signage, or set-top boxes, as noted here:

http://www.element14.com/community/message/81876#81876/l/rpi-use-cases-explained

If computer science education based on low-cost, credit-card sized, linux-based ARM

computers were their primary goal, then they could save a lot of effort trying to fix what

appear to be nearly impossible-to-fix USB and other hardware/firmware/kernel issues,

and focus on bringing their planned linux-based educational materials to market on BBB

and similar platforms expected to come in the near future that RPF may not have the

resources to compete with while developing educational materials at the same time.

coder27 wrote:

 

I would go farther than that.  Not only has the educational release not materialized,

after a considerable length of time, but it doesn't seem to be the primary focus of the RPF.  

and yet thet still bang on about it.  I think the recently unveiled GCSE syllabus video stuff may well end up being the 'educational release'.

Here in the UK there's probably 5-6 weeks left before the next school year starts. If it's not ready and in the hands of the schools today, I expect it's missed another year. It's not impossible they could get all this into schools in that short a time, but you'd like to think the schools planned ahead. If they did, then the decisions for the next year could already have been made and the budget could be assigned to other things.

I came to the conclusion long ago that education wasn't the goal, their words say one thing, but as you've observed their actions don't appear to agree. 

I'm left wondering what the goal could be if it's not education though.

I'm left wondering what the goal could be if it's not education though.

If you go by what they brag about,  it seems their #1 goal is to shift as many

boards as possible, and their #2 goal is to show off the features of VideoCore.

Their goals seem to be well aligned with their manufacturing partners in

preventing cloning of the board, and in selling accessories to hobbyists

and commercial uses.

I'm left wondering what the goal could be if it's not education though.

If you go by what they brag about,  it seems their #1 goal is to shift as many

boards as possible, and their #2 goal is to show off the features of VideoCore.

Their goals seem to be well aligned with their manufacturing partners in

preventing cloning of the board, and in selling accessories to hobbyists

and commercial uses.

coder27 wrote:

 

it seems their #1 goal is to shift as many boards as possible,

doesn't make sense unless it's only about the money

their #2 goal is to show off the features of VideoCore.

means they're just broadcoms puppets. VideoCore is just another black box GPU wrapped in NDAs and patents. Plenty of those, nothing to see here.

preventing cloning of the board,

not sure who'd want to clone it today, why wouldn't I clone an A20 olinuxino or marsboard instead ?  Or a BBB (perhaps with a newer TI chip) ?

and in selling accessories to hobbyists and commercial uses.

so it's about the money ?

Don't forget:

"What we are lacking (and the Raspberry Pi Foundation cannot provide) is

getting a coherent set of materials we can use with it to teach Computational

Thinking and principled ideas from Computer Science."

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~am21/slides/CAS12.pdf   (page 22)

"But it meant we were faced with a dilemma. How could we enable hacking while preventing cloning?"

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/09/raspberry-pi-insider-exclusive-sellout-to-sell-out/

Raspbery Pi 2020:

   "8 cores, improved GPU, 8GB main memory"

  (with mention of ~$50 productivity PC, but no mention of improved educational materials)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rdm34/raspi-talk.pdf  (page 10)

selsinork wrote:

coder27 wrote:

 

it seems their #1 goal is to shift as many boards as possible,

doesn't make sense unless it's only about the money

There are other motivations besides money.  There's fame -- they seem to enjoy that a lot chez RasPi.  Look at Linus Torvalds -- he didn't get rich off Linux like Bill Gates, but he gets to to call the shots and has the priceless satisfaction of freeing the world from Microsoft dominance.

John Beetem wrote:

 

Look at Linus Torvalds -- he didn't get rich off Linux like Bill Gates, but he gets to to call the shots and has the priceless satisfaction of freeing the world from Microsoft dominance.

While that might work for Linus, in my view it has a slightly sinister overtone when it's the RPF chaining people to a black box GPU.

but yes, fame might be a viable substitute. simply shifting lots of boards doesn't guarantee fame though.

simply shifting lots of boards doesn't guarantee fame though.

Maybe shifting lots of boards is for fame, maybe it's for money, maybe

it's for business credibility, maybe it's to bring down the unit costs,

maybe it's to sell lots of Broadcom chips, who knows. 

But it's pretty clear, even from the title of Pete Lomas's piece referenced above:

Raspberry Pi’s Secret: ‘Sell Out a Little to Sell a Lot’

that "selling a lot" is of critical importance, even at the cost of "selling out".

Similarly, the article's conclusion reinforces the point:

Raspberry Pi has been a project seven years in the making. It’s often felt like the closer we got to our goals, the further away they seemed. But we’re having the time of our lives. We’ve only been selling for six months, and we’ve sold around half a million units already.   ...

This is really a reply to coder27, morgaine and selsinork.

Thanks for your sympathy & offers of support. History: In the 1980s I wrote a course based on the ZX81 with simple interface to control LEDs, motors and buzzers and to accept inputs from switches. It taught simple programming in BASIC (a doddle compared to what I'm having to learn now) and simple electronics, giving The Beasties options in robotics (turtle). One project was a 1-bed flat, made from chipboard, with LEDs to represent lights, TV, cooker, etc., which could be switched to make it seem inhabited (I read of a Roedean pupil doing something similar with the RPi in some competition.) and monitoring door switches as a burglar detector with buzzer as alarm. Another was model railway control driving locos., signals and point motors.

I thought something similar would appeal and be relatively easy to concoct with the RPi. "Dad; I got it wrong again," as a *** Emery character said. When I said "Yes" to helping, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

I want to keep it simple to start with, partly because I'm 70 and am having difficulty learning and retaining new stuff, but I hope that, once started, the young teachers who've asked for help will steam away and The Beasties will follow.

We hope to get funding for 10 RPi Bs and interface boards, if we can show a good enough course.

I'd really counted on having the promised education pack by now, but I think it's either at the end of the rainbow or a mirage.

There are two parts to your problem.

The first is that people who have not been involved in large and complex problems have no conception of the hypergeometric growth rate of difficulty in writing longer and larger systems that have serious requirements for testing and correctness. I don't know how many times I have heard "Well, it only took me an afternoon to write a 100 line program in BASIC, I don't see why you, as a supposed professional, can't write a thousand line program in a week." Of course they don't even think of the pad they keep next to the PC as a means of dealing with exceptions they didn't want to code for, because "They never happen." At least not more than once every two days.

The second is that people have gotten used to computers, and their doing things which were beyond the conception of most thirty odd years ago. My then two year old son shocked and amused our hostess when he asked where their computer was, as we had an Apple ][ since he was born, and he thought everyone would have one. Even physical computing has become somewhat blase in a world where a friend on vacation can give you a call while standing on the Great Wall of China. So I think it is natural for many students, faculty and especially administration members to have expectations of a course that are completely unrealistic.

Being in your age group, I know what you mean by having difficulty absorbing and retaining new things. But over the years I have found that the greatest difficulty is in the begining. I tend to forget new words until I have heard them a number of times, and new paradigms can be difficult. For example, parsing complicated data flows using RegEx isn't easy for many people, nevermind someone whose experience was in scientific programing, statistics, epidemiology and data acquisition. But having acquired the basics of quite a few new systems, I now know that I have solved the type of problems I am facing before, or at least something like them. I pretty much need to only acquire the primary structures and memes of the new language/system to be able to apply my prior knowledge. That fear and ego will do more damage to my problem solving capacity than the newness of the situation.

Best wishes for your course.

This is for Frank and apologies to stepping in.

I applaude what you are doing, in that you are trying something new, and trying to pass on your knowledge to give some students the lift they need to carry on.

I also sympathise with the trying to learn new processes and language, etc.

I have a similar steep learning curve with RPi, but there are many resources around the web which with a good idea of where you want to go, can help put it together.

(You also have some very talented people here who can point you quickly to the resources)

There is a very good review of the PiFace Digital by Gough Lui http://www.element14.com/community/roadTestReviews/1468

There is also some very good tutorials at Adafruit http://learn.adafruit.com/category/raspberry-pi and the temperature sensor lends itself to integrating with the interface to combine two different uses of RPi.

If your budget doesn't cover the interface then LED's, buzzers and pushbuttons will achieve similar results.

Last year I put together an Arduino Introduction course for a group of 8 (year 6-7) students at our local school. (I'm not a teacher)

I thought it would be easy, just grab some tutorials off the web, and away you go.

I ended up writing it myself, which meant I knew the material, and was able to modify the delivery as the class dictated.

So my advice is to nut out what you want to achieve, break it down to reasonable size sessions, with lots of hands on and instant feedback (leds, buzzers, display) so they can see their changes happening.

Each session should add onto the other, and possibly pick up from where you left off.

You'll also need to allow for some slower and some faster students, and some that wont get it until the end.

Good luck

Mark

Frank,

   You've gotten some good advice.  He're my 2 cents:

Teach what you know.  If you know Basic, teach that.  Don't try to learn

Python or whatever just because someone else thinks it's the perfect

teaching language.  There is no perfect teaching language, and any language

you pick, or topics you pick, will likely be considered a bad choice by someone.

The students will be able to tell right away whether you know and are enthusiastic

about what you're teaching, and that's what matters most.

Michael wrote:

There are two parts to your problem.

I think there are a lot of parts in general to the problem of how to introduce

students to computers and/or computer science.  For example, a very small

percentage of students like programming.   I don't think there's any magic

solution, such as "physical computing" that will make the subject universally

appealing. 

Secondly, you can't advertise computing as a secure career path.  Programming

is relatively easy to outsource to low-wage countries, and the field changes

so rapidly that employers are often looking primarily for young programmers who

don't need to be trained on the latest technologies, and who are willing to work

long hours.

Thirdly, the field of computing is so vast that anything you teach will just be

an "exposure" to one or more aspect of the subject, so there is no point trying to

teach the "right" lessons.

Fourthly, the field is young enough that there is very little consensus on

standard technologies or even terminologies.  One of the most fundamental

concepts of programming is the subprogram, but in various languages it is

called a procedure, or a function, or a method.  There is also no consensus

in programming on how or even whether to declare variables.   Some languages

are good for efficiency, some for safety, some for productivity, some for

client-side web applications, some for server-side web applications, etc.

So the students will likely soon be re-learning anything you teach.

coder27 wrote:

 

Thirdly, the field of computing is so vast that anything you teach will just be

an "exposure" to one or more aspect of the subject, so there is no point trying to

teach the "right" lessons.

Very well said.  Even those who have been in the discipline for many decades, including academia and industry, know only a very tiny fraction of its full extent.  It's a bit disconcerting to face that reality, but not a reason for depression.  We just have to pick and choose from the vast mountain and find one or two narrow areas where we can accomplish something.

This is also one very good reason to highlight the difference between education and vocational training.  Education is that aspect of our learning that is so general that it provides us with a base or foundation for everything we do in the future, but on its own is of very limited direct applicability.  In contrast, vocational training is directly applicable, but may be useful only briefly and our experience of it may not translate to future endeavours at all.  (All learning usually involves both, but the percentage of each may vary almost 0-100%.)

Giving youngsters strong vocational training makes little sense, since the number that will be able to apply it is likely to be low or even zero if it's in an area of change like so many are in practical computing.  This makes coder27's remark about no point trying to teach the "right" lessons spot on.  Instead, focus on educating them about widely applicable concepts, because those will stand them in good stead forever, even outside of the discipline.

Morgaine.