RPi use cases explained

I'm now volunteering an hour a week in a local school, helping to run an After School club (Coder, you kindly supplied some suggestions when I posted about this elsewhere as to what we could do to get the children interested).

I have tried, several times, to look for educational resources that will tie both the Pi and the current syllabus here in the UK together, and unless my Google skills are seriously lacking, there seems to be nothing. Even on the Education section on the Pi forums, there is very little to build on. I can only imagine this is echoed up and down the land many times over.

There is nothing wrong with building a £25 device that is great for hacking, so why not just come out and say it, rather than badge it as a device aimed at educators, when there is very little hard evidence for this well over a year after launch.

Sorry, moan over.

Steve

Hi Steve It seems that by far the largest single "usecase" is the hacker comunity certainly as far as any one who is actually vocal.

It's possible that the XBMC comunity may actually me of very similar size or even larger but since this is an essentially "consume" use case I doubt we shall hear as much from these guys.

The education case is indeed a strong one currently driven by more zelious educators but hopefully with a curriculum slowly gelling together then we may see a formal education comunity arise from this. At the moment this seems to be coming from the hardcore educator and the Raspberry Jam organisation.

Either way when you are hacking you are learning so involve a kid(of any age really ) and spread the "learning" bug.

John

Here is my take on this odd situation.  There are several needs and types of stakeholders in the Pi ecosystem:

• Conceptual need in EE.  Eben Upton has many times related the problems he experienced while doing student recruitment  at university, where each year's intake candidates were seemingly  less technically experienced than the last.  I can well believe that, because we saw exactly that same problem in my own engineering department, to the point where we had to provide catch-up courses to bring part of the student intake up to the level where they could  understand basic 1st-year EE lectures.  Making very cheap hardware available that encourages experimentation by inquisitive youngsters does seem to address part of the problem squarely by fostering interest and offering direct experience with hardware.  However, it doesn't address the gap in mathematics and foundational science skills.

• Improving IT education.  The UK has a specific problem in school-level IT education, in that over time it became nothing more than vocational training in office skills.  Clearly there is much room for improvement there, but this is almost entirely unrelated to the skills shortage observed in EE recruitment.  CompSci departments might benefit a little if programming were taught in schools, but not a lot because lack of programming skills is not the bottleneck,  Stronger maths skills would be vastly more useful than programming knowledge, and would help EE as much as every other branch of engineering and the physical sciences.  Also, programming is almost always vocational training with just a smidgeon of CompSci education acquired by osmosis on the side, and very rapidly becomes dated.  To compound matters further, a high-level language with a lot of abstraction would tend to be chosen for programming education, which means that pupils would tend to learn little about computer fundamentals unless they have an awesome teacher who explains the foundations along with the programming.

• Cheap media centre.  Don't laugh, this is a major stakeholder group for Pi.  What's more, RPF have always known this, because they have promoted the very strong media capability of the Broadcom SoC countless times in their blog.  They even went as far as to sell licensed codecs which are about as distant from educational as anything could be.  This area may well be getting the most development effort as well, which is reasonable since it plays to the Pi's biggest strength and makes a very large group of Pi users happy.

• Platform for expansions.  It always did seem odd that the Foundation so often stressed the difficulty of reaching their $25/$35 price point, and yet created a board bearing proprietary MIPI DSI and CSI-2 connectors which raised the board cost and complicated PCB routing.  Even more odd is that these MIPI interfaces would not contribute significantly to the board's educational capabilities since USB cameras and displays with open interfaces were readily available at good prices.  The subsequent high investment by RPF in developing camera and display modules suggests that this was a planned business strategy from the start, and it explains why the extra connector cost was considered justified.  One possible view is that there is business advantage in creating a platform for which expansion modules could be produced using a proprietary interface spec that narrows the competition.  Whether or not that was the thinking, it is the current actuality since RPF has invested time and money in expansions and delivered product.

• Enthusiasts/makers hacking platform.  Quite distinct from the needs of EE and UK IT education, a  large group of stakeholders is the worldwide and ever-growing community of makers and related enthusiasts, which may or may not be technical.  This group is heavily interested in creative projects which typically underpin some other area of interest that isn't itself computing.  The Foundation has from the start shown some interest in supporting this group, as evidenced by the board's P1 interfacing header and the near-miraculous provision of SoC peripheral interfacing information from a SoC manufacturer that has shown very little interest in supplying open documentation.  The enthusiast/maker community is strongly aligned with the open source software and open hardware communities since closed/proprietary devices impede rather than support building things.  Unfortunately RPF has been lukewarm in this area as the board is not open hardware, the SoC has very little open documentation, and not all of the software is open source either.  Undoubtedly most of the blame for this lies with Broadcom, but RPF spokespersons have defended the restriction of information themselves as well.

• Commercial for-profit product.  This stakeholder group is small but obvious.  RPF is a registered non-profit, but Premier Farnell and RS are not, and so the Pi has to justify its place on warehouse shelves.  The typically high profits on accessories probably make this quite easy though.

It's pretty clear from the above that the Pi ecosystem has multiple interested parties and drivers, and proceeds along many roads simultaneously with varying degrees of support from the Foundation.

In other words, the Raspberry Pi's concept, rationale, targets and user base are not correlated.

Getting a single view from anyone (especially RPF) is no more productive than all those blind men feeling different parts of the elephant.  To say that it was designed for IT education is completely wrong if intended literally --- Pi would not have been designed as it was nor targetted so strongly at non-educational stakeholders if that had been the primary intention.  This makes the question of "Why is there still no educational release?" a simple one to answer:  IT education was only one driving force, and clearly not a major one.

The only certain position is from objective engineering:  it's an ARM board with specific pros and cons, and it's those pros and cons that determine its effectiveness or otherwise for any given application.  I guess that's more boring than hype-laden official positioning statements by people with vested interests, but in contrast to them, it's accurate.

Morgaine.

Morgaine I remember been phoned by Eben some 2 years ago about the RPi.

His aims at the time were as he stated to create a cheap device for education as well as a curriculum to support it.

In fact he was rather amazed at the wave of hackers who took to the device.

I think at least some of the problem is that the foundation was hoping that more of the curriculum would bubble up out of the comunity where  this would be a wave of enthusiastic teaching staff. The reality is that the comunity is in fact predominantly a hacker driven one who know little about what constitutes a curriculum and probably less interest.

I keep on about this curriculum but with out it's guidance most teachers volunteered with teaching this are going to be wofuly unprepared. Things seem to be improving but maybe not at the pace they originally expected.

Mind you the world rarely moves to the beat you expect.

As I noted above from personal experience, the shortfall in STEM skills was very pronounced when trying to recruit undergrads, so I can easily believe that this triggered the Raspberry Pi concept in Eben.  Not much about Pi is strongly correlated with that original idea though.  Pi is a medusa of stakeholders, and the heads aren't talking to each other.  There is no common goal, and  education is not a primary goal since it is not where most effort has been expended.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

• The subsequent high investment by RPF in developing camera and display modules suggests that this was a planned business strategy from the start, and it explains why the extra connector cost was considered justified.  One possible view is that there is business advantage in creating a platform for which expansion modules could be produced using a proprietary interface spec that narrows the competition. 

Actually the proprietary nature of the interface doesn't seem to be much of a problem. The actual camera sensors with the same interface and physical plug appear to be reasonable easily available off ebay and such like as spares for phones.

The roadblock is the bits that are buried inside the GPU.

I'd have to say that I originally thought the camera was a daft idea, but it's cheap enough that I bought one anyway.  If JamesH manages to sort out a couple of software niggles, I can see it having a reasonable future as a very cheap megapixel security camera amongst other things.

I see someone has already produced an aluminium case with a mount for the camera and externally a mount for additional standard lenses.

I think that's where the maker community shines.. by taking these cheap component parts and combining them into all sorts of interesting ideas.

John Alexander wrote:

 

In fact he was rather amazed at the wave of hackers who took to the device.

That's rather naive of him.  Prodcuing something general enough to be used by anyone, for anything, then making it amazingly cheap was bound to have the effect it did.

the curriculum would bubble up out of the comunity where  this would be a wave of enthusiastic teaching staff.

You'd have to think that if the enthusiastic teaching staff existed, then they'd probably be doing something about it themselves.  Part of the problem in this field is that it moves fast enough that even the paid professionals can have trouble keeping track, and keeping up. Quite where that leaves the teachers is anyones guess.

The camera interface is in fact a standard not unlike the display the problem here is that you can talk to the device but you don't know what to say to it when you have got it. Each camera has it's own set up which is really where it becomes a true pain.

Other than that the closed source GPU is quite the pain more so than the camera really since it controlls so many other subsystems

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

As I noted above from personal experience, the shortfall in STEM skills was very pronounced when trying to recruit undergrads,

I keep wondering if that simply means we're teaching the kids the wrong things.

I fully understand that education can't provide all the answers as it'll always be out of step and as such can only hope to provide a general backgrounder to the much harsher reality of the world outside of education, but if we're failing to provide even enough to take the next steps along the way, then is seems we're heading for trouble.

There is nothing wrong with building a £25 device that is great for hacking, so why not just come out and say it, rather than badge it as a device aimed at educators, when there is very little hard evidence for this well over a year after launch.

There is a catch-22.  They have said the charitable status allowed them to get parts

directly from the manufacturers at prices well below what they would otherwise have

been able to negotiate from parts distributors,  So the essential $25/$35 price point

would likely have been unreachable, at least initially, without the charitable status.

Similarly, as a charity they get lots of essential support from Broadcom and/or Broadcom

employees, and/or Broadcom's charitable foundation, and also from volunteers putting in

long hours as website moderators.  They also received a large charitable grant from Google.

But the charity was established based on an educational scope, and although I'm not any sort of

expert on UK charitable laws, I doubt they would be considered to be within their educational

scope if they were to go too far in de-emphasizing educational use cases.  And I doubt they

would have been allowed to adopt the charitable status if they had stated their scope to be simply

to sell low-cost computers.

I find it interesting that the rules for Rob Bishop's US marketing tour this summer explicitly say

"Rob will not be able to visit grade schools, but he may decide to fit in some university visits."

It would seem that even a token grade school visit would go a long way to showing an interest

in grade school education.