At this very moment, the Raspberry Pi education team are in Exeter nearing the end of the second day of Picademy #10; Day 2 is Project Day, and the #picademy hashtag on Twitter is full of photos of biscuit-tin robots, papercrafts, Babbage bears and breadboards as the teams share their projects.

Primary, secondary and post-16 teachers can be part of CPD like this: Picademy #11 takes place on 13 and 14 July at Pi Towers in Cambridge, UK, and you can apply here. As ever, it’s completely free to attend, and you don’t need any experience: we’ll teach you, inspire you, feed you, and give you free resources, and at the end, you’ll join the friendly and enthusiastic ranks of Raspberry Pi Certified Educators (you even get a badge).

But what’s it like, exactly? Raspberry Pi Certified Educators have blogged and tweeted quite a lot about their experiences of Picademy:

I decided to create a blue peter inspired drum kit made out of paper cups and tin foil which played different noises when hit using the pygame library in Python […] that really was what made Picademy stand out from other course – the fact that everyone was given time to play and practice away from the school environment and build a network of like minded educationalists and also have hands on guidance from the experts. I feel more confident in letting pupils loose on the pi now… – David Williams at https://computingcondo.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/picademynorth-day-2-and-overview/

Sway Grantham, a Year 5 class teacher and one of our earliest Picademy attendees, joined us at the recent Picademy North in York and used Storify to bring together glimpses of the event from Twitter.

One of our favourite things about Picademy is watching the effects ripple out afterwards, as people write about its impact on their teaching and network with one another to organise events local to them. Spencer Organ, a chemistry teacher from a school in Birmingham who attended Picademy in October 2014 blogged about the training itself and, later that term, about the impact of his two days at Pi Towers:

David Saunders travelled from overseas to attend Picademy in April, and went home inspired:

In short, my mind is ablaze with ideas and enthusiasm for how to positively impact my community. – David Saunders at https://medium.com/@DesignSaunders/raspberry-pi-academy-8001c43087d5

More Raspberry Pi Certified Educators have written about their Picademy experiences and their effects than I can quote here, and you’ll find more of them listed on our Picademy home page.

We always finish Picademy with a group photo. It’s an occasion of dignity and gravitas.

So, what are you waiting for?