Tag: Google

LadyAda, fireside with President Obama

On Thursday, our friend LadyAda, owner of Adafruit and Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year, is spending part of Valentine’s Day doing something called a Fireside Hangout (this sounds awfully romantic) with President Obama.

The marvellous LadyAda

We wonder what sort of hardware she’ll be talking about. She says:

I was selected to join President Obama in a Fireside Hangout this Thursday 2/14 at 4:50pm EST on Google+!

We’ll discuss issues that are top of mind for citizens, and I’d love you all to help shape this conversation. Submit your questions to http://www.youtube.com/whitehouse and the President will answer questions that are voted to the top.

Don’t forget to RSVP here for a reminder to tune in on Thursday - http://goo.gl/7pxfM.

Please head over, submit questions, vote up the good ones, and RSVP!

Video from Chesterton Community College

A short video from last week’s announcement of Google’s $1m grant for Raspberry Pi kits and teaching materials has just appeared in my inbox. No new news here, but we thought you’d like to see just how well the kids at Chesterton Community College got on with the morning’s programming; and to watch Eben trying his hardest not to break into a giant grin.

15,000 Raspberry Pis for UK schools – thanks Google!

Today’s been a bit unlike most Tuesdays at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Today we’re the recipients of a very generous grant from Google Giving, which will provide 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs for schoolkids around the UK. Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, has just been to visit Cambridge, and he and Eben have been teaching a classroom of local kids to code all morning. Lucky kids.

(Usually on Tuesday mornings we eat biscuits and do engineering. This is a bit of a change of pace.)

We’re going to be working with Google and six UK educational partners to find the kids who we think will benefit from having their very own Raspberry Pi. CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR will each be helping us identify those kids, and will also be helping us work with them. You’ll already have seen the Raspberry Pi teaching materials from Computing at Schools; OCR will also be creating 15,000 free teaching and learning packs to go with the Raspberry Pis.

We’re absolutely made up over the news; this is a brilliant way for us to find kids all over the country whose aptitude for computing can now be explored properly. We believe that access to tools is a fundamental necessity in finding out who you are and what you’re good at. We want those tools to be within everybody’s grasp, right from the start.

The really good sign is that industry has a visible commitment now to trying to solve the problem of CS education in the UK. Grants like this show us that companies like Google aren’t prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems we’re all discussing, but want to help tackle them themselves. We’re incredibly grateful for their help in something that we, like them, think is of vital importance. We think they deserve an enormous amount of credit for helping some of our future engineers and scientists find a way to a career they’re going to love.

Raspberry Pi session at the London Games Festival

This is a fascinating five minutes of video from last Saturday’s Raspberry Pi session at the London Games Festival, where kids and teachers spent the day workshopping away at the Google campus. The Guardian were there to record what was going on, and talked to Eben, to Alasdair Blackwell from Decoded, and to Theo Blackwell from Next Gen Skills. Well worth a watch!

Rob’s Google Tech Talk

If you’re one of those who wanted to go and see Rob on his tour who hasn’t been able to, here’s some video of his talk at the Google campus in Mountain View. Rob promises me that he’ll write a blog post about his trip very soon. Right now, he’s still somewhere in the western US – my hat’s off to him, because he’s still absurdly perky, while I’m all twitchy with fatigue after a trip a third the length of his. Go Rob.

We should have some video for you of one of Eben’s US talks coming up later this week.

Google, Teach First, and Raspberry Pi

We had some pretty fantastic news yesterday. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, visited London’s Science Museum to give a talk on Why Science Matters, as part of the Alan Turing 100th birthday events which are taking place around the country this year. And he made an announcement which has had us jumping around the office with glee.

As part of Google’s very non-evil drive to improve science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) provision in schools, the company will be sponsoring the charity Teach First to take on more than a hundred “exceptional” graduates for training and subsequent mentoring. These new teachers will also be given bursaries by Google with which to buy classroom equipment. Schmidt used his speech to mention Raspberry Pi as relevant, cost-appropriate classroom hardware for the scheme.

“The success of the BBC Micro in the 1980s shows what’s possible. There’s no reason why Raspberry Pi shouldn’t have the same impact, with the right support,” he said. ”It’s vital to expose kids to this early if they’re to have the chance of a career in computing. Only 2% of Google engineers say they weren’t exposed to computer science at high school. While not every child is going to become a programmer, those with aptitude shouldn’t be denied the chance.”

Obviously, we’re chuffed to bits. Teach First estimates that 20,000 children in deprived areas will be reached by this scheme, and we’re really excited to see how the project develops. Read more about the speech here, here and here.