His Royal Highness the Duke of York visits Raspberry Pi HQ

We welcomed a very special guest to Raspberry Pi HQ today.

Our Patron, His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, visited our central Cambridge HQ to meet our team, learn more about our work, and give his support for our mission to help more young people learn how to create with computers.

Royalty and Raspberry Pi

Avid readers of this blog will know that this isn’t Raspberry Pi’s first royal encounter. Back in 2014, Raspberry Pi was one of the UK tech startups invited to showcase our product at a reception at Buckingham Palace. At that stage, we had just celebrated the sale of our two millionth credit card–sized computer.

Fast forward to October 2016, when were celebrating the sale of our ten millionth Raspberry Pi computer with a reception at St James Palace and 150 members of our community. By this time, not only was our product flying off the shelves, but the Foundation had merged with Code Club, had expanded its teacher training programmes, and was working with thousands of volunteers to bring computing and digital making to tens of thousands of young people all over the world.

Both of our trips to the royal palaces were hosted by Prince Andrew, who has long been a passionate advocate for technology businesses and digital skills. On top of his incredible advocacy work, he’s also an entrepreneur and innovator in his own right, founding and funding initiatives such as iDEA and Pitch at the Palace, which make a huge impact on digital skills and technology startups.

We are really very fortunate to have him as our Patron.

Leaps and bounds

Today’s visit was an opportunity to update Prince Andrew on the incredible progress we’ve made towards our mission since that first trip to Buckingham Palace.

We now have over 25 million Raspberry Pi computers in the wild, and people use them in education, in industry, and for their hobbies in an astonishing number of ways. Through our networks of Code Clubs and CoderDojos, we have supported more than a million young people to learn how to create with technology while also developing essential life skills such as teamwork, resilience, and creativity. You can read more about what we’ve achieved in our latest Annual Review.

We talked with Prince Andrew about our work to support computing in the classroom, including the National Centre for Computing Education in England, and our free online teacher training that is being used by tens of thousands of educators all over the world to develop their skills and confidence.

Prince Andrew shares our determination to encourage more girls to learn about computing and digital making, and we discussed our #realrolemodels campaign to get even more girls involved in Code Clubs and CoderDojos, as well as the groundbreaking gender research project that we’ve launched with support from the UK government.

Dream team

One of our rituals at the Raspberry Pi Foundation is the monthly all-staff meetup. On the third Wednesday of every month, colleagues from all over the world congregate in Cambridge to share news and updates, learn from each other, and plan together (and yes, we have a bit of fun too).

My favourite part of Prince Andrew’s visit is that he organised it to coincide with the all-staff meetup. He spent most of his time speaking to team members and hearing about the work they do every day to bring our mission to life through creating educational resources, supporting our massive community of volunteers, training teachers, building partnerships, and much more.

In his address to the team, he said:

Raspberry Pi is one of those organisations that I have been absolutely enthralled by because of what you have enabled. The fact that there is this piece of hardware that started this, and that has led to educational work that reaches young people everywhere, is just wonderful.

In the 21st century, every single person in the workplace is going to have to use and interact with some form of digital technology. The fact that you are giving the next generation the opportunity to get hands-on is fantastic.

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