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Old 10-02-2012, 03:23 PM   #1 (permalink)
Arragonis
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Minimal Computing (anyone using "Raspberry Pi"?)

Just wondered if anyone else here has been playing with the "Raspberry Pi" computer at all ?

Quote:
The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, including Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.

Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.
Put simpler it is a single board computer running an ARM chip (the one in your mobile phone) and including sockets for a HD TV and a USB keyboard and mouse. The software is free to download and install, and includes simple stuff like a web browser, word processing and a lot of programming stuff like Python and C+++. There is, apparently, a version of Android being developed for it - perfect for AIDE.

I have mine, in a custom built (by A-Junior) Lego case

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