Pioneering the Future of Computing Education
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:15
Okay, welcome back to the next talk, pioneering the future of computing education.
00:21
And please welcome from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Ben Nuttall. Hi everyone, thanks for coming to the talk. I hope you're enjoying your Python as much as I am. It's great to be here. So I'm from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
00:41
My name is Ben Nuttall. I am a developer and I work in on the education team as well. So I'm responsible for the website, the Raspberry Pi website. I do other development work and writing educational material and I do outreach and talks and things like that. So what is Raspberry Pi?
01:01
So I've got one here. So it's a single board computer that runs Linux from an SD card. It has USB ports and HDMI. The idea is you just plug it into your TV, plug in a mouse and keyboard and program and you can use it as a normal desktop computer to a certain extent. So why Raspberry Pi? So why did they come up with this device?
01:24
The thing is, this is a BBC Micro computer and the idea of this was that you would plug it into your TV and you would get a programming environment straight away and that's exactly what the Raspberry Pi was supposed to be. So the thing is, we used to have computers like that
01:42
that you could program. Now I have computers like this that you can just, it's just a magic box and it just works. You wave your hands around and things happen. That's making us stupid. As great as that is, that technology, we're not learning how to make these things.
02:01
We're just learning how to use them. So the Raspberry Pi is a foundation. It's a UK charity. Has a board of trustees that manage its direction and there are two sides of it. Like most charities, they're kind of split into two at some point. There's a trading company. So that's the engineers. It's run by Evan Upton.
02:22
That's a bunch of people who bring in money. They make money. They give it to us and we spend it. I'm on the foundation side. That's the fun side. So we hire ex-teachers. We hire developers who want to work on the educational material and as I say, we spend the money
02:41
that the engineers bring in. So this is the foundation and it was set up in 2009 by a group of people at Cambridge University. They were trying to essentially make a modern day BBC Micro. Something you just plug in and you would get,
03:00
it was gonna be originally just gonna be a Python prompt at boot. So you'd plug it into your TV. You would have a Python prompt. You would have a keyboard. It would just be learning programming in a basic environment. And as you can see, there's a few examples of the prototypes there. The one on the right here. That was almost like a USB stick,
03:21
sort of kind of size device. That was just USB one side, HDMI the other side and it was just gonna be a programming environment with Python. The one in the middle, the Ebenezer holding, was a sort of prototype of a whole single board computer which eventually became the one on the right there which is the original Raspberry Pi model B.
03:45
And in that time, the entire foundation mission was just to get the board into production, make it a reality. And then from 2012, so the beginning of 2012 when the Raspberry Pi went on sale and they had 10,000 Raspberry Pis waiting to be bought,
04:03
they sold 100,000 on the first day. So it was a little bit more, there's a lot more interest than was anticipated and that was just from having a WordPress blog saying, yeah, we're gonna make this cool thing. It's gonna do Python and it'll teach kids code.
04:21
A lot of people are saying, hey, this is really cool. They're gonna make a $35 computer. I want one of those and they'll try to get one. I was there at that time trying to order a Raspberry Pi on the 29th of February, the leap day year in 2012. And so we had Ebenezer going around
04:40
in this first year, year or two, going around giving talks, telling people about what Raspberry Pi was about. We had Liz who was managing the blog and Twitter and doing a great job of promoting everything we were trying to do at the time. We announced the new model,
05:00
which was an anticipated new development, the model A. So that was the cheaper, less powerful version of the original Raspberry Pi. So it's just the same with only one USB and without ethernet. We had Clive Beale join the team. He's the guy on the end here. He sort of formed the first iteration
05:22
of the foundation's educational team. He went around giving talks about how you can use Raspberry Pi in school. We had some funding from Google who wanted to push these devices into schools around the UK and where we have a whole load of those
05:40
that we've been giving out to schools. We also brought out the first official product to add on product for the Raspberry Pi, the camera module. And then there was a second iteration of that which with the infrared filter removed, the Pi Noir as that was something people were asking for. And then also in, I think it was late 2012,
06:05
we moved production of all Raspberry Pis from China to the UK. So we were really kind of proud to be able to say all the Raspberry Pis you buy now are made in one factory, one Sony factory in Wales in the UK.
06:22
And then after the Raspberry Pi became available and it was out there in the wild, this whole community just came out of nowhere. And it was a real kind of amalgamation of everything from the existing hackers who were already used to these kind of dev boards but paying a lot more money for them. People like myself who were programmers
06:40
and attending user groups and really interested in the tech community that way. And a whole host of people in between. And there was all these new kids, parents, teachers all trying to get involved in what Raspberry Pi was about. All these books and magazines start sprouting up, loads of things on Kickstarter trying to further it, loads of add on boards,
07:01
people were doing robotics and all sorts of things. And there were all these other, all these people out there just making things with Raspberry Pi and our blog was just full of these amazing projects. There's a guy sending them into space to take pictures of the earth as you can see there. Absolutely amazing. I would definitely recommend you go and check his stuff out. He's called Dave Aikerman.
07:21
If you search for Pi in the sky, you'll find a lot of cool stuff. There was a load of, this is just an example, a load of robotics projects and all sorts of things people were doing with Raspberry Pis early on. So then from 2014 onwards, this is the point where, we've sold an awful lot of these things. We've got a lot of money coming in.
07:42
We'd originally said we weren't going to do some of teacher training and education material. We're going to leave that to the community. But we got to a point where we're in a position where we can actually do a lot of that. So what have we done so far this year? So we brought out this. This is the industrial version of the Raspberry Pi.
08:02
It's the industrial compute module. It's a Raspberry Pi in the form factor of a RAM chip. So it's a sodium connector. It slots into a dev board like this, and you use this as a prototype of your industrial product. That's a really, really cheap and very accessible dev board
08:25
that you can get there that will fund, the money comes into us and that will be used to fund the educational mission of the charity. We hit a major milestone recently, and we announced three million sales of Raspberry Pis, which is really cool. And just last week, we announced the model B plus,
08:44
the first upgrade to, the second upgrade, should I say, to the original Raspberry Pi. It's got extra USB ports, extra GPA opens, it now has 40. It's got improved power and power consumption. So we use less power and it deals with that
09:02
a lot more sensibly. We moved the composite for an analog TV onto the headphone jack, so it's just there on the one side, and it now takes a micro-SD card. And the best thing about this is that the price is the same. It's still $35.
09:24
So most notably about, sort of specific, related to this talk is that we formed an education team this year, so I joined at the end of 2013. Clive was already there. This is Carrie-Anne Filbin, who's the author of one of the books that I mentioned that the community brought out.
09:41
She's an ex-teacher, as is Clive. And we've got a couple of other guys who are in the same sort of mix of background. One was a teacher, another was a developer like myself. We're coming together now and doing a lot of things. So we've got Pi Academy, which is our teacher training course that we now run. We do about one every month or two at the moment.
10:01
So we invite teachers to apply, and it's free CPD for teachers. And it's now open to teachers around the world. They come in for two days training of getting used to all the different things you can do with the Raspberry Pi in the classroom and helping them overcome any problems they've had, classroom logistics, that kind of thing, and get them introduced to it in a nice kind of way
10:23
that they'll realize they're in the same boat and that they can get over these problems. And I was hired to take on the website. So previously we just had a simple blog just showing the information of what people were doing with the Raspberry Pis around the world, all the projects that we could find,
10:42
curated that all on our blog, which was fantastic in content. But what we really needed was all the stuff this new website brought. So we now have educational resources on the website. We have help guides and all that kind of thing in a more accessible way. So this is our resources page.
11:01
We have them in three categories, teach, learn, and make. So there's things for teachers to take and actually just give them, give classes based on this, teaching computing concepts and that kind of thing. They have all the stuff teachers need to deliver their UK curriculum.
11:22
They have kind of learning objectives and all the kind of things related to the curriculum that teachers need. Learn are things like just do this exercise, kind of learn about this topic and then make is kind of building things or making some sort of interactive application.
11:43
They're all free to use and free in the liberty sense. So they're all Creative Commons licensed. So you can do whatever you like with those. We don't want to put any restrictions on teachers to say they can't print them or can't photocopy them or can't edit them or whatever they want. So we just, they're all out there
12:02
for anyone to use for any purpose. And we encourage them to sort of edit them and make their own resources out of our materials. They're all on GitHub. So we have collaborators working on them around the world who file issues if they have any problems with them,
12:20
they can edit them, they can fork them. And we're encouraging teachers to get involved in sharing in this way as well. So some of our resources, just by a few examples. We've got a new one that's being worked on at the moment is using a Morse code tapper.
12:40
And we've got a Python interface to type in messages and using that with Morse code. And you learn how to build up that program through a few steps of building it up to which we'll be releasing soon. We've got an infrared bird box using the camera noir. So you can actually have a video feed
13:01
going from a bird box to, you know, that's got an infrared sensor. So whenever a bird comes in, it starts recording and you can get some, we've seen some of the uses of that around the internet of people who've set this up and made their own bird box. We've got, there's actually a pure Python interface
13:24
to the camera as well, which is written by a friend of mine in Manchester, which is really nice to use and a great example of a community contribution. And we've got a few resources based around that, such as the push button stop motion one.
13:44
So where you can set up a physical button that will trigger the camera, and you can make a stop motion animation with something like Lego. So there's a whole resource around building that up and understanding how the code works and actually building the, you know,
14:00
the sort of product for making that resource happen. One of the, we had a poster competition at the end of last year. People, kids sent in posters of ideas of things they wanted to make, and we sent them one of the Google Raspberry Pi kits in return. One of the ideas was a hamster party cam. They wanted to, this young child wanted
14:21
to see what hamsters did at night, because she's saying they were nocturnal. So they're probably, you know, running around and having a party. So we made the resource based on her idea and showed you how you could set up a camera to watch the, to be triggered
14:40
when the hamster wheel went round or when the hamster was walking around the cage. There's things like cress egg heads, which is a time lapse of cress growing out of egg, and then there's some actual sort of computer science stuff. So there's things like a networking resource we recently put together, which is a whole series of lessons based around learning networking with the Raspberry Pi,
15:02
which is a lot closer to what a lot of you imagine that we, you know, we should be doing. There's a program on Raspberry Pi called Sonic Pi, which is a really interesting project. It's actually writing music in code. So you can see there's an example here.
15:21
It's actually based on Ruby, which is a nice step between a visual programming like an environment like Scratch, where you just drag and drop the blocks, and building up to something where you can do, you have a lot more power like Python. Because of Ruby syntax, there's not as many brackets, and it's not as reliant upon you
15:43
having the indentation set up in the right way, things like that. This is a really nice way, and it also allows you to, rather than a visual representation of your code, it's an audible representation, which is really interactive,
16:01
can be really good to teach computer science concepts. So how can you help? So if you're running a code club, or something like an open tech school, something like that, you can use our materials. I'd love to see them being used. If you have any contributions,
16:21
if you've written your own materials, or if you've forked one of ours and added to it, we'd love to have it come back to us. It'd be great to see some contributions from the community as well. If you've got a package in Debian or in PIP, something like that, just check it out and see if it runs on the Raspberry Pi.
16:41
If there's something you could do to improve it, that would be great. There's also a network of events around, mostly around the UK, and there's a few around the world as well, called Raspberry Jam. There's actually just one recently being set up in Berlin,
17:02
by a friend of mine. So if you could attend a Raspberry Jam, just if you've got a project, show it off at the Jam. If you can help lend a hand, sort of the teaching aspects, because a lot of children, parents go along, and they need a bit of guidance. Any kind of help along at one of those Jams
17:22
would be really, really useful. And if you've done something with a Raspberry Pi, with a Pi, email me, tell me about it, or come and talk to somebody or email the foundation. It'd be great to, it's always great to hear what people are doing with Raspberry Pis. I often find people are quite quiet about these things, and I'll be chatting to somebody for ages,
17:41
telling them all about what we're doing, and then they just say, oh yeah, I've got a Raspberry Pi. I built a killer robot with it. It's all right, it's not bad. Or something like, oh, I set one up that helps feed children in Africa, and I'm like, whoa, this is amazing.
18:01
You need to tell me about this. We can put it on our blog. But another thing you can do to help is just to buy a Raspberry Pi and the compute module. That will be really, really helpful, because if you buy a Raspberry Pi, you're funding our educational mission, which is a worldwide mission. It's not just based in the UK.
18:21
You fund the development of new hardware, so a lot of hackers back in the original days, before this came out, were really excited about it, and they wanted a piece of the action. They wanted to get hold of a Raspberry Pi, and the more that we can work on that, the more engineers we have working on new products, the more everyone else will benefit from that.
18:45
There's always work being done on the current Raspberry Pi and future products that can be furthered by our expansion, and I'm sure you'd all love to see the next generation of Raspberry Pi,
19:01
and we can make big leaps forward in that respect. And you're also funding free and open source software by buying Raspberry Pi. We have a lot of contributions towards open source, and so we funded the port of Pi Pi to ARM,
19:22
which if you saw the talk yesterday on Pi Pi, that was mentioned there. We funded XBMC to kind of improve that on our hardware. Things like LibAV, Pixman, Wayland, and Western, we're working really hard on those kind of desktop environments
19:40
that will work better on our hardware, and getting those ported, and getting, we've got our own version of that being worked on at the moment called Maynard, which is looking really cool. We've developed a lot in, funded a lot of development of Squeak, the small talk VM which Scratch runs in, and actually Scratch itself.
20:01
MIT have moved on from the original version of Scratch, and have moved it to a Flash environment, so we're stuck on the old version, but we're actually funding development on that itself, and incorporating a lot of cool features that you can do with Raspberry Pi,
20:20
and that such as GPIO interaction. We've funded WebKit, and Epiphany is a new browser that we're working on, which will be released soon. We also been kind of lobbying Broadcom, the guys who make the chip that we use, to open source their graphics drivers, because that's something that a lot of people
20:40
really want to see. We've had a few wins with those over the last two or three years, and earlier this year we put out a $10,000 bounty to the first person to port some drivers that they open sourced to work on a Raspberry Pi, and that was one, and that was quite big,
21:01
big announcement for us. Just before I finish, I'm going to be doing a US tour next year, so if you're, I'd point out this map as a sort of vague anticipation of my route. This is going to be from the beginning of August for the next, for about two or three weeks.
21:21
I'm trying to stop at any hack spaces, or any communities, or groups. If anyone is in the US, or knows anyone in the US who might be interested in hearing me speak, or coming to visit them, or anything like that, check out the Raspberry Pi website. There's a call for requests, or come and speak to me, or get in touch. As I say, if you've got anything
21:41
you want to talk to me about, I'm going to be here afterwards, but also, by all means, send me an email, check out our work on GitHub, and if you've got any projects you want to tell me about, please do email me, so feel free to take a picture of that, or I've got some cards at the front here if you want to grab one as well. So thank you.
22:01
We'll take questions. Okay, cool. Very nice project. Any questions? Oh, a lot. We don't have too much time, but.
22:21
Hi, so you mentioned that you have ongoing development. What's going to happen next with Raspberry Pi? So I know that there was a BBC master, and then the RQEs, and so on and so forth, so what's the next thing in the pipeline? The next cool piece of hardware?
22:42
And I realise that you're probably going to say, I can't tell you. Or can you? Well, we only just brought out a new model, so I wouldn't expect anything immediately, but it's more of a long-term thing, talking about. I mean, Evan did reference Raspberry Pi 2 in the blog post announcing the B+, but we're not talking anything imminent.
23:04
There will be a future revision, and the B+, is the final revision of the original Raspberry Pi, so we won't be on the current set of hardware past this, but this will be a very long-term supported device, because as I said, there are three million
23:22
of the current Raspberry Pis out there, and we've no interest in leaving anyone behind. What about compatibility with the one laptop per child? One laptop per child.
23:41
So what do you mean by compatibility? What can be done in common with that project? Okay, you mean in terms of the project. So that was a really cool project, and a lot of the aims of that project were very similar to our own.
24:02
The Raspberry Pi is a lot more extensible in terms of what you can do with it, with the physical hardware and the physical computing elements. I'm not sure really what there is to be said about compatibility in terms of, I don't know if there's a still sort of team working on that project, but I don't know if you've got anything specific to say,
24:23
I'd love to talk to you about it. Okay, one more question. What sort of software comes bundled with the Raspberry Pi? Okay, so our main supported distribution is called Raspbian, which is a community port of the ARM Debian,
24:44
and that's the one that we generally support. We do have a piece of software which runs off the SD card and gives you a selection of different operating systems, but I'll just talk about Raspbian. So it's a full-fledged Linux distribution, so you do get a full desktop environment.
25:01
A lot of things are installed by default, and anything that's available in Debian and the Debian archives on ARM is supported generally. But by default, you get plenty of programming languages. You get Python, Java, Ruby, things like that, and a lot of packages are available through Python as well.
25:23
Scratch is bundled, Sonic Pi, the GPIO libraries, for instance, things like that, the camera interface, basically anything you can get in Debian as well is available.
25:41
Okay, thank you very much again.