Video: the BBC sent Eben to a local school...

[liz]

This is a teaser for a much longer piece that will be cycling on the BBC News channel all day on Wednesday. Eben was asked by the BBC to go to Chesterton Community College in Cambridge to take an ICT lesson - bear in mind that these kids are 10 years younger than the undergrads he's used to teaching, so we had a hell of a week working out where to pitch the lesson plan.

Things started quite quietly, but by the end of the lesson the kids were refusing to go to lunch so they could get more time with the Raspis. (The lesson plan went to pot - they were meant to be ramping up slowly to an easy version of Snake, but demanded to be thrown in at the deep end and start with the hard stuff.) We were thrilled; we have always believed that this stuff is exciting for kids, but it's been nice to see it demonstrated.

[frying_fish]

Awesome, I hope this gets the exposure level up even more. I also hope that the secondary school I'm starting to work at in September thinks of getting a few of these (although I'll be in the science department not ICT) and that I can therefore help out there too.

[drgeoff]

Gasp!  It doesn't have any blue LEDs - those things that all market researchers have decreed is mandatory on electronics.

[Gert van Loo]

drgeoff said:


Gasp!  It doesn't have any blue LEDs - those things that all market researchers have decreed is mandatory on electronics.



AAAhhhh... the ones I always have to put black tape on because they hurt your eyes.

[nick.mccloud]

Just as well you kept that field trip secret - imagine if we'd known the location of a room full of Raspi's!

[emg]

Are these the retail (ie, not beta) boards? If so, then yippie, they have GPIO headers!

[obarthelemy]

I'd have loved to have such a computer class.

[mobeyduck]

omg @emg NOOB!!

uhm sorry about that, but if you followed the different versions of the R-Pi you will notice that some of them are bigger, so thats the alpha the Beta's have far out-sticking sd card slots.

[rurwin]

emg said:


Are these the retail (ie, not beta) boards? If so, then yippie, they have GPIO headers!


It looks to me like those are Alpha boards. They look squarer than a Beta board and I can't match the connectors up.

And Ebon says they will go on sale at the end of February; if this was recent he wouldn't say February, he'd say "this month" or "in a few days".

Compare with the three boards here.

Edit: beaten by a rubber duck.

[Gert van Loo]

No, those are the alpha boards. I know because I helped Eben prepare for that trip.

[steveking]

liz said:


Things started quite quietly, but by the end of the lesson the kids were refusing to go to lunch so they could get more time with the Raspis. (The lesson plan went to pot


All the best lessons do!  I ended up spending 15 mins talking about AI, the Turing Test and ALICE on Friday... I hadn't planned that at all, and can't even remember how we started talking about it now I come to think about it.

Anyway, I suspect Eben has good teaching in his blood.

[Piw32]

for not going to die, assault robbery car

The subtitles are hilarious, Eben's accent is not a piece of cake for the voice recognition software.