Favorite Pi educational resources & youth projects?

Hi Drew,

   Those are nice links.

There's also Clive's first 6 GCSE videos here:

     http://www.cambridgegcsecomputing.org/courses

I'm not a fan of them, but someone might like them.

a co-worker asked me what good educational resources and youth project I knew of for the Raspberry Pi

I'm not sure why the co-worker was asking or what they already know, but I think

it's important to emphasize that the RPF has not yet made their educational release

of the RPi.   The educational materials that are currently available are preliminary

drafts.  For example, the Official Raspberry Pi Educational Manual that you list

is completely missing chapters 2 and 5.  Similarly, only the first 6 of over 100

planned GCSE videos are available.  The RPF is making significant changes to

the available programming language environments, including PyPy 2.1 Beta released

yesterday, and Scratch optimization still in development.  Significant work is also

ongoing with regard to bypassing X11 using Wayland.  I believe there is also

hardware development ongoing, such as to achieve residential FCC compliance.

I think it is likely that the RPF will release a major hardware upgrade prior to

the educational release, using ARMv7, which would allow use of Ubuntu, and

provide competitive cpu performance with BBB.

coder27 wrote:

 

I think it is likely that the RPF will release a major hardware upgrade prior to

the educational release, using ARMv7,

Do you know something we don't ?   Or what have you been reading to come to that conclusion ?

Do you know something we don't ?   Or what have you been reading to come to that conclusion ?

There have been lots of clues.  For example, Pete Lomas's May, 2013 interview quoted here:

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/25374?start=21&tstart=0

Also, JamesH has dropped lots of clues about how old the BCM2835 SoC is, and how Broadcom

has more modern SoC's available and in use, such as:

by jamesh » Sat Aug 11, 2012 8:53 am

All the current other uses of the 2835 seem to be fine - probably because they don't use the USB in the same way.It's an old chip - all new users are on different chips now (and again, don't usually use the USB in the same way)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=5249&start=99

So it isn't so much a question of if, as a question of when.

The successful launch of the BBB at about the same price point,

but with about twice the cpu power has probably accelerated their

hardware upgrade timetable.  And the extensive Wayland and other

software work has probably delayed their educational software timetable.

coder27 wrote:

 

The successful launch of the BBB at about the same price point,

but with about twice the cpu power has probably accelerated their

hardware upgrade timetable.  And the extensive Wayland and other

software work has probably delayed their educational software timetable.

You'd have to think that if education really was the goal they'd have started telling people to go buy a BBB instead. It would neatly remove all the distractions like needing to build your own distro, usb problems, wayland, camera..  But as you observed in a different discussion education doesn't seem to be very high on their list and their actions point to other goals - fame, media players, new kitchens

That the 2835 is old isn't news, it was old when it was chosen. If they do bring out a new board, hopefully they learn from some of the mistakes of the current one and don't simply pick a new SoC from the same line. As, judging by what jamesh says in that quote, they may all have usb problems since the normal uses don't use usb as a host and so are less likely to have been tested as extensively as a million rabid RPi fanboys are likely to do

Picking some next-gen broadcom chip for their next board instead of something cheap and easy like an Allwinner A20 would certainly give some interesting insight into what goes on behind the scenes at the RPF.

That the 2835 is old isn't news, it was old when it was chosen.

Yes, but it's even older now.  At the time it was chosen,  it ran the latest version

of Ubuntu, but now even Fedora is focusing their ARM work on v7 and later.

If they do bring out a new board, hopefully they learn from some of the mistakes of the current one and don't simply pick a new SoC from the same line.

There has been lots of speculation that the new SoC would be the BCM11311.

http://www.broadcom.com/products/Applications-and-Multimedia-Processors/Tablet-Application-Processors/BCM11311

I think the pinout is different from the current SoC, but it probably wouldn't take Pete Lomas

much time to re-route the wiring.

If they were intending to switch to a non-Broadcom SoC, you would probably see

some sort of severing of their close ties with Broadcom.  It wouldn't be very good

advertising for Broadcom's SoC's if the Executive Director of RPF was also employed

as a Broadcom executive, but selected some other company's SoC to replace Broadcom's.

Edited to add:

You can keep an eye on Roku's phasing out of the BCM 2835 here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roku#Feature_comparison

The BCM11311 was preannounced at CES 2011 (January)

http://www.linleygroup.com/newsletters/newsletter_detail.php?num=4470

We are currently working on a new project called Laika, which will allow schools or individuals to do some robotics using a Raspberry Pi. Creator Andy Bakin and Kitronik director Kevin Spurr are trailing the product in a school at the end of the week. When available (in October) there will be loads of easy to follow examples of using the product aimed at people with very limited programming knowledge. To find out more head to:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eightdog/laika-raspberry-pi-robotics

I've been looking for a quick reference card to help with the CLI. So far I think I like this one the best http://www.fejf.de/tips/bash.quickref.pdf . If anyone knows of a better one please let me know.