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A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers (2011)
- dcminter 3y agoFor anyone headline skimming, this was the original Raspberry Pi and that's £15 not 15lb!
- sdenton4 3y agoIsn't miniaturization great? What used to take a whole fifteen pounds of electronics now runs on this single little circuit board...
- tessierashpool 3y agoadmins, can you all change the title to say £15? imagine if you could somehow sum up the total aggregate cognitive drain accumulated by every HN reader outside the UK wondering why children need such heavy computers
- nsteel 3y agoIsn't it only the US plodding on with non-metric weights and measures?
- AltF4me 3y agoNo, we like to use imperial and metric in the UK.
- lewispollard 3y agoBut it's very rare for us to use lbs as a measurement of weight (at least directly)
- badcppdev 3y agoNo you use "stones" for peoples weight. Which I consider to be the least useful unit of measurement in common use today.
- nsteel 3y agoI live in the UK and I use the metric system for pretty much everything, including weighing humans. Everything except driving speed, for obvious reasons.
- nsteel 3y agoAnd if you did for some reason, you'd almost certainly write it as lbs rather than pounds to avoid this entire thing.
- KMnO4 3y agoI think the majority of educated people can figure out the title given the context of the domain. “15 pound... bbc.co.uk” took half a second for my brain to figure out. Similar to how you don’t get too confused with these (admittedly more common) titles: - “How memory works… (health.org)” - “Networking best practices… (sysadmin.info)” - “Languages of the future… (sociology.harvard.edu)”
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- hugs 3y agoI'm a huge Raspberry Pi fan. I use it in my robotics work and I have two sons who I set up a Pi for years ago to learn to code on, but... Did Raspberry Pi fail at its original mission of inspiring young programmers? It's obviously a huge success in industry and in the maker/hobbyist community, but it feels like kids would rather use a phone or a tablet to do anything. And in my work as a robotics team coach for middle-schoolers (First Lego League), we do all the coding with Chromebooks. (fwiw: both my sons are now either currently majoring in computer science in college, or will next year... but cumulative time spent working with the Pis over the years was minimal. Either way, maybe Pi and I should take the win?)
- tomatocracy 3y agoFrom what I see with my own children, Scratch has very much ended up as the "go-to" tool for teaching coding in schools. But Scratch doesn't really "inspire" them as such. What does seem to inspire my children in terms of coding is hardware - at younger ages it's things like Beebot and Ozobot, and then moving onto projects using the GPIO pins on the Pi - eg we got a Pi-controlled robot car kit a couple of years ago which has been great.
- mholm 3y agoHonestly, I think the idea of a less capable computer being used to teach kids to love _programming_ was misguided from the start. Raspberry pis are excellent for making electronics projects accessible and easy. I had an intro class in college that used Pi's for teaching electronics. It dramatically expands what's possible because you have a real computer with accessible pins, and the ecosystem made it all simple and comfortable. It felt much more accessible than Arduinos. But teaching programming? Why? It does not enhance what's possible, it limits what's possible in a teaching way. That screams the sort of thing that educators would find useful and students would tolerate. Sure, they eventually get comfortable and see the benefits, but most of those aren't in programming.
- bodge5000 3y agoIn my opinion, it's actually closer to its original mission than previously as it can, in its current form, be quite easily used as a main computer. Some kids will naturally like tinkering with these kinds of things and that's where the original, cheaper model is better, but most will want a computer to accomplish a task, so the best way to get them to learn this kind of thing is to give them a practical reason to. Want to play Minecraft/Roblox/Whatever on your pi? Go ahead, you just need to figure out how to actually set that up on Linux.
- _fzslm 3y agoIt worked for me. I got a Raspberry Pi when I was 12. I learned the Linux command line on it. I built doorbells and game sites to use in school. I learned PHP on the thing, my first proper programming language. Good times. :)
- baz00 3y agoGlad to hear it worked out for you. My kids school went full on Pi and they were broken and discarded after 2 months because they are mostly not suitable for educational settings from a software and hardware perspective. The hardware is not robust or reliable enough and the software requires fixing by staff too often to be productive. Instead they taught them python on windows.
- ofjcihen 3y agoI’m surprised to hear that. We had an entire job tracking system in a large factory running off of them and they lasted years. This was with daily handling by factory workers.
- baz00 3y agoImagine monkeys on meth and you basically have the school environment.
- jrockway 3y agoI think the students are doing more "system integration" work than your factory workers are doing with their day-to-day handling. So they're touching all of the GPIO pins immediately after shuffling across the carpet to rub 18 balloons against themselves, connecting every GPIO pin to every other GPIO pin just for fun, rebooting by unplugging the power, etc. If the Raspberry Pi had 5V compatible GPIO and SD cards stored data permanently immediately after fsync() returns, the Pi would have been much more successful in the educational environment.
- ofjcihen 3y ago
- DustinBrett 3y agoWhoa. This is heavy.
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- James-Livesey 3y ago[Disclaimer: I work at the BBC.] ...later on, the BBC made[0] the micro:bit[1], another £15 (well, around £15 back then for the V1) computer to inspire young programmers. Funny to think that little did the BBC know that they'd be creating their own cheap computer. [0]: Well, the BBC didn't _make_ it exactly — rather, the development and manufacturing was subcontracted to third-party companies (though some people at the BBC were involved in designing the prototypes — I've had a chat with one such person who did some prototype PCB fabrication in his own kitchen). The BBC came up with the initiative, though. [1]: https://microbit.org https://microbit.org
- b800h 3y agoDid the BBC miss an opportunity to major on the Raspi? For a lot of kids it could have been the only real computer in their house. Another BBC Computer Literacy Project would have been amazing, the micro:bit doesn't feel like it does the business.
- James-Livesey 3y agoAs much as the Raspberry Pi is really great for computing education, in my personal opinion, I think the micro:bit does well in terms of setting it up and getting started with it, especially in a school environment when there'll be around 20-or-so of these devices all being used by students. With the Pi, you have to format the SD card and flash an OS to it, then plug in the peripherals such as the display, keyboard and mouse. While schools will likely have this equipment, having to reconnect all these devices from a school PC can be a chore, especially when it comes to the end of the lesson. Schools would likely also have to issue a lot of these peripherals alongside Pis for kids to use them as their only computer in the house, and that can get expensive. With the micro:bit, all you need is a computer (which most schools will have), a USB cable (supplied with micro:bits) and a connection to the internet to access the online IDEs. Granted, that does place some barriers to their use at home when kids don't have a companion computing device for coding on. Despite the micro:bit being limited as a microcontroller with a 5x5 pixel display and 2 user buttons, it does have a lot of on-board sensors that can bring a lot of potential opportunities to students in terms of creating physical projects that Raspberry Pis don't have built-in (you have to purchase external sensors, such as accelerometers, to match the functionality). That being said, the micro:bit does require a special connector to use its GPIO pins in a DIP format that can be connected to a breadboard (the Pi is better at this due to its GPIO header). And, while the Pi does give a full-blown Linux environment that would have been great for all learners to interact with, the immediacy and portability of the micro:bit does have some advantages for new learners. I was in fact in Year 5 back when the micro:bit was launched and given out to Year 5 school children, and now I'm an apprentice at the BBC (similar stories exist for the original BBC Micro); so I'd say in that respect that it was overall a good investment from the BBC :) That's my thoughts, anyway!
- Koshkin 3y agoI haven't weighed my desktop, but 6,8 kg sounds about right.
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- jacobtt21 3y agoI got my first pi when I was still in high school and the only thing I did on it was build a LAMP server. Cool project though.
- userbinator 3y agoDesigning an SBC around a proprietary SoC from a notoriously secretive company to "inspire young programmers" never seemed like anything more than PR stunt to me. IMHO that mission is better served by getting them into something like retrocomputing and exposing them to the actually open PC-compatible ecosystem of the time, instead of encouraging them to participate in another thinly-veiled walled garden.
- snvzz 3y agoAgon Light a much better approach than Raspberry Pi, for sure. Yet overlooked.
- camkego 3y agoI mean this thing really put the Osborne 1 computer to shame, which weighed 24lbs. /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
- Applejinx 3y agoMy whole code library and VST plugin library has been ported to the Pi for over a year :) https://www.airwindows.com/raspberry-pi/ https://www.airwindows.com/raspberry-pi/ Best platform expansion I've ever made. Not the most popular—there's been only 876 downloads of the whole plugin library compiled for Pi, from the mediafire mirror—but it's all open source, and that's still quite a few Pis set up for music production :)
- boffinAudio 3y agoThat's awesome, and is another reason why schools using the micro:bit approach, versus raspberryPi, are artificially limiting their students reach and horizon for computing. I've got my kids learning computers on their raspberryPi's - for them to learn that they can also easily get into audio programming is a huge benefit.
- robbie-c 3y agoEben Upton spoke at my school during my teens, I remember being so impressed with him that I applied to his college at Cambridge just so that I would be one of his students. Sadly he'd moved on by the time I arrived, but I got the impression that the Pi was largely a result of interviewing so many prospective CS students that didn't already know how to code, whereas in his generation they would have been able to. I wonder how many CS applicants in 2023 know how to code?
- n4r9 3y agoYour comment reminded me of a 2017 article recently linked here: https://danwang.co/why-so-few-computer-science-majors/ https://danwang.co/why-so-few-computer-science-majors/ The obvious answer in my view is familiarity. Most secondary school leavers will have some idea of what's involved in a maths, chemistry, biology, geography etc degree. Very few will know what's involved in CS and I reckon the uncertainty puts them off. I'm not sure kids that age would learn how to code without strong encouragement. Why would they?
- jecel 3y agoThe original motivation for the Pi was to offer current generations the same learning opportunities that low cost home computers offered those growing up in the 1980s. An expensive shared family PC in the 2000s didn't encourage tinkering. And things would get even worse as these PCs got replaced with closed smartphones as the only computing platforms people would grow up with. So a really cheap computer, even if limited, would allow the young programmers to experiment and even if they ended up damaging it at a sufficiently low cost it wouldn't be a disaster. The initial prototype hooked up two of the same processor in the first Arduinos, one running a Python interpreter and one generating a TV output. Booting to a programming prompt like the 1980s micro would encourage learning the language. The second prototype used a much more powerful chip and the third added an ARM that could run Linux (it was the one shown in 2011 which looked like a fat USB pen drive). They realized that though the 1980s home computers booted to a Basic prompt, most of the time they loaded ready made games from cassette tapes instead. Having Linux would open up the modern Internet to the little machine. I think they could have had it both ways - with a small local flash they could boot to a Python prompt if the SD cards was not present. With the card you would go into Linux. In a way, the original idea is finally here with the RP2040 microcontroller configured for MicroPython even though that has the flavor of cross-development instead of a stand-alone machine.