BBC Wales Science Cafe broadcast from the Pi factory

BBC Radio Wales’ Science Cafe programme this week came from the Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales, that makes the Raspberry Pi for us under licence. It’s only available for UK listeners (my mistake – the BBC’s territorial thingbat doesn’t extend to radio broadcasts, so you can listen anywhere in the world – as long as you aren’t Gert, who is still having problems), and only for the next five days.

It’s a half hour’s broadcast well worth listening to. Listen out for the dulcet tones of the inestimable Gareth Jones, who is in charge of things Pi at the factory. He gives an in-depth explanation of what’s going on on the factory floor; you’ll learn details about the production process that we haven’t talked about here on the blog before.

You’ll also hear from Eben (who was interviewed on the phone from a hotel room in the US last week at about four in the morning, which explains why he sounds so tired), and Gerald Kelly, the General Manager of the facility, who talks about how the Pi came to be made in Wales, and who is awfully tactful and nice about stuff like last year’s near-disaster with the mag jacks that got swapped out without our knowledge in China. Tom Crick, from CAS Wales, also pops up to talk about Pi in schools – and best of all, the broadcast team visits the Machynlleth Raspberry Jam, which is set up by school pupils Luke and Robert. It’s a great programme, and worth putting on for half an hour in the background while you get on with the rest of your day.

Here’s a link to listen to it: let us know what you think in the comments!


CAS Raspberry Pi Educational Manual

You might remember that we mentioned last year that a team of UK teachers from Computing at School (CAS) was working on a Creative Commons licensed teaching manual for the Raspberry Pi, with recognition and encouragement from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. That manual is now available at the Pi Store (which you’ll find on your Raspberry Pi’s desktop) as a PDF. If you’re not a Pi owner, there’s a link to a copy at the bottom of this post.

The manual is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 unported licence, which is a complicated way of saying that it’s free for you to download, copy, adapt and use – you just can’t sell it.

You’ll find chapters here on Scratch, Python, interfacing, and the command line. There’s a group at Oracle which is currently working with us on a faster Java virtual machine (JVM) for the Pi, and once that work’s done, chapters on Greenfoot and Geogebra will also be made available – we hope that’ll be very soon.

We want to say an enormous thank you to the whole CAS team, especially Andrew Hague, who corralled everything (and everyone) together as well as editing much of the document and writing a couple of the chapters. Thanks also to the team at Publicis Blueprint (beware! This link autoplays some video), who did more copy-editorial, production and typesetting work, all on a volunteer basis. Thank you to Graham Hastings, Michael Kölling, Ben Croston, Adrian Oldknow and Clive Beale, who wrote chapters of the manual; thank you to Bruce Nightingale, Brian Starkey and Alan Holt for the digital content. And thank you to the army of CAS members who worked so hard on reviewing and proofreading everything. Everybody who worked on this manual gave freely of their own time to make it happen, and we’re very, very grateful to you all.

The manual itself? It’s brilliant, and we think you’ll find it really useful. Head over to the Pi Store from your Raspberry Pi’s desktop to download a copy directly to your Pi, or, if you don’t have a Raspberry Pi, download it here. We’ll be hosting the manual on this site too, once I’m in front of the right computer – I’ll update again this evening!


Computing at School’s Raspberry Pi manual – call for contributions!

Liz: Commander Coder, one of our friends from Computing at School, left the message below on our forums last night. Because I know not all our forum visitors read the  Educational applications section, I’m copying what he posted here. Please consider whether there’s anything you can do to help out – we really value community input and we’d be really chuffed if you can take part.

I know a lot of you are interested to learn more about what we’re planning for this year’s educational release. Myra, our educational co-ordinator, has been working on the project for more than a month now, and I hope we’ll be able to publish something about her plans for the run-up to the next academic year later this week.

I’ll hand over to Commander Coder:

Over the past few months the Computing at School’s working group (CAS) has been working on a user manual to be ready for the educational launch.  The manual is destined to answer that question to be asked by many Raspberry Pi owners; “What do I do with it?“  The manual will be right there on the desktop when the Raspberry Pi boots up. Thus, the owner won’t need an internet connection to get started.

The manual will answer the question with a series of “step-by-step” guides and “type-in and run” experiments in computer science. CAS has agreed with the Raspberry Pi Foundation that the following languages will be available on the educational launch SD card in a few months. There are hundreds of other languages and systems, but these will be enough to give Raspberry Pi users an experience of computer science.

* Scratch
* Python 3 (including PyGame, PyQt4 and similar libraries)
* Greenfoot
* Geogebra
* Java
* and C/C++ (naturally)

We have created a series of experiments for the owners to try out but we’re hungry for more. This is a call to the Raspberry Pi development community for your contribution to the educational manual.

As in the good old days of magazine listings, we are looking for short programs followed by a description of how they do what they do and preferably how it relates to a computing concept. If you’d like to contribute you can contact me at raspberryfilling@live.com.  Ideally, point me at a website which has your experiment, add it to the Wiki Manual section, or simply send a zip or tarball containing the program and readme. Please don’t send links to material you don’t own. We want your contribution, not someone else’s.

Thanks in advance for any contributions and any we use in the manual will be properly attributed to you. We can’t promise we’ll use all the contributions, and I’ve seen a lot of them already mentioned on the forums and the wiki, but we’ll try to collate the most appropriate for teaching computer science to the Raspberry Pi owners.

Even if you don’t want to contribute anything to the manual you can follow our progress on Twitter @rasp_filling, and our Facebook page.