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

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.

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.

coder27 wrote:

 

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.

RasPi has posted items on their front page about Eben visiting various schools, mostly in the UK, so it's beyond token.  I attended one of Rob's visits last year in San Francisco, which was informative and fun.  I got to show off my Atrix Lapdock, which I had just got working the week before.  What Rob said about the educational side is that RasPi is counting on the "community" to come up with educational applications.  I suspect he'll say the same thing this year.  The reality is IMO that to develop good eductional software requires teachers who have (1) the knowledge to do it, (2) the desire to do it, and (3) the time to do it, which is a difficult combination.  Teachers in the USA are generally swamped -- I don't know how much slack they have elsewhere on the planet.

Another problem is that while RasPi is fun and easy to use and set up most of the time, when it doesn't work figuring out why is just as nasty as any other modern computer.  I know a lot about computers, but I'm not an OS hacker and I hate being a system admin.  Having a PC means being your own system admin unless you work for an organization that has professionals to do this for you.  Running a classroom full of RasPis means you get to be system admin for a whole classroom full of computers.

RasPi has posted items on their front page about Eben visiting various schools, mostly in the UK, so it's beyond token.

I remember on the first day the RPi was released, Eben visited an elementary school,

and the photo from that is still being used as recently as 2 weeks ago:

http://www.element14.com/community/community/news/blog/2013/06/26/ebon-upton-receives-the-silver-medal-for-bringing-raspberry-pi-to-the-masses

Do you happen to have any more recent links?

What Rob said about the educational side is that RasPi is counting on the "community" to come up with educational applications.  I suspect he'll say the same thing this year.

Well, I suspect this year Rob will say that Clive has been brought on full time in charge

of education, and is working on GCSE videos.