Gadgetory

how do you build a computer that's the size of a pack of cards and costs just $25 and once you've built it how do you use it to grow a new generation of programmers in this special episode of adventures in tech we explore the making of Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi is a tiny computing board that's so simplistic you have to learn basic programming just to turn it on geeks love it for its flexibility but in fact when the Raspberry Pi foundation built this tiny machine they were trying to use that user unfriendliness to solve a growing problem in the computer industry early computers required a certain level of knowledge to use but those who did get to grips with them grew up and built better machines modern gadgets that were much more accessible and today you don't need to know anything about how a computer works in order to use one but if new generations are losing touch with what makes computers tick how are we going to build better ones we've come to Cambridge a spiritual home of computing to speak with raspberry pi inventor Evan Upton very simply the problem we wanted to solve was we saw here in Cambridge at the University the number of applicants to study can be a science fall from maybe five hundred 480 places in 1995 to roughly two hundred ten years later and really we were trying to find with Raspberry Pi a way to reverse that decline so I think the thing is that young programmers learn about computers and what they learn is that a computer is like a metal box that contains a keyboard and a mouse in the display and a battery and lots of software and stuff what we teach them is that actually you know this is a this is a computer concept of a basic machine for learning was there as early as 2006 prototypes were built but ultimately it was in 2010 with the arrival of the micro DB developed at Broadcom that Evan became convinced the Raspberry Pi was viable several years of hard work later the first pie was ready to come out of the oven the Raspberry Pi model bee went on sale in February 2012 and it backed a surprising amount of power into its tiny form at the center of the first pie was a 700 megahertz processor backed up by 256 Meg of RAM it didn't even come with any kind of casing but could run an operating system off an SD card and sported several crucial outputs including a headphone jack USB Ethernet and HDMI raspberry pi was an immediate hit plenty of media attention turned into sales and within a year a million boards have been sold with the itsy-bitsy microcomputer becoming a fixture of tech culture geeky types founder way to make their own media centers while even geekier types dreamed up weird and wonderful applications for the PI such worthy pursuits as making a keyboard out of beer cans opening a garage a vegetable drum machine sending it to space controlling robots building a pet feeder an arcade cabinet or a small arcade cabinet the back-to-basics nature of the Raspberry Pi has made it a plaything for grown-up geeks but in a world of iPads and X boxes how do you enchant the younger crowd according to the Foundation's education mastermind it's the crudity of the pie that makes it such a powerful teaching tool ok it doesn't come so that when you turn it on straight away it works first time it's not in a fancy case it doesn't work my magic these are really important points and what actually make party planner a great tool for learning with putting on a desk in front of children and they see that they ask questions and for any teacher that's when you know your children are engaged the foundation is making inroads with education Google bought 15,000 raspberry pies for UK schools while communities around the world have come together in raspberry jams to get to grips with the pie the foundation also runs Pike Adam II classes which train teachers on how the hardware can be used in the classroom we have started to see adoption among children we think that we have about a million of them of the three and a half million we've sold over a million of them are in the hands of children one way or another but we found now that schools many schools are picking up and using it and so we're seeing it move from informal learning into formal learning and that's quite exciting for us here at foundation what do you think the future holds for young programmers and have you experimented with the Raspberry Pi let me know and check back next time for another adventure in tech