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Introduction
“CHILDREN TODAY ARE
digital natives”, said a man I got talking to at a fireworks party
last year. “I don’t understand why you’re making this thing. My kids know more about set-
ting up our PC than I do.”
I asked him if they could program, to which he replied: “Why would they want to? The com-
puters do all the stuff they need for them already, don’t they? Isn’t that the point?”
As it happens, plenty of kids today aren’t digital natives. We have yet to meet any of these
imagined wild digital children, swinging from ropes of twisted-pair cable and chanting war
songs in nicely parsed Python. In the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s educational outreach work, we
do meet a lot of kids whose entire interaction with technology is limited to closed platforms
with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that they use to play movies, do a spot of word-processed
homework and play games. They can browse the web, upload pictures and video, and even
design web pages. (They’re often better at setting the satellite TV box than Mum or Dad, too.)
It’s a useful toolset, but it’s shockingly incomplete, and in a country where 20 percent of house-
holds still don’t have a computer in the home, even this toolset is not available to all children.
Despite the most fervent wishes of my new acquaintance at the fireworks party, computers
don’t program themselves. We need an industry full of skilled engineers to keep technology
moving forward, and we need young people to be taking those jobs to fill the pipeline as older
engineers retire and leave the industry. But there’s much more to teaching a skill like pro-
grammatic thinking than breeding a new generation of coders and hardware hackers. Being
able to structure your creative thoughts and tasks in complex, non-linear ways is a learned
talent, and one that has huge benefits for everyone who acquires it, from historians to
designers, lawyers and chemists.
Programming Is Fun!
It’s enormous, rewarding, creative fun. You can create gorgeous intricacies, as well as (much
more gorgeous, in my opinion) clever, devastatingly quick and deceptively simple-looking
routes through, under and over obstacles. You can make stuff that’ll have other people looking
on jealously, and that’ll make you feel wonderfully smug all afternoon. In my day job, where I
design the sort of silicon chips that we use in the Raspberry Pi as a processor and work on the
low-level software that runs on them, I basically get paid to sit around all day playing. What
could be better than equipping people to be able to spend a lifetime doing that?