Raspberry Pi A, User Manual, Page: 19 / 314

I N T R O D U C T I O N
3
Too many of the computing devices a child will interact with daily are so locked down that they
can’t be used creatively as a tool—even though computing
is a creative subject. Try using your
iPhone to act as the brains of a robot, or getting your PS3 to play a game you’ve written. Sure,
you can program the home PC, but there are significant barriers in doing that which a lot of
children don’t overcome: the need to download special software, and having the sort of parents
who aren’t worried about you breaking something that they don’t know how to fix. And plenty
of kids aren’t even aware that doing such a thing as programming the home PC is possible. They
think of the PC as a machine with nice clicky icons that give you an easy way to do the things
you need to do so you don’t need to think much. It comes in a sealed box, which Mum and Dad
use to do the banking and which will cost lots of money to replace if something goes wrong!
The Raspberry Pi is cheap enough to buy with a few weeks’ pocket money, and you probably
have all the equipment you need to make it work: a TV, an SD card that can come from an old
camera, a mobile phone charger, a keyboard and a mouse. It’s not shared with the family; it
belongs to the kid; and it’s small enough to put in a pocket and take to a friend’s house. If
something goes wrong, it’s no big deal—you just swap out a new SD card and your Raspberry
Pi is factory-new again. And all the tools, environments and learning materials that you need
to get started on the long, smooth curve to learning how to program your Raspberry Pi are
right there, waiting for you as soon as you turn it on.
A Bit of History
I started work on a tiny, affordable, bare-bones computer about seven years ago, when I was
a Director of Studies in Computer Science at Cambridge University. I’d received a degree at
the University Computer Lab as well as studying for a PhD while teaching there, and over
that period, I’d noticed a distinct decline in the skillset of the young people who were apply-
ing to read Computer Science at the Lab. From a position in the mid-1990s, when 17-year-
olds wanting to read Computer Science had come to the University with a grounding in
several computer languages, knew a bit about hardware hacking, and often even worked in
assembly language, we gradually found ourselves in a position where, by 2005, those kids
were arriving having done some HTML—with a bit of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets if you
were lucky. They were still fearsomely clever kids with lots of potential, but their experience
with computers was entirely different from what we’d been seeing before.
The Computer Science course at Cambridge includes about 60 weeks of lecture and seminar
time over three years. If you’re using the whole first year to bring students up to speed, it’s
harder to get them to a position where they can start a PhD or go into industry over the next
two years. The best undergraduates—the ones who performed the best at the end of their
three-year course—were the ones who weren’t just programming when they’d been told to
for their weekly assignment or for a class project. They were the ones who were programming