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R A S P B E R R Y P I
U S E R G U I D E , S E C O N D E D I T I O N
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It’s not even as if we’re coming from a position where children don’t want to get involved in
the computer industry. A big kick up the backside came a few years ago, when we were mov-
ing quite slowly on the Raspberry Pi project. All the development work on Raspberry Pi was
done in the spare evenings and weekends of the Foundation’s trustees and volunteers—
we’re a charity, so the trustees aren’t paid by the Foundation, and we all have full-time jobs
to pay the bills. This meant that occasionally, motivation was hard to come by when all I
wanted to do in the evening was slump in front of the
Arrested Development boxed set with a
glass of wine. One evening, when not slumping, I was talking to a neighbour’s nephew about
the subjects he was taking for his General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE, the
British system of public examinations taken in various subjects from the age of about 16),
and I asked him what he wanted to do for a living later on.
“I want to write computer games”, he said.
“Awesome. What sort of computer do you have at home? I’ve got some programming books
you might be interested in.”
“A Wii and an Xbox.”
On talking with him a bit more, it became clear that this perfectly smart kid had never done
any real programming at all; that there wasn’t any machine that he could program in the
house; and that his information and communication technology (ICT) classes—where he
shared a computer and was taught about web page design, using spreadsheets and word pro-
cessing—hadn’t really equipped him to use a computer even in the barest sense. But com-
puter games were a passion for him (and there’s nothing peculiar about wanting to work on
something you’re passionate about). So that was what he was hoping the GCSE subjects he’d
chosen would enable him to do. He certainly had the artistic skills that the games industry
looks for, and his maths and science marks weren’t bad. But his schooling had skirted around
any programming—there were no Computing options on his syllabus, just more of the same
ICT classes, with its emphasis on end users rather than programming. And his home interac-
tions with computing meant that he stood a vanishingly small chance of acquiring the skills
he needed in order to do what he really wanted to do with his life.
This is the sort of situation I want to see the back of, where potential and enthusiasm is
squandered to no purpose. Now, obviously, I’m not monomaniacal enough to imagine that
simply making the Raspberry Pi is enough to effect all the changes that are needed. But I do
believe that it can act as a catalyst. We’re already seeing big changes in the UK schools’ cur-
riculum, where Computing is arriving on the syllabus and ICT is being reshaped, and we’ve
seen a massive change in awareness of a gap in our educational and cultural provision for
kids just in the short time since the Raspberry Pi was launched.