teaching | Raspberry Pi

Bringing computing to rural Cameroon

Liz: I was going to post this tomorrow, but it’s so good I just couldn’t wait. We’ve just had some mail from Geert Maertens, from Anzegem in Belgium. He’s been working with a small group of volunteers to raise money to bring computing to a school in a remote area of Cameroon. I’ll quote him in full: what he’s got to tell us is fascinating, and makes us feel very, very proud. Thank you Geert, Kristel, Griet and Hans - please keep us posted!

I am a volunteer in a group that provides the funding to build a secondary school (Saint Marcellin Comprehensive College, or SAMACCOL) in a small village in Cameroon. The village is called Binshua and is located close to Nkambe in the Northwest region of Cameroon. This is a relatively poor region of the country, with no reliable water and electricity supply. Also, at present, the nearest internet connection is found in a town called Kumbo which is a three hour drive from Binshua, not so much because of the distance but rather because of the quality of the road.

Ever since we learned about the Raspberry Pi, we were dreaming of a computer lab equipped with these little wonders. And so we pursued this dream. For the necessary funds, we found a generous partner in Rotary International. Thanks to the efforts of the Rotarians in Waregem, Kortrijk and Kumbo and of the Rotary International Foundation, we have the money to provide the essential infrastructure for the school.

And so last month, we travelled with a group of four Pi enthusiasts (Kristel, Griet, Hans and myself) to Cameroon with 30 Pis in our suitcases. Also, we bought HDMI to VGA convertors here in Belgium because we knew it might be hard to find HDMI screens over there. Furthermore, the network equipment (router, switches, hard drive) and a small load of books all came along from Europe. The screens, keyboards and mice were bought in a local computer shop in Bamenda, Cameroon. Currently, it is not possible to connect the school to the public power network, so the class needs to be powered by a small generator of Chinese manufacture.

In the lab, we installed 25 Raspberry Pis. The remaining 5 RPis are currently unused. They certainly play a role in our plans for the future, but currently serve only as spare parts. All of the systems run on the Raspbian image from December, with LibreOffice and CUPS installed. The Pis are currently used to teach the children the basics of working with an Office suite. But we made sure that we gave the teacher a little introduction (and a good book) on programming in Scratch. So, now we are hoping that this will get Scratch introduced in the school curriculum as well.

The computers are all connected in a network. The central point of the network is a router that’s ready to be connected to a WAN modem. We hope to be able to provide a connection to the internet in the near future, which would certainly bring a small revolution into this rural area. Even without an internet connection, we believe that we created an advanced computer lab in this underdeveloped area. Giving the children in the area a chance to work their way to a better future. And that is our motivation.

Geert Maertens

SenseBoard

Liz: Another day, another expansion board. Here’s a guest post from John Woodthorpe at the Open University, where SenseBoard is being used in teaching along with the Raspberry Pi, which drives it. Some of our forum members have taken the university’s My Digital Life course, which uses the SenseBoard as a teaching tool; you can read what they thought here. Over to John!

One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s motivations was to promote physical computing, having the computer interact with the real world. Unfortunately, most of the existing physical computing experiment sets, such as Arduino and Phidgets, can be difficult for the uninitiated to get started.

The Open University faced the same problem when we started developing a new introductory module called ‘My Digital Life’. We wanted to integrate computing hardware into our teaching, but nothing on the market was suitable for complete newcomers.

SenseBoard – click to enlarge

So we developed our own device – the SenseBoard – and the Sense programming environment that drives it. The Senseboard is about the size of a Raspberry Pi, and comes with inputs and outputs including a slider, noise sensor, and IR detector. Input sockets allow other sensors to be added. We supply light, heat, and motion sensors, and you can make others that act as variable resistors. Outputs include a bank of LEDs and plugs for stepper motors, servo motors, and an IR LED on a lead. The SenseBoard simply plugs into a USB port.

The SenseBoard gets students, most of whom are new to computing, quickly building physical devices that have real, immediately visible effects in the real world. Based on the Scratch programming environment, Sense makes this possible by including blocks to interact with the Senseboard, as well as reading and writing over internet.

When the Raspberry Pi came out, it seemed like a marriage made in heaven. A cheap, simple computer together with a simple, robust physical interaction board opened up many possibilities.

However, getting Sense working on the Raspberry Pi wasn’t straightforward. Sense, and Scratch, are built on an old version of Squeak. We had to go through some shenanigans to compile a Squeak virtual machine for the Raspberry Pi’s ARM chip, and then persuade it that serial devices could exist on USB ports. But we got there in the end!

We’ve been working with several schools who bought SenseBoards from us, helping them to use the board and Sense in their teaching. One of the first schools to contact us was Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury. Graeme George has been using SenseBoards in their Computer Science and Informatics department for almost a year. They’ve created projects like weather stations, data loggers, and games like Pong.

Graeme has also been one of several teachers throughout the country asking us when Sense would be available for the Raspberry Pi. His reaction to being given this development version was to comment that it ‘could make the teaching of programming more mobile and might even mean that the classroom could become more of an experimental room than a traditional ICT suite’.

You can buy your own Senseboard kit through the OU Worldwide shop, but our main target is schools rather than hobbyists. You can download Sense for the Raspberry Pi (and for other Linux, Windows and Mac platforms) from http://sense.open.ac.uk

BETT 2013

Are you going to BETT this year? BETT (Jan 30—Feb 2) is the UK’s annual educational technology conference, and this year we’ve teamed up with the exam board OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA examinations) for the show. We’ll be with them at stand B240.

We know that a lot of the teachers who read this blog will be there, and we’d love it if you could drop by the stand to meet us: Rob Bishop will be doing whizz-bang demonstrations there and showing you how easy incorporating the Pi into your computing classes can be; he’ll also have some fun physical computing projects to talk about (he’s been muttering about making machines that interface with Twitter, and making dark hints about robots). You can find out about some exciting new resources from OCR, and we’ll also be introducing you to our new Director of Educational Development, whose identity we’re keeping secret until the end of the month; he and Dr Rob Mullins will be presenting at the weekend. We’ll have more details about that closer to the event.

OCR are helping us to run a special prize draw for UK teachers, who can win ten Raspberry Pis for use in their classroom. (Sorry, non-teachers – this one’s for educators only.) We’re running on-stand demos throughout the event plus a ‘Learn Live’ session on Friday 01 February 2013 at 1.15pm. Don’t miss it!

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!~~

Thursday grab bag

Heatermeter

Want to control the temperature of your barbecue, smoker, firepit or clambake over a web interface? Here’s the Raspberry Pi-powered HeaterMeter. Bryan Mayland says:

HeaterMeter for RaspberryPi joins an Arduino / AVR ATmega328 microcontroller with OpenWrt running on a RaspberryPi $35 wonder-computer for the purpose of providing oven-like control of a charcoal BBQ grill via web interface. The microcontroller controls a fan which limits airflow to the pit, displays the current status on a character LCD, and passes the data on to the RaspberyPi which streams real-time updates to connected web browsers. The website also works on mobile browsers running Android or iOS, allowing users to unchain themselves from their grills and partake in many life-enriching activities such as

Going to the grocery store to buy more beer

Going to a bar to drink more beer

Not get off the couch, where your beer is

Possibly other non-beer related hobbies

Monogame

Dean Ellis has got Monogame running on his Pi. There are details of exactly what hacks he’s used to get it running so well on the YouTube page that this video comes from.

Monogame is an open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework – and it gives us all kinds of ideas about game development on the Pi. You can read some more about Dean and his Pi here.

Make Yourself at Home

We’ve been seeing a lot of visual artists using the Raspberry Pi in their installations. Whether you’re driving video or if you want to drive something with wheels, the Pi offers artists a much cheaper way of getting to their goals than the old “borrow someone’s old laptop” model. We’ve seen Pis being used in the Tate Gallery’s new Tanks in London; we’ve seen them being used in installations at Milton Keynes shopping centre. Most recently, I’ve heard from Martin Beha, who was working on the electronics side of an installation by Austrian artist Robert F Hammerstiel in Hannover. He used Raspberry Pis to make three lawnmower robots talk to each other. (You can see them from about two minutes into this video.) The result is curiously charming.

Click for more on the installation

Martin says:

The communication is established through Wireless LAN. One of the Robots is configured as a server and delivers a (completely wrong but usable) time via NTP for synchronisation. It also calculates the start time for the audio files and delivers it to the other robots via SSH and “at”. The audio is taken directly from the analog output and is amplified by an 18W amplifier module. The sound quality is quite satisfactory for speech.

The devices are powered by a second battery because the manufacturer of the lawn mower robot has built in a function that monitors if additional current is taken from the main battery and stops the robot. The 5V is generated by DC/DC-Converters for car use. Other included circuits are for example a differential amplifier against an audio ground loop and a deep discharge protector.

I chose the Raspberry Pi for reasons of flexibility, size and because there was a very limited budget. The original plan was to communicate via Bluetooth Class 1 dongles and rfcomm to get a virtual serial connection. Because of several bugs in Bluetooth I could not connect the devices and decided to choose Wi-Fi as an alternative. Depending on different (resistor) jumper settings on the GPIO-Port, the RPIs recognize their conversation role after startup and play the right file. The jumper also defines the role as server or client. So I was able to use the same SD-Card image for all robots.

The actual audio files are mp3s of a dialogue about the sense of a robot’s life, spoken by three TV announcers of Austrian national television (Austrians will surely recognize their voices).

STEM – training the teachers

There was a big Raspberry Pi event in Manchester last week, where a large group (including our very own Pete Lomas, accurately described by gocracker.com as “charismatic“) came together for a CPD/networking event for teachers at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Krisma? Bags of it.

We’re not alone in recognising that there’s a lot to be done before a new Computing syllabus arrives at schools next year in helping teachers out of the old ICT mindset and showing them how easy starting with the Pi can be. We’re really pleased to see how seriously teachers are taking the Raspberry Pi, and, as always, incredibly grateful to STEMNET for their tireless volunteering. This was the first of a series of events, where teachers were learning how to use the Pi with Manchester University’s Pi Face, getting to grips with Scratch and Python, and working on cross-curricular activities with the Raspberry Pi. A number of STEM ambassadors from industry also attended, doing that support and mentorship thing that STEMNET does so well. (I don’t think I’ve been to a single Raspberry Pi event that hasn’t been attended by at least one STEM ambassador.) We’d like to thank every one of them, and all of the teachers who are working so hard on getting to grips with a new piece of kit – we’re very grateful.

Jude’s cardboard case

Pete Wood from DesignSpark put me onto this most excellent little series of tutorial videos from Jude Pullen. Jude is a fan of cardboard. Having watched this, so am I!

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!

Deliveries have started!

It’s been a hell of a 24 hours. We’ve been driving up and down the country meeting the people packaging and sending out the Raspberry Pis, doing masterclasses with kids, meeting and eating with our very excellent graphic designer Paul Beech (more meetings should involve bread and dripping, we think) and doing yet more filming with the BBC. We’re not sure when/if it’s being broadcast – we think we may have been bumped by a very photogenic story about a rapidly deflating hot-air balloon and some overhead power cables – but we did get some great pictures from the session with the children. I sincerely don’t know how you teachers do it. I found myself wanting to go and hide behind the whiteboard to do some heavy breathing halfway through the lesson just to get a respite from all the (very smart) questions we were being asked.

Eben shows the kids how to modify a game of Snake. We ended up with the guy sitting to Eben's right (our left) producing a lovely replica of The Matrix's falling green letters (he subsequently made his Dad late for an appointment - sorry, Dad). Some others introduced score counters, the boy Eben's with in the picture learned how to give the game a finish line - and a good time was had by all.

A few people have got their Raspberry Pis today, and more should be arriving on doorsteps on Monday. Serial production has begun, so the backlog should be cleared sooner than some of you were hoping, and we hope that this means that some time over the next week or so element14 and RS will be able to give you firmer delivery estimates than we’ve been able to generate so far.

And finally: how’s your Japanese? Mine’s non-existent, but I still think this is my favourite piece of TV coverage yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETYnmFr5o_s