Connexion
Here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we believe that it’s important that our academic research has a practical application. An important area of research we are engaged in is broadening participation in computing education by investigating how the subject can be made more culturally relevant — we have published several studies in this area.
However, we know that busy teachers do not have time to keep abreast of all the latest research. This is where our Pedagogy Quick Reads come in. They show teachers how an area of current research either has been or could be applied in practice.
Our new Pedagogy Quick Reads summarises the central tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (the theory) and then lays out 10 areas of opportunity as concrete ways for you to put the theory into practice.
Computing remains an area where many groups of people are underrepresented, including those marginalised because of their gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, additional educational needs, or age. For example, recent stats in the BCS’ Annual Diversity Report 2023 record that in the UK, the proportion of women working in tech was 20% in 2021, and Black women made up only 0.7% of tech specialists. Beyond gender and ethnicity, pupils who have fewer social and economic opportunities ‘don’t see Computing as a subject for somebody like them’, a recent report from Teach First found.
The fact that in the UK, 94% of girls and 79% of boys drop Computing at age 14 should be of particular concern for Computing educators. This last statistic makes it painfully clear that there is much work to be done to broaden the appeal of Computing in schools. One approach to make the subject more inclusive and attractive to young people is to make it more culturally relevant.
As part of our research to help teachers effectively adapt their curriculum materials to make them culturally relevant and engaging for their learners, we’ve identified 10 areas of opportunity — areas where teachers can choose to take actions to bring the latest research on culturally relevant pedagogy into their classrooms, right here, right now.
The Pedagogy Quick Read gives teachers ideas for how they can use the areas of opportunity (AOs) to begin to review their own curriculum, teaching materials, and practices. We recommend picking one area initially, and focusing on that perhaps for a term. This helps you avoid being overwhelmed, and is particularly useful if you are trying to reach a particular group, for example, Year 9 girls, or low-attaining boys, or learners who lack confidence or motivation.
For example, one simple intervention is AO1 ‘Finding out more about our learners’. It’s all too easy for teachers to assume that they know what their students’ interests are. And getting to know your students can be especially tricky at secondary level, when teachers might only see a class once a fortnight or in a carousel.
However, finding out about your learners can be easily achieved in an online survey homework task, set at the beginning of a new academic year or term or unit of work. Using their interests, along with considerations of their backgrounds, families, and identities as inputs in curriculum planning can have tangible benefits: students may begin to feel an increased sense of belonging when they see their interests or identities reflected in the material later used.
The Quick Read presents two practical case studies of how we’ve used the 10 AO to adapt and assess different lesson materials to increase their relevance for learners.
As we’ve shared before, we implemented culturally relevant pedagogy as part of UK primary school teachers’ professional development in a recent research project. The Quick Read provides details of how we supported teachers to use the AOs to adapt teaching material to make it more culturally relevant to learners in their own contexts. Links to the resources used to review 2 units of work, lesson by lesson, to adapt tasks, learning material, and outcomes are included in the Quick Read.
In a different project, we used the AOs to reflect on our adaptation of classroom materials from The Computing Curriculum, which we had designed for schools in England originally. Partnering with Amala Education, we adapted Computing Curriculum materials to create a 100-hour course for young adults at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya who wanted to develop vocational digital literacy skills.
The diagram below shows our ratings of the importance of applying each AO while adapting materials for this particular context. In this case, the most important areas for making adaptations were to make the context more culturally relevant, and to improve the materials’ accessibility in terms of readability and output formats (text, animation, video, etc.).
You can use this method of reflection as a way to evaluate your progress in addressing different AOs in a unit of work, across the materials for a whole year group, or even for your school’s whole approach. This may be useful for highlighting those areas which have, perhaps, been overlooked.
The ‘Areas of opportunity’ Pedagogy Quick Read aims to help teachers apply research to their practice by summarising current research and giving practical examples of evidence-based teaching interventions and resources they can use.
The set of AOs was developed as part of a wider research project, and each one is itself research-informed. The Quick Read includes references to that research for everyone who wants to know more about culturally relevant pedagogy. This supporting evidence will be useful to teachers who want to address the topic of culturally relevant pedagogy with senior or subject leaders in their school, who often need to know that new initiatives are evidence-based.
Our goal for the Quick Read is to raise awareness of tried and tested pedagogies that increase accessibility and broaden the appeal of Computing education, so that all of our students can develop a sense of belonging and enjoyment of Computing.
Let us know if you have a story to tell about how you have applied one of the areas of opportunity in your classroom.
To date, our research in the field of culturally relevant pedagogy has been generously supported by funders including Cognizant and Google. We are very grateful to our partners for enabling us to learn more about how to make computing education inclusive for all.
The post New resource to help teachers make Computing culturally relevant appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We are pleased to announce that we are renewing our partnership with Oak National Academy in England to provide an updated high-quality Computing curriculum and lesson materials for Key Stages 1 to 4.
In 2021 we partnered with Oak National Academy to offer content for schools in England that supported young people to learn Computing at home while schools were closed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
In our renewed partnership, we will create new and updated materials for primary and secondary teachers to use in the classroom. These classroom units will be available for free on the Oak platform and will include everything a teacher needs to deliver engaging lessons, including slide decks, worksheets, quizzes, and accompanying videos for over 550 lessons. The units will cover both the general national Computing curriculum and the Computer Science GCSE, supporting teachers to provide a high-quality Computing offering to all students aged 5 to 16.
These new resources will update the very successful Computing Curriculum and will be rigorously tested by a Computing subject expert group.
“I am delighted that we are continuing our partnership with Oak National Academy to support all teachers in England with world-leading resources for teaching Computing and Computer Science. This means that all teachers in England will have access to free, rigorous and tested classroom resources that they can adapt to suit their context and students.” – Philip Colligan, CEO
All our materials on the Oak platform will be free and openly available, and can be accessed by educators worldwide.
As we did with The Computing Curriculum, we’ll design these teaching resources to model best practice, and they will be informed by leading research into pedagogy and computing education, as well as by user testing and feedback.
The materials will bring teachers the added benefit of saving valuable time, and schools can choose to adapt and use the resources in the way that works best for their students
We have already started work and will begin releasing units of lessons in autumn 2024. All units across Key Stages 1 to 4 will be available by autumn 2025.
We’re excited to continue our partnership with Oak National Academy to provide support to teachers and students in England.
And as always, our comprehensive classroom resources can be downloaded for free, by anyone in the world, from our website.
The post Supporting Computing in England through our renewed partnership with Oak National Academy appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We’re really excited to see that Experience AI Challenge mentors are starting to submit AI projects created by young people. There’s still time for you to get involved in the Challenge: the submission deadline is 24 May 2024.
If you want to find out more about the Challenge, join our live webinar on Wednesday 3 April at 15:30 BST on our YouTube channel.
During the webinar, you’ll have the chance to:
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and press the ‘Notify me’ button to receive a notification when we go live.
The Experience AI Challenge, created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in collaboration with Google DeepMind, guides young people under the age of 18, and their mentors, through the exciting process of creating their own unique artificial intelligence (AI) project. Participation is completely free.
Central to the Challenge is the concept of project-based learning, a hands-on approach that gets learners working together, thinking critically, and engaging deeply with the materials.
In the Challenge, young people are encouraged to seek out real-world problems and create possible AI-based solutions. By taking part, they become problem solvers, thinkers, and innovators.
And to every young person based in the UK who creates a project for the Challenge, we will provide personalised feedback and a certificate of achievement, in recognition of their hard work and creativity. Any projects considered as outstanding by our experts will be selected as favourites and its creators will be invited to a showcase event in the summer.
You don’t need to be an AI expert to bring this Challenge to life in your classroom or coding club. Whether you’re introducing AI for the first time or looking to deepen your young people’s knowledge, the Challenge’s step-by-step resource pack covers all you and your young people need, from the basics of AI, to training a machine learning model, to creating a project in Scratch.
In the resource pack, you will find:
The pack offers a safety net of scaffolding, support, and troubleshooting advice.
By bringing the Experience AI Challenge to young people, you’re inspiring the next generation of innovators, thinkers, and creators. The Challenge encourages young people to look beyond the code, to the impact of their creations, and to the possibilities of the future.
You can find out more about the Experience AI Challenge, and download the resource pack, from the Experience AI website.
The post The Experience AI Challenge: Find out all you need to know appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We partner with educational organisations around the world to bring coding activities to young people in their regions through Code Club and CoderDojo. Currently involving 52 organisations in 41 countries, this Global Clubs Partner network shares our passion for empowering kids to create with technology.
A key aspect of how we foster the Global Clubs Partner network is to promote connections between partners. It’s one reason we host regular online meetings and regional in-person events, and connect partners one on one to facilitate information sharing. Today, we’re highlighting three stories from partner organisations that have benefited from working with each other.
In March 2023, the Foundation hosted the first Clubs Conference for educators and volunteers involved with Code Club and CoderDojo. As this event took place in Cambridge, UK, the majority of attendees were from the UK and Republic or Ireland, but a small number came from further away. Much further away, in some cases.
Bruce Harms and his colleague Thanya Croes (Full Stack Vision Foundation, Aruba) were attending the Clubs Conference to share their work to increase digital literacy in Aruba through CoderDojo clubs. At a special conference session for international attendees, they connected with Sanneke van der Meer and Marloes van der Meulen (CoderDojo Netherlands), who were also presenting as part of the session.
After the Clubs Conference, the two organisations remained in touch. Later in the year, Bruce and Thanya attended the DojoCon Netherlands 2023 in the Hague. ”It was an amazing day with great workshops and lots of other CoderDojo Champions”, Bruce said. He and Thanya have plans to invite the CoderDojo Netherlands team to Aruba and hope to collaborate on future projects together.
Sylvester Mtumbuka (Computers for Enhanced Education, Malawi) and Mrisho Habibu (AMCET Innovation Hub, Tanzania) first connected at our Global Clubs Partner meetup in Malaysia in late 2022. Sylvester said: “We were the only ones from Africa there and we are from neighbouring countries. We happen to have a lot of goals in common, and we started discussing possible opportunities for collaboration.”
The result is the Tanzania and Malawi (TaMa) Innovation Initiative, which is dedicated to fostering the educational, technological, and entrepreneurial development of young people in Tanzania and Malawi. It aims to empower young people in under-served communities, offering support for sustainable livelihoods and entrepreneurship, and it is already yielding great results.
As part of their ongoing partnerships with us, Sylvester and Mrisho attended our Global Clubs Partner meetup in South Africa a year later — the perfect opportunity to sign their partnership agreement.
A chance meeting between Homero Cardoso (TAGUSVALLEY, Portugal) and Manos Zeakis (CoderDojo in Greece) at DojoCon Netherlands 2022 in Almere had unexpected consequences. “We discussed a lot of things, including the difficulty in finding venues for our Dojos in Greece”, Manos said. “Then in October 2023, we met at a Global Clubs Partner call and we talked again. With Homero’s help I contacted a Greek company, and they were immediately enthusiastic about helping us. After a few weeks, the Nea Ionia Dojo was live and the first Ninjas had their first session!”
Homero added: “Getting to know Manos was transformative for me as well. Because of that chance encounter in Almere, this year 7th and 8th grade students are participating in Astro Pi Mission Zero for the first time, mostly due to the inspiring example of Manos’s United Dojos project presented at DojoCon.”
To find out more about our Global Clubs Partner network and how your organisation might get involved, visit the CoderDojo or Code Club websites, or contact us directly about a partnership.
The post Fostering collaboration in the Global Clubs Partner network appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Big news for young coders and everyone who supports them: project registration is now open for Coolest Projects 2024! Coolest Projects is our global technology showcase for young people aged up to 18. It gives young creators the incredible opportunity to share the cool stuff they’ve made with digital technology with a global audience, and receive certificates and rewards to celebrate their achievements.
The Coolest Projects online showcase is open to young people worldwide. Young creators can register their projects to share them with the world in our online project gallery, and join our exciting livestream event to celebrate what they have made with the global Coolest Projects community.
By taking part in Coolest Projects, young people can join an international community of young makers, represent their country, receive personalised feedback on their projects, and get certificates and more to recognise their achievements.
Here’s how it works:
Taking part in Coolest Projects is simple:
As well as the global online showcase, Coolest Projects in-person events are held for young people locally in certain countries too, and we encourage creators to take part in both the online showcase and their local in-person event.
In 2024, creators can look forward to the following in-person events, run by us and partner organisations around the world:
More events are coming soon, so sign up to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be sure to hear about any in-person events in your country. And if there isn’t an event near you, don’t worry. The online showcase is open to any young person anywhere in the world.
Coolest Projects welcomes all digital tech projects, from beginner to advanced, and there are loads of great resources available to help you support the young people in your community to take part.
We are running a series of online calls and webinars for mentors and young people to share practical tips and help participants develop their ideas and build their creations. Sign up for the sessions here. All sessions will be recorded, so you can watch them back if you can’t join live.
You can also check out the Coolest Projects guidance page for resources to help you support young people throughout their Coolest Projects journey, including a mentor guide and session plans.
To inspire your coders, encourage them to take a look at the 2023 showcase gallery, where they can explore the incredible projects submitted by participants last year.
Our projects site is also a great place for participants to begin — there are hundreds of free step-by-step project guides to help young people create their own projects, whether they’re experienced tech creators or they’re just getting started.
There’s lots more exciting news to come, from the announcement of our VIP judges to details about this year’s swag, so sign up for email updates to be the first to know. And whether your coders have already made something fun, innovative, or amazing that they want to share, or they’re inspired to make something new, Coolest Projects is the place for them. We can’t wait to see what they create!
The post Registration is open for Coolest Projects 2024 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
You can now access classroom resources created by us for the T Level in Digital Production, Design and Development. T Levels are a type of vocational qualification young people in England can gain after leaving school, and we are pleased to be able to support T Level teachers and students.
With our new resources, we aim to empower more young people to develop their digital skills and confidence while studying, meaning they can access more jobs and opportunities for further study once they finish their T Levels.
We worked collaboratively with the Gatsby Charitable Foundation on this pilot project as part of their Technical Education Networks Programme, the first time that we have created classroom resources for post-16 vocational education.
T Levels are Technical Levels, 2-year courses for 16- to 18-year-old school leavers. Launched in England in September 2020, T Levels cover a range of subjects and have been developed in collaboration with employers, education providers, and other organisations. The aim is for T Levels to specifically prepare young people for entry into skilled employment, an apprenticeship, or related technical study in further or higher education.
For us, this T Level pilot project follows on from work we did in 2022 to learn more about post-16 vocational training and identify gaps where we could make a difference.
Something interesting we found was the relatively low number of school-age young people who started apprenticeships in the UK in 2019/20. For example, a 2021 Worldskills UK report stated that only 18% of apprentices were young people aged 19 and under. 39% were aged 19-24, and the remaining 43% were people aged 25 and over.
To hear from young people about their thoughts directly, we spoke to a group of year 10 students (ages 14 to 15) at Gladesmore School in Tottenham. Two thirds of these students said that digital skills were ‘very important’ to them, and that they would consider applying for a digital apprenticeship or T Level. When we asked them why, one of the key reasons they gave was the opportunity to work and earn money, rather than moving into further study in higher education and paying tuition fees. One student’s answer was for example, “It’s a good way to learn new skills while getting paid, and also gives effective work experience.”
To support teachers in delivering the Digital Production, Design and Development T Level qualification, we created a new set of resources: curriculum materials as well a project brief with examples to support the Occupational Specialism component of the qualification.
The curriculum materials on the topic ‘Digital environments’ cover content related to computer systems including hardware, software, networks, and cloud environments. They are designed for teachers to use in the classroom and consist of a complete unit of work: lesson plans, slide decks, activities, a progression chart, and assessment materials. The materials are designed in line with our computing content framework and pedagogy principles, on which the whole of our Computing Curriculum is based.
The project brief is a real-world scenario related to our work and gives students the opportunity to problem-solve as though they are working in an industry job.
The T Level project brief materials are available for download now, with the T Level classroom materials coming in the next few weeks.
We hope T Level teachers and students find the resources useful and interesting — if you’re using them, please let us know your thoughts and feedback.
Our thanks to the Gatsby Foundation for collaborating with us on this work to empower more young people to fulfil their potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
The post Our T Level resources to support vocational education in England appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Since November, registration is open for Mission Space Lab, part of the European Astro Pi Challenge 2023/24. The Astro Pi Challenge is an ESA Education project run in collaboration with us here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation that gives young people up to age 19 the amazing opportunity to write computer programs that run on board the International Space Station (ISS). It is free to take part and young people can participate in two missions: Mission Zero, designed for beginners, and Mission Space Lab, designed for more experienced coders.
This year, Mission Space Lab has a brand-new format. As well as introducing a new activity for teams to work on, we have created new resources to support teams and mentors, and developed a special tool to help teams test their programs.
A big motivator for these changes was to make the activity more accessible and enable more young people to have their code run in space. Listening to feedback from participants and mentors, we are creating the opportunity for even more teams to submit programs that run on the ISS this year, by offering a specific activity and providing more extensive support materials.
For this year’s mission, ESA astronauts have given teams a specific scientific task to solve: to calculate the speed that the ISS is travelling as it orbits the Earth. People working in science often investigate a specific phenomenon or try to solve a particular problem. They have to use their knowledge and skills and the available tools to find ways to answer their research question. For Mission Space Lab, teams will work just like this. They will look at what sensors are available on the Astro Pi computers on board the ISS, develop a solution, and then write a Python program to execute it. To test their program, they will use the new Astro Pi Replay software tool we’ve created, which simulates running their program on board the ISS.
To help teams and mentors take part in Mission Space Lab, we are providing a variety of supporting materials:
We have also run virtual sessions to help mentors and teams familiarise themselves with the new Mission Space Lab activity, and to ask any technical questions they might have. You can watch the recordings of these sessions on YouTube:
Astro Pi Replay is a new simulation tool that we have developed to support Mission Space Lab teams to test their programs. The tool simulates running programs on the Astro Pi computers on board the ISS. It is a Python library available as a plug-in to install in the Thonny IDE where teams write their programs. Thanks to this tool, teams can develop and test their programs on any computer that supports Python, without the need for hardware like the Astro Pi units on board the ISS.
The Astro Pi Replay tool works by replaying a data set captured by a Mission Space Lab team in May 2023. The data set includes readings from the Astro Pi ‘s sensors, and images taken by its visible-light camera like the ones below. Whenever teams run their programs in Thonny with Astro Pi Replay, the tool replays some of this historical data. That means teams can use the historical data to test their programs and calculations.
One of the benefits of using this simulation tool is that it gives teams a taste of what they can expect if their program is run on the ISS. By replaying a sequence of data captured by the Astro Pis in space, teams using sensors will be able to see what kind of data can be collected, and teams using the camera will be able to see some incredible Earth observation images.
If you’re curious about how Astro Pi Replay works, you’ll be pleased to hear we are making it open source soon. That means you’ll be able to look at the source code and find out exactly what the library does and how.
Community members have consistently reported how amazing it is for teams to receive unique Earth observation photos and sensor data from the Astro Pis, and how great the images and data are to inspire young people to participate in their computing classes, clubs, or events. Through the changes we’ve made to Mission Space Lab this year, we want to support as many young people as possible to have the opportunity to engage in space science and capture their own data from the ISS.
If you want a taste of how fantastic Astro Pi is for learners, watch the story of St Joseph’s, a rural Irish school where participating in Astro Pi has inspired the whole community.
Submissions for Mission Space Lab 2023/24 are open until 19 February 2024, so there’s still time to take part! You can find full details and eligibility criteria at astro-pi.org/mission-space-lab.
If you have any questions about the European Astro Pi Challenge, please get in touch at contact@astro-pi.org.
The post Get ready for Mission Space Lab with our new simulation tool appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
“Computational thinking is really about thinking, and sometimes about computing.” – Aman Yadav, Michigan State University
Computational thinking is a vital skill if you want to use a computer to solve problems that matter to you. That’s why we consider computational thinking (CT) carefully when creating learning resources here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. However, educators are increasingly realising that CT skills don’t just apply to writing computer programs, and that CT is a fundamental approach to problem-solving that can be extended into other subject areas. To discuss how CT can be integrated beyond the computing classroom and help introduce the fundamentals of computing to primary school learners, we invited Dr Aman Yadav from Michigan State University to deliver the penultimate presentation in our seminar series on computing education for primary-aged children.
In his presentation, Aman gave a concise tour of CT practices for teachers, and shared his findings from recent projects around how teachers perceive and integrate CT into their lessons.
Aman began his talk by placing his team’s work within the wider context of computing education in the US. The computing education landscape Aman described is dominated by the National Science Foundation’s ambitious goal, set in 2008, to train 10,000 computer science teachers. This objective has led to various initiatives designed to support computer science education at the K–12 level. However, despite some progress, only 57% of US high schools offer foundational computer science courses, only 5.8% of students enrol in these courses, and just 31% of the enrolled students are female. As a result, Aman and his team have worked in close partnership with teachers to address questions that explore ways to more meaningfully integrate CT ideas and practices into formal education, such as:
At the primary education level, the CT4EDU project posed the question “What does computational thinking actually look like in elementary classrooms, especially in the context of maths and science classes?” This project involved collaboration with teachers, curriculum designers, and coaches to help them conceptualise and implement CT in their core instruction.
During professional development workshops using both plugged and unplugged tasks, the researchers supported educators to connect their day-to-day teaching practice to four foundational CT constructs:
An emerging aspect of the research team’s work has been the important relationship between vocabulary, belonging, and identity-building, with implications for equity. Actively incorporating CT vocabulary in lesson planning and classroom implementation helps students familiarise themselves with CT ideas: “If young people are using the language, they see themselves belonging in computing spaces”.
A main finding from the study is that teachers used CT ideas to explicitly engage students in metacognitive thinking processes, and to help them be aware of their thinking as they solve problems. Rather than teachers using CT solely to introduce their students to computing, they used CT as a way to support their students in whatever they were learning. This constituted a fundamental shift in the research team’s thinking and future work, which is detailed further in a conceptual article.
The work conducted for the CT4EDU project guided the approach taken in the Smithsonian Science for Computational Thinking project. This project entailed the development of a curriculum for grades 3 and 5 that integrates CT into science lessons.
Part of the project included surveying teachers about the value they place on CT, both before and after participating in professional development workshops focused on CT. The researchers found that even before the workshops, teachers make connections between CT and the rest of the curriculum. After the workshops, an overwhelming majority agreed that CT has value (see image below). From this survey, it seems that CT ties things together for teachers in ways not possible or not achieved with other methods they’ve tried previously.
Despite teachers valuing the CT approach, asking them to integrate coding into their practices from the start remains a big ask (see image below). Many teachers lack knowledge or experience of coding, and they may not be curriculum designers, which means that we need to develop resources that allow teachers to integrate CT and coding in natural ways. Aman proposes that this requires a longitudinal approach, working with teachers over several years, using plugged and unplugged activities, and working closely with schools’ STEAM or specialist technology teachers where applicable to facilitate more computationally rich learning experiences in classrooms.
Aman’s team is also engaged in a research project to integrate CT at middle school level for students aged 11 to 14. This project focuses on the question “What does CT look like in the context of social studies, English language, and art classrooms?”
For this project, the team conducted three Delphi studies, and consequently created learning pathways for each subject, which teachers can use to bring CT into their classrooms. The pathways specify practices and sub-practices to engage students with CT, and are available on the project website. The image below exemplifies the CT integration pathways developed for the arts subject, where the relationship between art and data is explored from both directions: by using CT and data to understand and create art, and using art and artistic principles to represent and communicate data.
Aman’s work highlights the broad value of CT in education. However, to meaningfully integrate CT into the classroom, Aman suggests that we have to take a longitudinal view of the time and methods required to build teachers’ understanding and confidence with the fundamentals of CT, in a way that is aligned with their values and objectives. Aman argues that CT is really about thinking, and sometimes about computing, to support disciplinary learning in primary classrooms. Therefore, rather than focusing on integrating coding into the classroom, he proposes that we should instead talk about using CT practices as the building blocks that provide the foundation for incorporating computationally rich experiences in the classroom.
Watch the recording of Aman’s presentation:
You can access Aman’s seminar slides as well.
You can find out more about connecting research to practice for primary computing education by watching the recordings of the other seminars in our series on primary (K–5) teaching and learning. In particular, Bobby Whyte discusses similar concepts to Aman in his talk on integrating primary computing and literacy through multimodal storytelling.
Our 2024 seminar series is on the theme of teaching programming, with or without AI. In this series, we explore the latest research on how teachers can best support school-age learners to develop their programming skills.
On 13 February, we’ll hear from Majeed Kazemi (University of Toronto) about his work investigating whether AI code generator tools can support K-12 students to learn Python programming.
Sign up now to join the seminar:
The post Integrating computational thinking into primary teaching appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
At the heart of our work as a charity is the aim to democratise access to digital skills and technologies. Since 2020, we have partnered with over 100 youth and community organisations in the UK to develop programmes that increase opportunities for young people experiencing educational disadvantage to engage and create with digital technology in underserved communities.
Youth organisations attempting to start a coding club can face a range of practical and logistical challenges, from a lack of space, to funding restrictions, and staff shortages. However, the three issues that we hear about most often are a lack of access to hardware, lack of technical expertise among staff, and low confidence to deliver activities on an ongoing basis.
In 2023, we worked to help youth organisations overcome these barriers by designing and delivering a new hybrid training programme, supported by Amazon Future Engineer. With the programme, we aimed to help youth leaders and educators successfully incorporate coding and digital making activities as part of their provision to young people.
“Really useful, I have never used Scratch so going [through] the project made it clear to understand and how I would facilitate this for the children[.]” – Heather Coulthard, Doncaster Children’s University
We invited 14 organisations from across the UK to participate in the training, based on:
Attendees included a number of previous Learn at Home partners, including Breadline London, Manchester Youth Zone, and Youth Action. They all told us that the additional support they had received from the Foundation and organisations such as The Bloomfield Trust during the coronavirus pandemic had directly inspired them to participate in the training and begin their own coding clubs.
We started with four online training sessions where we introduced the youth leaders to digital making concepts, programming languages, and recommended activities to run with their young people. This included everything from making their own block-based Scratch games, to running Python programs on our Code Editor and trying out physical computing via our new micro:bit project path.
Alongside digital skills and interactive codealongs, the training also focused on how to be an effective CoderDojo mentor, including classroom management best practice, an explanation of the thinking behind our 3…2…1…Make! project paths, and an overview of culturally relevant pedagogy.
This last part explored how youth leaders can adapt and tailor digital making resources designed for a wide, general audience for their specific groups of young people to aid their understanding, boost their learning outcomes, and increase their sense of belonging within a coding club environment — a common blocker for organisations trying to appeal to marginalised youth.
The training culminated in a day-long, in-person session at our head office in Cambridge, so that youth leaders and educators from each organisation could get hands-on experience. They experimented with physical computing components such as the Raspberry Pi Pico, trained their own artificial intelligence (AI) models using our Experience AI resources, and learned more about how their young people can get involved with Coolest Projects and Astro Pi Mission Zero.
The in-person session also gave everyone the chance to get excited about running digital making activities at their centres: the youth leaders got to ask our team questions, and had the invaluable opportunity to meet each other, share their stories, swap advice, and discuss the challenges they face with their peers.
“Having the in-person immensely improved my skills and knowledge. The instructors were all brilliant and very passionate.” – Awale Elmi, RISE Projects
Finally, thanks to the generous support from Amazon Future Engineer, we were able to equip each participating organisation with Raspberry Pi 400 kits so that the youth leaders can practise and share the skills and knowledge they gained on the course at their centres and the organisations can offer computing activities in-house.
Over the next 12 months, we will continue to work with each of these youth and community organisations, supporting them to establish their coding clubs, and helping to ensure that young people in their communities get a fair and equal opportunity to engage and create with technology, no matter their background or challenges they are facing.
“It was really great. The online courses are excellent and being in-person to get answers to questions really helped. The tinkering was really useful and having people on hand to answer questions [was] massively useful.” – Liam Garnett, Leeds Libraries
For more information about how we can support youth and community organisations in the UK to start their own coding clubs, please send us a message with the subject ‘Partnerships’.
The post Working with UK youth and community organisations to tackle the digital divide appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, students are increasingly interacting with AI-powered applications when listening to music, writing assignments, and shopping online. As educators, it’s our responsibility to equip them with the skills to critically evaluate these technologies.
A key aspect of this is understanding ‘explainability’ in AI and machine learning (ML) systems. The explainability of a model is how easy it is to ‘explain’ how a particular output was generated. Imagine having a job application rejected by an AI model, or facial recognition technology failing to recognise you — you would want to know why.
Establishing standards for explainability is crucial. Otherwise we risk creating a world where decisions impacting our lives are made by opaque systems we don’t understand. Learning about explainability is key for students to develop digital literacy, enabling them to navigate the digital world with informed awareness and critical thinking.
AI models can have a significant impact on people’s lives in various ways. For instance, if a model determines a child’s exam results, parents and teachers would want to understand the reasoning behind it.
Artists might want to know if their creative works have been used to train a model and could be at risk of plagiarism. Likewise, coders will want to know if their code is being generated and used by others without their knowledge or consent. If you came across an AI-generated artwork that features a face resembling yours, it’s natural to want to understand how a photo of you was incorporated into the training data.
Explainability is about accountability, transparency, and fairness, which are vital lessons for children as they grow up in an increasingly digital world.
There will also be instances where a model seems to be working for some people but is inaccurate for a certain demographic of users. This happened with Twitter’s (now X’s) face detection model in photos; the model didn’t work as well for people with darker skin tones, who found that it could not detect their faces as effectively as their lighter-skinned friends and family. Explainability allows us not only to understand but also to challenge the outputs of a model if they are found to be unfair.
In essence, explainability is about accountability, transparency, and fairness, which are vital lessons for children as they grow up in an increasingly digital world.
Some models, like decision trees, regression curves, and clustering, have an in-built level of explainability. There is a visual way to represent these models, so we can pretty accurately follow the logic implemented by the model to arrive at a particular output.
By teaching students about AI explainability, we are not only educating them about the workings of these technologies, but also teaching them to expect transparency as they grow to be future consumers or even developers of AI technology.
A decision tree works like a flowchart, and you can follow the conditions used to arrive at a prediction. Regression curves can be shown on a graph to understand why a particular piece of data was treated the way it was, although this wouldn’t give us insight into exactly why the curve was placed at that point. Clustering is a way of collecting similar pieces of data together to create groups (or clusters) with which we can interrogate the model to determine which characteristics were used to create the groupings.
However, the more powerful the model, the less explainable it tends to be. Neural networks, for instance, are notoriously hard to understand — even for their developers. The networks used to generate images or text can contain millions of nodes spread across thousands of layers. Trying to work out what any individual node or layer is doing to the data is extremely difficult.
Regardless of the complexity, it is still vital that developers find a way of providing essential information to anyone looking to use their models in an application or to a consumer who might be negatively impacted by the use of their model.
One suggested strategy to add transparency to these models is using model cards. When you buy an item of food in a supermarket, you can look at the packaging and find all sorts of nutritional information, such as the ingredients, macronutrients, allergens they may contain, and recommended serving sizes. This information is there to help inform consumers about the choices they are making.
Model cards attempt to do the same thing for ML models, providing essential information to developers and users of a model so they can make informed choices about whether or not they want to use it.
Model cards include details such as the developer of the model, the training data used, the accuracy across diverse groups of people, and any limitations the developers uncovered in testing.
Model cards should be accessible to as many people as possible.
A real-world example of a model card is Google’s Face Detection model card. This details the model’s purpose, architecture, performance across various demographics, and any known limitations of their model. This information helps developers who might want to use the model to assess whether it is fit for their purpose.
As the world settles into the new reality of having the amazing power of AI models at our disposal for almost any task, we must teach young people about the importance of transparency and responsibility.
As a society, we need to have hard discussions about where and when we are comfortable implementing models and the consequences they might have for different groups of people. By teaching students about explainability, we are not only educating them about the workings of these technologies, but also teaching them to expect transparency as they grow to be future consumers or even developers of AI technology.
Most importantly, model cards should be accessible to as many people as possible — taking this information and presenting it in a clear and understandable way. Model cards are a great way for you to show your students what information is important for people to know about an AI model and why they might want to know it. Model cards can help students understand the importance of transparency and accountability in AI.
This article also appears in issue 22 of Hello World, which is all about teaching and AI. Download your free PDF copy now.
If you’re an educator, you can use our free Experience AI Lessons to teach your learners the basics of how AI works, whatever your subject area.
The post Teaching about AI explainability appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Each year, young people all over the world share and celebrate their amazing tech creations by taking part in Coolest Projects, our digital technology showcase. Our global online showcase and local in-person events give kids a wonderful opportunity to celebrate their creativity with their communities, explore other young creators’ tech projects, and gain inspiration and encouragement for their future projects.
Now, visitors to the Young V&A museum in London can also be inspired by some of the incredible creations showcased at Coolest Projects. The museum has recently reopened after a large reimagining, and some of the inspiring projects by Coolest Projects 2022 participants are now on display in the Design Gallery, ready to spark digital creativity among more young people.
Many Coolest Projects participants showcase projects that they created to make an impact and solve a real-world problem that’s important to them, for example to help members of their local community, or to protect the environment.
One example on display in the Young V&A gallery is EleVoc, by 15-year-old Chinmayi from India. Chinmayi was inspired to create her project after she and her family faced a frightening encounter:
“My family and I are involved in wildlife conservation. One time we were charged by elephants even though we were only passing by in a Jeep. This was my first introduction to human–animal conflict, and I wanted to find a way to solve it!” – Chinmayi
The experience prompted Chinmayi to create EleVoc, an early-warning device designed to reduce human–elephant conflict by detecting and classifying different elephant sounds and alerting nearby villages to the elephants’ proximity and behaviour.
Also exhibited at the Young V&A is the hardware project Gas Leak Detector by Sashrika, aged 11, from the USA. Gas Leak Detector is a device that detects if a fuel tank for a diesel-powered heating system is leaking and notifies householders through an app in a matter of second.
Sashrika knew this invention could really make a difference to people’s lives. She explained, “Typically, diesel gas tanks for heating are in the basement where people don’t visit every day. Leakage may be unnoticed and lead to fire or major repair cost.”
As well as projects designed to solve problems, Coolest Projects also welcomes young people who create things to entertain or have fun.
At the Young V&A, visitors can enjoy the fun, fast-paced game project Runaway Nose, by 10-year-old Harshit from Ireland. Runaway Nose uses facial recognition, and players have to use their nose to interact with the prompts on the screen.
Harshit shared the motivation behind his project:
“I wanted to make a fun game to get you thinking fast and that would get you active, even on a rainy day.” – Harshit
We can confirm Runaway Nose is a lot of fun, and a must-do activity for people of all ages on a visit to the museum.
If you are in London, make sure to head to the Young V&A to see Chinmayi’s, Sashrika’s, and Harshit’s projects, and many more. We love seeing the ingenuity of the global community of young tech creators celebrated, and hope it inspires you and your young people.
With that in mind, we are excited that Coolest Projects will be back in 2024. Registrations for the global Coolest Projects online showcase will be open from 14 February to 22 May 2024, and any young creator up to age 18 anywhere in the world can get involved. We’ll also be holding in-person Coolest Projects events for young people in Ireland and the UK. Head to the Coolest Projects website to find out more.
Coolest Projects is for all young people, no matter their level of coding experience. Kids who are just getting started and would like to take part can check out the free project guides on our projects site. These offer step-by-step guidance to help everyone make a tech project they feel proud of.
To always get the latest news about all things Coolest Projects, from event updates to the fun swag coming for 2024, sign up for the Coolest Projects newsletter.
The post Celebrating young Coolest Projects creators at a London museum appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We support two networks of coding clubs where young people around the world discover the countless possibilities of creating with digital technologies.
Every year, we send out a survey to volunteers at all the clubs we support. Today we share some highlights from the findings and what we’re planning next.
The simple answer is: to help make clubs even better for everyone involved! Educators and volunteers are doing a remarkable job in helping young people learn about computing and coding, so we want to know more about them, about how they run their clubs, and what impact the club sessions have for young people.
By knowing more about clubs — how frequently club leaders run them, what resources they use, what they would like more of — we can continue to improve the learning experience for educators, volunteers, and young people involved in our clubs.
This year in March we sent out our survey to all Code Clubs and CoderDojos around the world, and we heard back from almost 500. As always, the results were very positive, and they also gave us a lot of useful information on how we can continue to improve our support for clubs all over the world.
Based on the survey, we estimate that at the time, the network of over 4200 Code Clubs and 700 CoderDojos was reaching almost 139,000 young people globally. The global community of clubs has continued to grow since then, with a now even larger network of volunteers supporting ever more young people.
According to the survey, the majority of young people attending clubs are aged between 8 and 13, but clubs host young people as young as 6 and as old as 18. It was great to hear about the participation of girls, and we’d love to see this rise even higher: respondents told us that 42% of their Code Club attendees and 30% of their CoderDojo attendees are female.
Respondents feel that attending club sessions improves young peoples’ interest and engagement in computing and programming, and increases their understanding of the usefulness of computing.
None of these young people would be able to attend clubs without the great work of teams of educators and volunteers. Based on the survey, we estimate that at the time of the survey, there were over 10,300 Code Club leaders and almost 4000 CoderDojo champions around the world. Many survey respondents said that they were motivated to start volunteering after attending a club themselves.
Community is at the heart of clubs and the clubs networks: over 80% of respondents said that belonging to a global community of clubs helps motivates them to volunteer at their own club.
Clubs focus on a wide range of topics and programming languages. Scratch is overwhelmingly popular, with over 95% of respondents telling us that they used Scratch in club sessions in the previous year. Micro:bit projects and Python-based programming were also very popular. Club leaders told us that in future they would like to offer more activities around AI applications, as well as around games and mobile apps.
Club leaders told us that being part of a Code Club or CoderDojo affects young people positively. Respondents feel that attending club sessions improves young peoples’ skills and interest in computing and programming, and increases their understanding of the usefulness of computing. Almost 90% of club leaders also agree that after attending a club, young people are interested in additional experiences of learning about computing and programming.
Attending also positively affects young people’s wider skills and attitudes, with club leaders stating that young people who attend improve their personal confidence, independence in learning, and creative thinking.
Young people who attend improve their personal confidence, independence in learning, and creative thinking.
We were pleased to find out that most Code Club leaders, who run their sessions in schools, think that their clubs increase the visibility of computing within their school. Many also said that the attendees’ parents and guardians value their clubs as opportunities for their children.
We want to keep providing clubs with support to increase their positive impact on young people. Thanks to the survey results, we know to focus our work on providing training opportunities for club volunteers, as well as supporting club leaders to recruit volunteers and advertise their clubs to more young people.
You can read the survey report to dive deeper into our findings.
As we take an impact-focused approach to our work, we are currently partnering with Durham University on an evaluation of Code Clubs in UK schools. The evaluation will provide further insights for how we can best support people around the world to run clubs that provide welcoming spaces where all kids can learn to create with digital technologies.
The post What is the impact of attending a Code Club or CoderDojo? appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Today’s blog is written by Dr Alex Hadwen-Bennett, who we worked with to find out primary school learners’ experiences of engaging with culturally relevant Computing lessons. Alex is a Lecturer in Computing Education at King’s College London, where he undertakes research focusing on inclusive computing education and the pedagogy of making.
Despite many efforts to make a career in Computing more accessible, many groups of people are still underrepresented in the field. For instance, a 2022 report revealed that only 22% of people currently working in the IT industry in the UK are women. Additionally, among learners who study Computing at schools in England, Black Caribbean students are currently one of the most underrepresented groups. One approach that has been suggested to address this underrepresentation at school is culturally relevant pedagogy.
For this reason, a particular focus of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s academic research programme is to support Computing teachers in the use of culturally relevant pedagogy. This pedagogy involves developing learning experiences that deliberately aim to enable all learners to engage with and succeed in Computing, including by bringing their culture and interests into the classroom.
The Foundation’s work in this area started with the development of guidelines for culturally relevant and responsive teaching together with a group of teachers and external researchers. The Foundation’s researchers then explored how a group of Computing teachers employed the guidelines in their own teaching. In a follow-on study funded by Cognizant, the team worked with 13 primary school teachers in England to adapt Computing lessons to make them culturally relevant for their learners. In this process, the teachers adapted a unit on photo editing for Year 4 (ages 8–9), and a unit about vector graphics for Year 5 (ages 9–10). As part of the project, I worked with the Foundation team to analyse and report on data gathered from focus groups of primary learners who had engaged with the adapted units.
For the focus groups, the Foundation team asked teachers from three schools to each choose four learners to take part. All children in the three focus groups had taken part in all the lessons involving the culturally adapted resources. The children were both boys and girls, and came from diverse cultural backgrounds where possible.
The questions for the focus groups were prepared in advance and covered:
“I feel happy that I see myself represented in some way.”
“It was nice to do something that actually represented you in many different ways, like your culture and your background.”
– Statements of learners who participated in the focus groups
When the learners were asked about what they did in their Computing lessons, most of them made references to working with and manipulating graphics; fewer made references to programming and algorithms. This emphasis on graphics is likely related to this being the most recent topic the learners engaged with. The learners were also asked about their reflections on the culturally adapted graphics unit that they had recently completed. Many of them felt that the unit gave them the freedom to incorporate things that related to their interests or culture. The learners’ responses also suggested that they felt represented in the work they completed during the unit. Most of them indicated that their interests were acknowledged, whereas fewer mentioned that they felt their cultural backgrounds were highlighted.
“Anyone can be good at computing if they have the passion to do it.”
– Statement by a learner who participated in a focus group
When considering who does computing, the learners made multiple references to people who keep trying or do not give up. Whereas only a couple of learners said that computer scientists need to be clever or intelligent to do computing. A couple of learners suggested that they believed that anyone can do computing. It is encouraging that the learners seemed to associate being good at computing with effort rather than with ability. However, it is unclear whether this is associated with the learners engaging with the culturally adapted resources.
While this was a small-scale study, the focus groups findings do suggest that engaging with culturally adapted resources can make primary learners feel more represented in their Computing lessons. In particular, engaging with an adapted unit led learners to feel that their interests were recognised as well as, to a lesser extent, their cultural backgrounds. This suggests that primary-aged learners may identify their practical interests as the most important part of their background, and want to share this in class.
Finally, the responses of the learners suggest that they feel that perseverance is a more important quality than intelligence for success in computing and that anyone can do it. While it is not possible to say whether this is directly related to their engagement with a culturally adapted unit, it would be an interesting area for further research.
You can find out more about culturally relevant pedagogy and the Foundation’s research on it, for example by:
The Foundation would like to extend thanks to Cognizant for funding this research, and to the primary computing teachers and learners who participated in the project.
The post Culturally relevant Computing: Experiences of primary learners appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Underrepresentation in computing is a widely known issue, in industry and in education. To cite some statistics from the UK: a Black British Voices report from August 2023 noted that 95% of respondents believe the UK curriculum neglects black lives and experiences; fewer students from working class backgrounds study GCSE Computer Science; when they leave formal education, fewer female, BAME, and white working class people are employed in the field of computer science (Kemp 2021); only 21% of GCSE Computer Science students, 15% at A level, and 22% at undergraduate level are female (JCQ 2020, Ofqual 2020, UCAS 2020); students with additional needs are also underrepresented.
Such statistics have been the status quo for too long. Many Computing teachers already endeavour to bring about positive change where they can and engage learners by including their interests in the lessons they deliver, so how can we support them to do this more effectively? Extending the reach of computing so that it is accessible to all also means that we need to consider what formal and informal values predominate in the field of computing. What is the ‘hidden’ curriculum in computing that might be excluding some learners? Who is and who isn’t represented?
In a recent research seminar, Katharine Childs from our team outlined a research project we conducted, which included a professional development workshop to increase primary teachers’ awareness of and confidence in culturally relevant pedagogy. In the workshop, teachers considered how to effectively adapt curriculum materials to make them culturally relevant and engaging for the learners in their classrooms. Katharine described the practical steps teachers took to adapt two graphics-related units, and invited seminar participants to apply their learning to a graphics activity themselves.
Culturally relevant pedagogy is a teaching framework which values students’ identities, backgrounds, knowledge, and ways of learning. By drawing on students’ own interests, experiences and cultural knowledge educators can increase the likelihood that the curriculum they deliver is more relevant, engaging and accessible to all.
The idea of culturally relevant pedagogy was first introduced in the US in the 1990s by African-American academic Gloria Ladson-Billings (Ladson-Billings 1995). Its aim was threefold: to raise students’ academic achievement, to develop students’ cultural competence and to promote students’ critical consciousness. The idea of culturally responsive teaching was later advanced by Geneva Gay (2000) and more recently brought into focus in US computer science education by Kimberly Scott and colleagues (2015). The approach has been localised for England by Hayley Leonard and Sue Sentance (2021) in work they undertook here at the Foundation.
Katharine began her presentation by explaining that the professional development workshop in the Primary culturally adapted resources for computing project built on two of our previous research projects to develop guidelines for culturally relevant and responsive computing and understand how teachers used them in practice. This third project ran as a pilot study funded by Cognizant, starting in Autumn 2022 with a one-day, in-person workshop for 13 primary computing teachers.
Katharine then introduced us to the 10 areas of opportunity (AO) our research at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre had identified for culturally relevant pedagogy. These 10 areas were used as practical prompts to frame the workshop discussions:
At first glance it is easy to think that you do most of those things already, or to disregard some items as irrelevant to the computing curriculum. What would your own cultural identity (see AO2) have to do with computing, you might wonder. But taking a less complacent perspective might lead you to consider all the different facets that make up your identity and then to think about the same for the students you teach. You may discover that there are many areas which you have left untapped in your lesson planning.
Katharine explained how this is where the professional development workshop showed itself as beneficial for the participants. It gave teachers the opportunity to reflect on how their cultural identity impacted on their teaching practices — as a starting point to learning more about other aspects of the culturally relevant pedagogy approach.
Our researchers were interested in how they could work alongside teachers to adapt two computing units to make them more culturally relevant for teachers’ specific contexts. They used the Computing Curriculum units on Photo Editing (Year 4) and Vector Graphics (Year 5).
Katharine illustrated some of the adaptations teachers and researchers working together had made to the emoji activity above, and which areas of opportunity (AO) had been addressed; this aspect of the research will be reported in later publications.
Although the number of participants in this pilot study was small, the findings show that the professional development workshop significantly increased teachers’ awareness of culturally relevant pedagogy and their confidence in adapting resources to take account of local contexts:
These quantitative shifts in perspective indicate a positive effect of the professional development pilot.
Katharine described that in our qualitative interviews with the participating teachers, they expressed feeling that their understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy had increased and they recognized the many benefits to learners of the approach. They valued the opportunity to discuss their contexts and to adapt materials they currently used with other teachers, because it made it a more ‘authentic’ and practical professional development experience.
The seminar ended with breakout sessions inviting viewers to consider possible adaptations that could be made to the graphics activities which had been the focus of the workshop.
In the breakout sessions, attendees also discussed specific examples of culturally relevant teaching practices that had been successful in their own classrooms, and they considered how schools and computing educational initiatives could support teachers in their efforts to integrate culturally relevant pedagogy into their practice. Some attendees observed that it was not always possible to change schemes of work without a ‘whole-school’ approach, senior leadership team support, and commitment to a research-based professional development programme.
The seminar reminds us that the education system is not culture neutral and that teachers generally transmit the dominant culture (which may be very different from their students’) in their settings (Vrieler et al, 2022). Culturally relevant pedagogy is an attempt to address the inequities and biases that exist, which result in many students feeling marginalised, disenfranchised, or underachieving. It urges us to incorporate learners’ cultures and experiences in our endeavours to create a more inclusive computing curriculum; to adopt an intersectional lens so that all can thrive.
As a pilot study, the workshop was offered to a small cohort of 13, yet the findings show that the intervention significantly increased participants’ awareness of culturally relevant pedagogy and their confidence in adapting resources to take account of local contexts.
Of course there are many ways in which teachers already adapt resources to make them interesting and accessible to their pupils. Further examples of the sort of adaptations you might make using these areas of opportunity include:
Can you see an opportunity for integrating culturally relevant pedagogy in your classroom? We would love to hear about examples of culturally relevant teaching practices that you have found successful. Let us know your thoughts or questions in the comments below.
You can watch Katharine’s seminar here:
You can download her presentation slides on our ‘previous seminars’ page, and you can read her research paper.
To get a practical overview of culturally relevant pedagogy, read our 2-page Quick Read on the topic and download the guidelines we created with a group of teachers and academic specialists.
Tomorrow we’ll be sharing a blog about how the learners who engaged with the culturally adapted units found the experience, and how it affected their views of computing. Follow us on social media to not miss it!
On 12 December we’ll host the last seminar session in our series on primary (K-5) computing. Anaclara Gerosa will share her work on how to design and structure early computing activities that promote and scaffold students’ conceptual understanding. As always, the seminar is free and takes place online at 17:00–18:30 GMT / 12:00–13:30 ET / 9:00–10:30 PT / 18:00–19:30 CET. Sign up and we’ll send you the link to join on the day.
In 2024, our new seminar series will be about teaching and learning programming, with and without AI tools. If you’re signed up to our seminars, you’ll receive the link to join every monthly seminar.
The post Engaging primary Computing teachers in culturally relevant pedagogy through professional development appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We partner with organisations around the world to bring coding activities to young people in their regions through Code Club and CoderDojo. Currently involving 54 organisations in 43 countries, this Global Clubs Partner network shares our passion for educating kids to create with technology.
We work to connect our Global Clubs Partners to foster a sense of community and encourage collaboration. As part of this, we run in-person meetups to allow our partners to get to know each other better, and to help us understand how we can best support them, and what we can learn from them. Previously held in Penang, Malaysia, and Almere, the Netherlands, our latest meetup took place in Cape Town, South Africa.
Although we’ve seen some surprising points of commonality among all Global Clubs Partners, we also know that our partners find it helpful to connect with organisations based in their region. For the Cape Town meetup, we invited partner organisations from across Africa, hoping to bring together as many people as possible.
Our aim was to give our partners the opportunity to share their work and identify and discuss common questions and issues. We also wanted to mitigate some of the challenges of working internationally, such as time constraints, time zones, and internet connectivity, so that everyone could focus on connecting with each other.
The meetup agenda included time for each Global Clubs Partner organisation to present their work and future plans, as well as time for discussions on growing and sustaining club volunteer and mentor communities, strategy for 2024, and sharing resources.
“If the only thing rural communities have is problems, why are people still living there? … Rural communities have gifts, have skills, they have history that is wasting away right now; nobody is capturing it. They have wisdom and assets.”
Damilola Fasoranti from Prikkle Academy, Nigeria, talking about not making assumptions about rural communities and how this shapes the work his organisation does
A group dinner after the meetup enabled more informal networking. The next day, everyone had the chance to get inspired at Coolest Projects South Africa, a regional Coolest Projects event for young tech creators organised by partner organisation Coder LevelUp.
The meetup gave the Global Clubs Partners time to talk to each other about their work and experiences and understand one another better. It was also very beneficial for our team: we learned more about how we can best support partners to work in their communities, whether through new resources, information about funding applications, or best practice in overcoming challenges.
After attending a previous meetup, two of our partner organisations had decided to create an agreement for future partnership. We were delighted to learn about this collaboration, and to witness the signing of the agreement at this meetup.
By continuing to bring our partner network together, we hope to foster more cross-organisation partnerships like this around the world that will strengthen the global movement for democratising computing education.
You can find out how your organisation could join our Global Clubs Partner network on the CoderDojo and Code Club websites, or contact us directly with your questions or ideas about a partnership.
The post Creating connections at our 2023 Africa partner meetup appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In our series of community stories, we celebrate some of the amazing young people and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them.
In our latest story, we’re sharing the inspiring journey of St Joseph’s Secondary School in Rush, Ireland. Over the past few years, the school community has come together to encourage coding and digital skills, harnessing the European Astro Pi Challenge as an opportunity to kindle students’ enthusiasm for tech and teamwork.
We caught up with some of the educators and students at St Joseph’s, fresh off the success of their participation in another round of Astro Pi, to delve a little deeper into the school’s focus on making opportunities to engage with computing technologies accessible to all.
St Joseph’s Secondary School is in the heart of Rush, a rural town steeped in agricultural heritage. The school houses a diverse student population coming from the local multigenerational farming families as well as families who’ve been drawn to Rush more recently by its beautiful countryside and employment opportunities. St Joseph’s leadership team has responded to the changing demographics and increase of its student population by adapting and growing the school’s curriculum to meet the evolving needs of the young people and help them build a strong community.
One of the school’s most popular initiatives has been teaching coding from first year (ages 12–13). This proactive approach has resonated with many students, including Kamaya, a member of the school’s 2022/23 Astro Pi cohort, who first discovered her passion for space science and computing through the movie Interstellar.
I remember the first time I was like, ‘OK, space is cool’ is when I watched a movie. It was called Interstellar. I [realised] I might want to do something like that in my future. So, when I came to [St Joseph’s] secondary school, I saw coding as a subject and I was like, ‘Mum, I’ve got to do coding.’
Kamaya, student at St Joseph’s
A key person encouraging St Joseph’s students to give coding a try has been Mr Murray, or Danny as he is fondly referred to by students and staff alike. Danny was introduced to the importance of engaging with computing technologies while teaching science at a school in England: he attended a Code Club where he saw kids building projects with Raspberry Pis, and he couldn’t wait to get involved. Growing his knowledge from there, Danny changed subject focus when he moved back to Ireland. He took on the challenge of helping St Joseph’s expand their computer science offering, along with leading on all IT-related issues.
When the school introduced mandatory coding taster sessions for all first-year students, Danny was blown away by the students’ eagerness and wanted to provide further opportunities for them to see what they could achieve with digital technologies.
This is where Astro Pi came in. After hearing about this exciting coding challenge through an acquaintance, Danny introduced it to his computer science class, as well as extending an open invitation to all St Joseph’s students. The uptake was vast, especially once he shared that the young people could become the recipients of some very exciting photos.
You get to see photos of Earth that nobody has ever seen. Imagine just talking to somebody and saying, ‘Oh, there’s a picture of the Amazon. I took that picture when I was 14. From space.’
Danny Murray, computing teacher at St Joseph’s
Danny’s mission is to instil in his students the belief that they can achieve anything. Collaborating on Astro Pi projects has enabled young people at St Joseph’s to team up and uncover their strengths, and has helped foster a strong community.
The students’ sense of community has transcended Danny’s classroom, creating a culture of enthusiasm for digital skills at St Joseph’s. Today, a dedicated team of students is in charge of solving tech-related challenges within the school, as Deputy Principal Darren Byrne explains:
Our own students actually go class to class, repairing tech issues. So, every day there are four or five students going around checking PCs in classrooms. They […] give classes to our first-year students on app usage.
Darren Byrne, Deputy Principal at St Joseph’s
It’s invested in the whole school [now], the idea that students can look after this kind of technology themselves. We’re the ones reaching out for help from the students!
To find out how you can get involved in Astro Pi, visit astro-pi.org for further information, deadlines, and more. If you would like to learn more about the other free resources we have available to help you inspire a coding community in your school, head to www.raspberrypi.org/teach.
Help us celebrate St Joseph’s Secondary School by sharing their story on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The post Celebrating the community: St Joseph’s Secondary School appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Today we’re calling all young people who are excited to explore coding and space science, and the mentors who want to support and inspire them on their journey. Astro Pi Mission Space Lab is officially open again, offering young people all over Europe the amazing chance to have their code for a science experiment run in space on the International Space Station (ISS).
With this year’s Mission Space Lab, astronauts from the European Space Agency are setting young people a task: to write a computer program that runs on the ISS and calculates the speed at which the ISS is orbiting planet Earth. Participation in Mission Space Lab is completely free.
Here’s ESA astronaut candidate Rosemary Coogan to introduce this year’s mission:
Mission Space Lab invites young people up to age 19 to work in teams of 2 to 6 and write a Python program for the Astro Pi computers on board the ISS to collect data and calculate the speed at which the ISS is travelling.
Your role as a mentor is to support teams as they design and create their program — with our free guidance resources to help you and your young creators.
We want as many young people as possible to have the chance to take part in Mission Space Lab, so the way in which teams solve the task set by the ESA astronauts can be different depending on the experience of your team:
The Astro Pis are two Raspberry Pi computers stationed on the ISS, each equipped with a High Quality Camera, a Sense HAT add-on board with a number of sensors, and a Coral machine learning accelerator. Each Astro Pi has a hard casing designed especially for space travel.
There are lots of ways to use sensor data from the Astro Pis to calculate the speed of the ISS, so young people can get creative solving their Mission Space Lab task while learning fascinating facts about physics and the inner workings of the ISS.
All Mission Space Lab participants whose programs run on the ISS will receive a certificate recognising their achievement, and they’ll get the chance to attend a Q&A webinar with an ESA astronaut. Teams also receive back data from the ISS based on their Mission Space Lab programs, for example photos or sensor measurements. That means you’ll have the option to explore and use that data in follow-on activities with your young people.
We are providing lots of supporting materials to help you and your team with Mission Space Lab:
Mission Space Lab is open for submissions from today, 6 November 2023, until 19 February 2024.
Visit the Astro Pi website for full details and eligibility criteria: astro-pi.org/mission-space-lab
The European Astro Pi Challenge is an ESA Education project run in collaboration with us here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
You can keep up with all Astro Pi news by following the Astro Pi X account (formerly Twitter) or signing up to the newsletter at astro-pi.org.
The post Explore space science and coding with Astro Pi Mission Space Lab appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Increasing access to computing education is a global challenge, and at the Raspberry Pi Foundation we take a global approach in addressing it. One way we do this is to partner with organisations around the world and support them to introduce Code Clubs and CoderDojos in their local or national communities.
Code Club and CoderDojo are the two global networks of free, volunteer-led coding clubs for young people that we support. They are a great fit for a lot of organisations that share our vision and values and work with young people from backgrounds that are currently under-represented in computing. Right now, our Global Clubs Partner network involves more than 50 organisations in over 40 different countries around the world. Seven new partners have joined us since August.
We send a warm welcome to our seven new partners. Here is some of what they are working on:
We are really excited that these organisations have chosen to join the Global Clubs Partner network.
When they join our Global Clubs Partner network, organisations work with us to grow the Code Club and CoderDojo communities around the world. Our Global Clubs Partners share our mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies, and they commit to working towards this mission with our support.
For many partners and the educators and volunteers they work with, running Code Clubs and CoderDojos is an opportunity to learn to code alongside the young people. We give partners tailored support for their work through our free, high-quality resources, including online training, community events, and easy-to-follow coding projects.
Our new partners are as glad as we are to have joined our network.
Abdelmoneim Mohammed of Orientations Training Centre in Sudan is excited by the impact Code Club will have on his young coders, telling us:
I expect this can help to make our citizens a global citizen, [by] learning from a well-established and developed educational system.
For Ethel Tshukudu of CSEd Botswana, it is the community focus and available support network that is important. She tells us:
The strong sense of community and the availability of mentorship opportunities are particularly appealing, as they ensure that CSEdBotswana can consistently access the support needed to enhance our coding clubs and create a more significant impact.
Our partner from KIT Hub in Burundi, Ferdinand Alimasi, values how establishing clubs promotes collective learning and engagement in the community. He says:
Education and preparation of [the] future workforce require collective work and responsibilities, so these clubs will bring the change in communities by offering opportunities to learn for kids and teens, as well as opportunities for everyone to be involved in building a better future for all.
Our partners work in lots of different circumstances all around the world. A key learning for us is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to computing education. We support our partners to adapt and deliver our resources in a way that they know will best engage their learners. This highlights how important it is to work in a culturally sensitive way, and to prioritise providing opportunities for learners to use digital technology to make things that matter to them. That looks very different depending on where you are in the world, and who you are working with.
Through working with our partners, we also see just how much world events can impact the already unequal access young people have to learning new digital skills. Climate crisis events such as floods and wildfires, and political crises such as war, conflict, and changes in government have affected many of our global partners this year. The resulting closures of schools and other educational venues, electricity blackouts, and funding challenges cause further educational disadvantage to the children in the affected areas. Our partners play a key role in providing additional educational opportunities for young people when it is safe to do so.
The experiences and perspectives we’ve gained through our partnerships with global organisations are extremely important to us and our mission. They help to inform the work we do to make computing education truly accessible for all learners and educators around the globe.
You can find out more about how your organisation could join our Global Clubs Partner network on the CoderDojo and Code Club websites, or contact us directly with your questions or ideas about a partnership.
The post Welcome, new partners: Growing the global impact of Code Club and CoderDojo appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The UK Bebras Challenge is back and ready to accept entries from schools for its annual event, which runs from 6 to 17 November.
More than 3 million students from 59 countries took part in the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge in 2022. In the UK alone, over 365,000 students participated. Read on to find out how you can get your school involved.
“This is now an annual event for our Year 5 and 6 students, and one of the things I actually love about it is the results are not always what you might predict. There are children who have a clear aptitude for these puzzles who find this is their opportunity to shine!”
– Claire Rawlinson, Primary Teacher, Lancashire
Bebras is a free, annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their students. No programming is involved, and it’s completely free for schools to enter. All Bebras questions are self-marking.
We’re making Bebras accessible by offering age-appropriate challenges for different school levels and a challenge tailored for visually impaired students. Schools can enter students from age 6 to 18 and know they’ll get interesting and challenging (but not too challenging) activities.
Students aged 10 to 18 who do particularly well will get invited to the Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC).
We want young people to get excited about computing. Through Bebras, they will learn about computational and logical thinking by answering questions and solving problems.
Bebras questions are based on classic computing problems and are presented in a friendly, age-appropriate way. For example, an algorithm-based puzzle for learners aged 6 to 8 is presented in terms of a hungry tortoise finding an efficient eating path across a lawn; for 16- to 18-year-olds, a difficult problem based on graph theory asks students to sort out quiz teams by linking quizzers who know each other.
“This has been a really positive experience. Thank you. Shared results with Head and Head of Key Stage 3. Really useful for me when assessing Key Stage 4 options.”
– Secondary teacher, North Yorkshire
Here’s a Bebras question for the Castors category (ages 8 to 10) from 2021. You will find the answer at the end of this blog.
A robot picks up litter.
Question: Which kind of litter will the robot pick up last?
The Bebras challenge for UK schools takes place from 6 to 17 November. Register at bebras.uk/admin to get free access to the challenge.
By registering, you also get access to the Bebras back catalogue of questions, from which you can build your own quizzes to use in your school at any time during the year. All the quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results for your mark book. Schools have reported using these questions for end-of-term activities, lesson starters, and schemes of lessons about computational thinking.
The answer to the example puzzle is:
The image below shows the route the robot takes by following the instructions:
The post Take part in the UK Bebras Challenge 2023 for schools appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Throughout this year, space agencies have been embarking on new missions to explore our solar system, and young people can get involved too through the European Astro Pi Challenge 2023/24, which we’re launching today.
In the past few months India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission landed near the Moon’s south pole, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew by Venus on its way to the sun, and the SpaceX Crew-7 launched to the International Space Station (ISS), led by ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen. We’re especially excited about Andreas’ mission because he’s the astronaut who will help to run young people’s Astro Pi programs on board the ISS this year.
As you may know, the European Astro Pi Challenge gives young people the amazing opportunity to conduct scientific experiments in space by writing computer programs for the Astro Pis, special Raspberry Pi computers on board the ISS.
The Astro Pi Challenge is free and offers two missions for young people: Mission Zero is an inspiring activity for introducing kids to text-based programming with Python. Mission Space Lab gives teams of young people the chance to take on a more challenging programming task and stretch their coding and science skills.
Participation in Astro Pi is open to young people up to age 19 in ESA Member States (see the Astro Pi website for eligibility details).
In Astro Pi Mission Zero, young people write a simple Python program to take a reading using a sensor on one of the ISS Astro Pi computers and display a personalised pixel art image for the astronauts on board the ISS. They can take part by themselves or as coding teams.
The theme for Mission Zero 2023/24 is ‘fauna and flora’: young people are invited to program pixel art images or animations of animals, plants, or fungi to display on the Astro Pi computers’ LED pixel screen and remind the astronauts aboard the ISS of Earth’s natural wonders.
By following the guide we provide, kids can complete the Mission Zero coding activity in around one hour, for example during a school lesson or coding club session. No coding experience is needed to take part. Kids can write their code in any web browser on any computer connected to the internet, without special equipment or software.
All young people that meet the eligibility criteria and follow the official Mission Zero guidelines will have their program run in space for up to 30 seconds. They will receive a unique and personalised certificate to show their coding achievement. The certificate will display the exact start and end time of their program’s run, and where the ISS was above Earth in this time period.
Mission Zero 2023/24 opens today and is open until Monday 25 March 2024. It’s very easy to support young people to get involved — find out more on the Astro Pi website:
In this year’s Astro Pi Mission Space Lab, ESA astronauts are inviting teams of young people to solve a scientific task by writing a Python program.
The Mission Space Lab task is to gather data with the Astro Pi computers to calculate the speed at which the ISS is travelling. This new format of the mission will allow many more young people to run their programs in space and get a taste of space science.
Mission Space Lab will open on 6 November. We will share more information about how young people and mentors can participate very soon.
The European Astro Pi Challenge is an ESA Education project run in collaboration with us here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
You can keep up with all Astro Pi news by following the Astro Pi X account (formerly Twitter) or signing up to the newsletter at astro-pi.org.
The post Launch kids’ code into space with the European Astro Pi Challenge 2023/24 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In the 2023 Coolest Projects online showcase, 5801 young people from all over the world shared the wonderful, fun, and creative things they had made with technology. But that’s not all we’ve seen of Coolest Projects this year. As well as our worldwide annual online showcase, a number of in-person Coolest Projects events are taking place in countries across the globe in 2023.
Run by us or partner organisations, these exciting events create a space for young people to meet other young tech creators, connect to their community, and celebrate each others’ creations. In-person Coolest Projects events around the world had to pause over the coronavirus pandemic, and we’re delighted to see them return to engage and inspire young people once again.
On 1 July, we were super excited to host Coolest Projects Ireland, our first in-person Coolest Projects event since 2020. 63 young tech creators from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland came together in Dublin for an exciting one-day event where they shared 43 incredible creations, with engineer and STEM communicator Dr Niamh Shaw leading everyone through the day’s celebrations.
One young maker showcasing her project was Charlotte from Kinsale CoderDojo in the Republic of Ireland. Her creative storytelling project ‘Goldicat and the Three Angry Property Owners’ was chosen as a judges’ favourite in the Scratch category.
Charlotte’s story includes different games and three secret endings for the user to discover. She told us: “I know someone who made an animation based off the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel in Scratch. This inspired me to make a game based off a different fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”
Harshit entered the Hardware category with his amazing mini vending machine. Describing his project, he explained, “This is a recreation of a vending machine, but I have added my own twists to it to make it simple to build. You still get the full experience of an actual vending machine, but what makes it special is that it is made fully out of recycled materials.”
Young people at Coolest Projects Ireland were joined and supported by family, friends, and mentors from Code Clubs and CoderDojos. Mentors told us their favourite things about attending a Coolest Projects event in person were “the joy and excitement the participants got from taking part and discussing their project with the judges”, and “the way it was very inclusive to all children and all [were] included on stage for some swag!”
In 2023 we’re partnering with six organisations that are bringing Coolest Projects events for their communities. We’re still looking forward to the exciting Coolest Projects events planned for the rest of the year:
Back in June, more than 30 young creators participated in Coolest Projects Hungary, which was organised in Budapest by the team at EPAM Systems Inc. And April saw our partner CoderDojo Belgium organise Coolest Projects Belgium for 40 young people, who shared 25 projects across different categories from Scratch to Hardware and Advanced Programming.
The CoderDojo Belgium team shared how important the Coolest Projects event is to their community:
“Just like every year, we’ve unlocked the doors to welcome the next generation of tech enthusiasts. And this year, once again, we were absolutely amazed by the projects they brought to the spotlight. From an app predicting stock market evolution, to creatively designed games with unexpected twists, not to mention the incredible robots, and more, their ingenuity knows no bounds.”
CoderDojo Belgium
We’re excited that the Coolest Projects online showcase — open to any young creator anywhere in the world — will return in 2024. And if there isn’t a Coolest Projects in-person event in your country yet, don’t worry. We’re working with more and more partners every year to bring Coolest Projects events to more young people.
To stay up to date with news about the Coolest Projects online showcase, sign up to the newsletter.
And you can celebrate young tech creators with us year round wherever you are by following Coolest Projects on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, where we share inspiring projects from the Coolest Projects online gallery and photos from the in-person events.
We’d like to thank EPAM Systems Inc, Meta, and GoTo for supporting the Coolest Projects Ireland event. If you’re interested in partnering with us for Coolest Projects, please reach out to us via email.
The post Celebrating young tech creators in person: Coolest Projects events 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Lots of kids are excited about robotics, and we have the free resources you need to help your children start making robots.
Did you know that the concept of robotics dates back to ancient Greece, where a mathematician built a self-propelled flying pigeon to understand bird flight? Today, we have robots assisting people in everything from manufacturing to medicine. But what exactly is a robot? Ask two people, and you might get two different answers. Some may tell you about Star Wars’ C3PO and R2D2, while others may tell you about self-driving cars or even toys.
In my view, a robot is a machine that can carry out a series of physical tasks, programmed via a computer. These tasks could range from picking up an object and placing it elsewhere, to navigating a maze, to even assembling a car without human interaction.
My first encounter with robotics was the Big Trak, a programmable toy vehicle created in 1979. You could program up to 16 commands into Big Trak, which it then executed in sequence. My family and I used the toy to transport items to each other around our house. It was a fun and engaging way to explore the basics of robotics and programming.
Understanding something about robotics is not just for scientists and engineers. It involves learning a range of skills that empower your kids to be creators of our digital world, instead of just consumers.
Robotics combines various aspects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in a fun and engaging way. It also encourages young people’s problem-solving abilities, creativity, and critical thinking — skills that are key for the innovators of tomorrow.
What happens when we add machine learning to robotics? Machine learning is an area of artificial intelligence where people design computer systems so they “learn” from data. This is not unlike how people learn from experience. Machine learning can enable robots to adapt to new situations and perform tasks that only people used to do.
We’ve already built robots that can play chess with you, or clean your house, or deliver your food. As people develop machine learning for robotics further, the possibilities are vast. By the time our children start their careers, it might be normal to have robots as software-driven “coworkers”. It’s important that we prepare children for the possible future that robotics and machine learning could open up. We need to empower them to contribute to creating robots with capabilities that complement and benefit all people.
To see what free resources we’re offering to help young people understand and create with machine learning and AI, check out this blog post about our Experience AI learning programme.
So, how can kids start diving into the world of robotics? Here are three online resources to kickstart their journey:
‘Physical computing with Scratch and the Raspberry Pi‘ is a fantastic introduction to using electronics with the block-based Scratch programming language for young learners.
Kids will learn to create interactive stories, games, and animations, all while getting a taste of physical computing. They’ll explore how to use sound and light, and even learn how to create improvised buttons.
This project path introduces the Raspberry Pi Pico, a tiny yet powerful digital device that kids can program using the text-based MicroPython language.
It’s a great way to delve deeper into the world of electronics and programming. The path includes a variety of fun and engaging projects that incorporate crafting and allow children to see the tangible results of their coding efforts.
‘Build a robot’ is a project path that allows young people to create a simple programmable buggy. They can then make it remote-controlled and even transform it so it can follow a line by itself.
This hands-on project path not only teaches the basics of robotics but also encourages problem-solving as kids iteratively improve their robot buggy’s design.
Let’s take a moment to celebrate two young tech creators who love building robots.
Selin is a digital maker from Istanbul, Turkey, who is passionate about robotics and AI. Selin’s journey into the world of digital making began with a wish: after her family’s beloved dog Korsan passed away, she wanted to bring him back to life. This led her to design a robotic dog on paper, and to learn coding and digital making to build that robot.
Selin has since built seven different robotics projects. One of them is IC4U, a robotic guide dog designed to help people with impaired sight. Selin’s commitment to making projects that help make the world a better place was recognised when she was awarded the Aspiring Teen Award by Women in Tech.
Jay, a young digital maker from Preston, UK, started experimenting with code at a young age to make his own games. He attended free local coding groups, such as CoderDojo, and was introduced to the block-based programming language Scratch. Soon, Jay was combining his interests in programming with robotics to make his own inventions.
Jay’s dad, Biren, comments: “With robotics and coding, what Jay has learned is to think outside of the box and without any limits. This has helped him achieve amazing things.”
Robotics and machine learning are not just science fiction — they shape our lives today in ways kids might not even realise. Whether your child is just interested in playing with robots, wants to learn more about them, or is considering a career in robotics, our free resources are a great place to start.
If a Greek mathematician was able to build a flying pigeon millennia ago, imagine what children could create today!
The post Make a robot: A fun and educational journey into robotics for kids appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Moonhack is a free global, online coding challenge by our partner Code Club Australia, powered by Telstra Foundation. It runs once a year for young learners worldwide. In 2022, almost 44,000 young people from 63 countries registered to take part.
This year, Moonhack will happen from 10 to 26 October, to coincide with World Space Week 2023. The challenge is open to all young learners, wherever they are in the world, and features six brand-new projects that focus on space and innovation. We caught up with Kaye North, Community and Engagement Manager at Code Club Australia, to find out more.
Moonhack 2023 offers access to engaging new projects for Scratch, micro:bit, and Python. For the first time ever, young people will also have the option to follow a project brief to code their own solution to a space-based issue, using a programming language of their choice.
In keeping with this year’s theme — which was inspired by the World Space Week 2023 theme of ‘Space and Entrepreneurship’ — the new Moonhack projects showcase inventions that were created for space exploration but are now used in everyday life, such as mobile phone cameras and LEDs.
Kaye shared that in Australia, inventions created for space travel and exploration are part of the science curriculum at primary school level. She hopes that this year’s Moonhack will help more young people understand how space exploration and coding are connected to their daily lives.
Moonhack features six unique coding projects, giving young people of all ages and experience levels the opportunity to engage and learn. The project brief introduced this year encourages participants to be creative, coding a solution on any platform they choose.
Coders who respond to the project brief will also be in with a chance of having their project selected to be developed into an official Code Club Australia project, for other young people and educators around the world to enjoy.
Kaye emphasised that Moonhack is about more than just taking part in a global event; it also helps young people to better understand the real-world opportunities that coding can offer.
“The more kids we expose this to, the better, expanding coding past just coding and having purpose behind it. And I do try to link things in so that we’re connecting with real-world context, careers…”
Kaye North
Registration for Moonhack 2023 is open now. The challenge runs from 10 to 26 October, and projects can be submitted until 30 November. Participation is free and open to any young coder, whether they are part of a Code Club or not. The 2023 projects are already available in English, Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, Filipino, French, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish, and will be available in more languages soon.
To find out more and register to take part, visit the Moonhack website.
Code Club Australia is powered by Telstra Foundation as part of a strategic partnership with us at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The post Get ready for Moonhack 2023: Bringing space down to Earth appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Dr Sue Sentance, Director of our Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, shares what she learned on a recent visit in Malaysia to understand more about the approach taken to computing education in the state of Sarawak.
Computing education is a challenge around the world, and it is fascinating to see how different countries and education systems approach it. I recently had the opportunity to attend an event organised by the government of Sarawak, Malaysia, to see first-hand what learners and teachers are achieving thanks to the state’s recent policies.
In Sarawak, the largest state of Malaysia, the local Ministry of Education, Innovation and Talent Development is funding an ambitious project through which all of Sarawak’s primary schools are receiving sets of Raspberry Pis. Learners use these as desktop computers and to develop computer science skills and knowledge, including the skills to create digital making projects.
Crucially, the ministry is combining this hardware distribution initiative with a three-year programme of professional development for primary school teachers. They receive training known as the Raspberry Pi Training Programme, which starts with Scratch programming and incorporates elements of physical computing with the Raspberry Pis and sensors.
To date the project has provided 9436 kits (including Raspberry Pi computer, case, monitor, mouse, and keyboard) to schools, and training for over 1200 teachers.
In order to showcase what has been achieved through the project so far, students and teachers were invited to use their schools’ Raspberry Pis to create projects to prototype solutions to real problems faced by their communities, and to showcase these projects at a special STEM Trailblazers event.
Geographically, Sarawak is Malaysia’s largest state, but it has a much smaller population than the west of the country. This means that towns and villages are very spread out and teachers and students had large distances to travel to attend the STEM Trailblazers event. To partially address this, the event was held in two locations simultaneously, Kuching and Miri, and talks were live-streamed between both venues.
STEM Trailblazers featured a host of talks from people involved in the initiative. I was very honoured to be invited as a guest speaker, representing both the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation as the Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre.
The Raspberry Pi projects at STEM Trailblazers were entered into a competition, with prizes for students and teachers. Most projects had been created using Scratch to control the Raspberry Pi as well as a range of sensors.
The children and teachers who participated came from both rural and urban areas, and it was clear that the issues they had chosen to address were genuine problems in their communities.
Many of the projects I saw related to issues that schools faced around heat and hydration: a Smart Bottle project reminded children to drink regularly, a shade creator project created shade when the temperature got too high, a teachers’ project told students that they could no longer play outside when the temperature exceeded 35 degrees, and a water cooling system project set off sprinklers when the temperature rose. Other themes of the projects were keeping toilets clean, reminding children to eat healthily, and helping children to learn the alphabet. One project that especially intrigued me was an alert system for large and troublesome birds that were a problem for rural schools.
The creativity and quality of the projects on show was impressive given that all the students (and many of their teachers) had learned to program very recently, and also had to be quite innovative where they hadn’t been able to access all the hardware they needed to build their creations.
Everyone involved in this project in Sarawak — including teachers, government representatives, university academics, and industry partners — is really committed to giving children the best opportunities to grow up with an understanding of digital technology. They know this is essential for their professional futures, and also fosters their creativity, independence, and problem-solving skills.
Over the last ten years, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel widely in my capacity as a computing education researcher, and I’ve seen first-hand a number of the approaches countries are taking to help their young people gain the skills and understanding of computing technologies that they need for their futures.
It’s good for us to look beyond our own context to understand how countries across the world are preparing their young people to engage with digital technology. No matter how many similarities there are between two places, we can all learn from each other’s initiatives and ideas. In 2021 the Brookings Institution published a global review of how countries are progressing with this endeavour. Organisations such as UNESCO and WEF regularly publish reports that emphasise the importance for countries to develop their citizens’ digital skills, and also advanced technological skills.
The Sarawak government’s initiative is grounded in the use of Raspberry Pis as desktop computers for schools, which run offline where schools have no access to the internet. That teachers are also trained to use the Raspberry Pis to support learners to develop hands-on digital making skills is a really important aspect of the project.
Our commercial subsidiary Raspberry Pi Limited works with a company network of Approved Resellers around the globe; in this case the Malaysian reseller Cytron has been an enormous support in supplying Sarawak’s primary schools with Raspberry Pis and other hardware.
Schools anywhere in the world can also access the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s free learning and teaching resources, such as curriculum materials, online training courses for teachers, and our magazine for educators, Hello World. We are very proud to support the work being done in Sarawak.
As for what the future holds for Sarawak’s computing education, at the opening ceremony of the STEM Trailblazers event, the Deputy Minister announced that the event will be an annual occasion. That means every year more students and teachers will be able to come together, share their learning, and get excited about using digital making to solve the problems that matter to them.
The post Digital making with Raspberry Pis in primary schools in Sarawak, Malaysia appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation is to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. That’s what we say in our 2025 strategy. But how can we be sure we’re succeeding?
In our strategy we also identify one of our values as being ‘focussed on impact’. This means that we are committed to learning from the best available evidence, and to being rigorous and transparent about the difference we’re making.
Like all our values, our focus on impact infuses all of our work, and it is led by a dedicated impact team. This blog outlines four ways in which we put this value into practice in pursuit of our mission.
It doesn’t matter how fast you run, if you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’ll never get to your destination. We use data to prioritise our resources where we can make the biggest difference for young people.
For example, we use national statistics from the UK to assess how many of the Code Clubs and CoderDojos we support in the UK run in places where they can reach young people facing educational disadvantage, so that we can adopt an evidence-based approach to better serving these young people.
And we know many of the young people who face the greatest barriers to accessing computing education and developing new skills and confidence live in countries with low- and middle-income economies. That’s why we are building new partnerships in India, Kenya, and South Africa and adapting our resources and programmes for the contexts of educators and learners living there.
We’re really excited that we’ll soon be publishing an updated Theory of Change, which captures how we make an impact. This will be the foundation for Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) plans for all of our initiatives, where we specify their goals and set down what kinds of data we will collect to make sure we have the measure of whether the initiatives are succeeding.
Strong M&E is equally important for our established programmes and our new pilot initiatives. Code Club, the worldwide network of free, after-school coding clubs for 9- to 13-year-olds we support, has been growing for more than 10 years. Durham University’s Evidence Centre for Education is currently conducting an independent evaluation of UK-based Code Clubs to help us understand how to better support Code Club volunteers and learners around the world. We ourselves recently evaluated the pilot of a new programme we designed in partnership with Amala Education to deliver a vocational skills course for displaced learners aged 16 to 25 in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
Data is only useful if it’s translated into insights that are acted upon. We use the findings from evaluations to inform the design and continual improvement of all our initiatives.
For example, the evaluation of our pilot vocational skills training in Kakuma refugee camp provided insights that have helped us adapt the programme for a second cohort of young people. The same was true of the M&E insights we gained from our partnership with Mo Schools in Odisha, India, where we have provided training and support to 1075 teachers to establish Code Clubs. Informed by survey data and informal feedback each step of the way, we are now gradually scaling up our support towards launching a more intensive computing and coding programme in 2000 schools in Odisha this year.
Side by side with our M&E results, we also rely on the latest computing education research, conducted at the Foundation, in the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and by academic researchers around the world. Our groundbreaking research programme on gender balance in computing, and our ongoing research on culturally relevant pedagogy, are shaping the way we work to enable all young people to achieve their full potential in computing.
We are proud of the difference we are making. We want everyone to hear about it and feel inspired to get involved in our vital mission for young people. Our annual reviews are packed full of statistics and overviews of the difference we’re making, and we’re creating a growing video series of unique stories from people in the community we support. Watch this space for news about our updated Theory of Change, our next annual review, and more blogs about our impact.
By doing these four things well, we can be confident that we are enabling young people to achieve their potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
If you share our passion for impact and think our mission is important, why not get involved today? You can:
The post The four elements of our focus on impact appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Celebrate another year of young people’s computer programs in space with us: today we and our collaborators at the European Space Agency can finally announce the winning and highly commended teams in this year’s Astro Pi Mission Space Lab.
In Mission Space Lab, teams of young people work together to create computer programs for scientific experiments to be carried out on the International Space Station. The programs they design and create run on the two Astro Pi computers: space-adapted Raspberry Pis with cameras and a range of sensors.
Teams’ programs were deployed on the ISS during May and ran for up to 3 hours, collecting data for their experiments. Once we’d sent the teams their data, they started analysing it in order to write their Phase 4 reports. To identify patterns and phenomena they were interested in, many teams chose to compare their data with other sources.
We were especially excited to see the results from the experiments this year, particularly given that the upgraded Astro Pi units with their High Quality Cameras were positioned in a new observation window (WORF) on the ISS. This allowed teams to capture high-resolution images with a much wider field of view.
We feel very privileged to see the culmination of the team’s experiments in their final reports. So let’s share a few highlights from this year’s experiments:
Team Aretusa from Sicily explored the effects of climate change by cross-referencing the images they captured with the Astro Pis with historical images from Google Earth. They used Near Infrared photography to capture images, and NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) image processing in their analysis. Below you can see that they have compared data of Saudi Arabia from 1987 to 2023, showing increasing levels of vegetation grown in attempts to restore degraded land.
Team Barrande from the Czech Republic trained AI models on images they gathered to identify topographical features of Earth. Their Mission Space Lab program used the Astro Pi computer’s machine learning dongle to train one AI model in real time. Later, the team also used the collected images to train another model back on Earth. Comparing the outputs of the two models, the team could tell how well the models had identified different topographical features. The below selection shows an image the team’s experiment captured on the left, the same image after processing by the AI model trained on the Astro Pi computer in the middle, and the image processed by the AI model trained on Earth.
Team DAHspace from Portugal measured the intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field along the orbit path of the ISS. Using the magnetometer on the Astro Pi, their experiment recorded data allowing the team to track changes of intensity. The team mapped this data to the ISS’s coordinates, showing the difference in the Earth’s magnetic field between the North Pole (points 1 and 2 on the chart below) and the South Pole (points 3 and 4).
We and our collaborators at ESA Education have been busy reviewing all of the reports to assess the scientific merit, use of the Astro Pi hardware, experiment design, and data analysis. The ten winning teams come from schools and coding clubs in 11 countries. We are sending each team some cool space swag to recognise their achievement.
| Team | Experiment theme | Based at | Country |
| Magnet47 | Life on Earth | O’Neill CVI | Canada |
| Aretusa | Life on Earth | Liceo Da Vinci Floridia | Italy |
| ASaether | Life on Earth | “Andrei Saguna” National College | Romania |
| Barrande | Life on Earth | Gymnázium Joachima Barranda Beroun | Czech Republic |
| Escapers | Life in space | Code Club | Canada |
| Futura | Life in space | Scuola Svizzera Milano | Italy |
| StMarks | Life on Earth | St Mark’s Church of England School | United Kingdom |
| DAHspace | Life on Earth | EB 2,3 D. Afonso Henriques | Portugal |
| T5Clouds | Life on Earth | Dominican College | Ireland |
| PiNuts | Life in space | TEKNISK GYMNASIUM, Skanderborg | Denmark |
You can click on a team name to read the team’s experiment report.
Along with the winning teams, we would like to commend the following teams for their experiments:
| Team | Experiment theme | Based at | Country |
| Parsec | Life on Earth | Liceo Da Vinci Pascoli Gallarate | Italy |
| Celeste | Life on Earth | International School of Florence | Italy |
| LionTech | Life on Earth | Colegiul Național ”Mihai Eminescu” | Romania |
| OHSpace | Life in Space | Oxford High School | United Kingdom |
| Magneto | Life on Earth | The American School of The Hague | Netherlands |
| GreenEye | Life on Earth | ROBOTONIO | Greece |
| Primus | Life on Earth | Independent coding club | Germany |
You can click on a team name to read the team’s experiment report.
All of the teams whose Mission Space Lab programs ran on the ISS will receive a certificate signed by ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The winning and highly commended teams will also be invited to a live video chat with an ESA astronaut in the autumn.
Huge congratulations to every team that participated in Astro Pi Mission Space Lab. We hope you found it fun and inspiring to take part.
A big thank you to everyone who has been involved in the European Astro Pi Challenge this year. An amazing 24,850 young people from 29 countries had their programs run in space this year. We can’t wait to do it all again starting in September.
And it’s not just us saying thanks and well done — here’s a special message from ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer:
On 18 September 2023, we’ll launch the European Astro Pi Challenge for 2023/24. Mission Zero will open in September, and we’ll announce exciting news about Mission Space Lab in September too.
If you know a young person who might be interested in the Astro Pi Challenge, sign up for the newsletter on astro-pi.org and follow the Astro Pi Twitter account for all the latest announcements about how you can support them to take the unique opportunity to write code to run in space.
The post Young people’s amazing experiments in space: Astro Pi Mission Space Lab 2022/23 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
A couple of months ago we announced that you can test the online text-based Code Editor we’re building to help young people aged 7 and older learn to write code. Now we’ve made the code for the Editor open source so people can repurpose and contribute to it.
You and your learners can try out the Code Editor in our Python project paths. We’ve included a feedback form for you to let us know what you think about the Editor.
Since the Editor lets learners save their code using their Raspberry Pi Foundation account, it’s easy for them to build on projects they’ve started in the classroom or at home, or bring a project they’ve started at home to their coding club.
Python is the first programming language our Code Editor supports because it’s popular in schools, CoderDojos, and Code Clubs, as well as in industry. We’ll soon be adding support for web development languages (HTML/CSS).
We know that starting out with new programming tools can be tricky and add to the cognitive load of learning new subject matter itself. That’s why our Editor has a simple and accessible user interface and design:
We’ll expand the Editor’s functionalities as we go. For example, at the moment we’re looking at how to improve the Editor’s user interface (UI) for better mobile support.
If there’s a feature you think would help the Editor become more accessible and more suitable for young learners, or make it better for your classroom or club, please let us know via the feedback form.
Our vision is that every young person develops the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use digital technologies effectively, and to be able to critically evaluate these technologies and confidently engage with technological change. We’re part of a global community that shares that vision, so we’ve made the Editor available as an open-source project. That means other projects and organisations focussed on helping people learn about coding and digital technologies can benefit from the work.
To support the widest possible range of learners, we’ve designed the Code Editor application to work well on constrained devices and low-bandwidth connections. Safeguarding, accessibility, and data privacy are also key considerations when we build digital products at the Foundation. That’s why we decided to design the front end of the Editor to work in a standalone capacity, with Python executed through Skulpt, an entirely in-browser implementation of Python, and code changes persisted in local storage by default. Learners have the option of using a Raspberry Pi Foundation account to save their work, with changes then persisted via calls to a back end application programming interface (API).
As safeguarding is always at the core of what we do, we only make features available that comply with our safeguarding policies as well as the ICO’s age-appropriate design code. We considered supporting functionality such as image uploads and code sharing, but at the time of writing have decided to not add these features given that, without proper moderation, they present risks to safeguarding.
There’s an amazing community developing a wealth of open-source libraries. We chose to build our text-editor interface using CodeMirror, which has out-of-the-box mobile and tablet support and includes various useful features such as syntax highlighting and keyboard shortcuts. This has enabled us to focus on building the best experience for learners, rather than reinventing the wheel.
Diving a bit more into the technical details:
You can find out more about our Editor’s code for both the UI front end and API back end in our GitHub readme and contributions documentation. These kick-starter docs will help you get up and running faster:
The Editor’s front end is licensed as permissively as possible under the Apache Licence 2.0, and we’ve chosen to license the back end under the copyleft AGPL V3 licence. Copyleft licences mean derived works must be licensed under the same terms, including making any derived projects also available to the community.
We’d greatly appreciate your support with developing the Editor further, which you can give by:
Our work to develop and publish the Code Editor as an open-source project has been funded by Endless. We thank them for their generous support.
If you are interested in partnering with us to fund this key work, or you are part of an organisation that would like to make use of the Code Editor, please reach out to us via email.
The post Our Code Editor is open source appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Who chooses to study Computing? In England, data from GCSE and A level Computer Science entries in 2019 shows that the answer is complex. Black Caribbean students were one of the most underrepresented groups in the subject, while pupils from other ethnic backgrounds, such as White British, Chinese, and Asian Indian, were well-represented. This picture is reflected in the STEM workforce in England, where Black people are also underrepresented.
That’s why one of our areas of academic research aims to support Computing teachers to use culturally relevant pedagogy to design and deliver equitable learning experiences that enable all learners to enjoy and succeed in Computing and Computer Science at school. Our previous research projects within this area have involved developing guidelines for culturally relevant and responsive teaching, and exploring how a small group of primary and secondary Computing teachers used these guidelines in their teaching.
In our latest research study, funded by Cognizant, we worked with 13 primary school teachers in England on adapting computing lessons to incorporate culturally relevant and responsive principles and practices. Here’s an insight into the workshop we ran with them, and what the teachers and we have taken away from it.
In the group of 13 England-based primary school Computing teachers we worked with for this study:
In November 2022, we held a one-day workshop with the teachers to introduce culturally relevant pedagogy and explore how to adapt two six-week units of computing resources.
The first part of the workshop was a collaborative, discussion-based professional development session exploring what culturally relevant pedagogy is. This type of pedagogy uses equitable teaching practices to:
The rest of the workshop day was spent putting this learning into practice while planning how to adapt two units of computing lessons to make them culturally relevant for the teachers’ particular settings. We used a design-based approach for this part of the workshop, meaning researchers and teachers worked collaboratively as equal stakeholders to decide on plans for how to alter the units.
We worked in four groups, each with three or four teachers and one or two researchers, focusing on one of two units of work from The Computing Curriculum for teaching digital skills: a unit on photo editing for Year 4 (ages 8–9), and a unit about vector graphics for Year 5 (ages 9–10).
In order to plan how the resources in these units of work could be made culturally relevant for the participating teachers’ contexts, the groups used a checklist of ten areas of opportunity. This checklist is a result of one of our previous research projects on culturally relevant pedagogy. Each group used the list to identify a variety of ways in which the units’ learning objectives, activities, learning materials, and slides could be adapted. Teachers noted down their ideas and then discussed them with their group to jointly agree a plan for adapting the unit.
By the end of the day, the groups had designed four really creative plans for:
Before and after the workshop, we asked the teachers to fill in a survey about themselves, their experiences of creating computing resources, and their views about culturally relevant resources. We then compared the two sets of data to see whether anything had changed over the course of the workshop.
After teachers had attended the workshop, they reported a statistically significant increase in their confidence levels to adapt resources to be culturally relevant for both themselves and others.
Teachers explained that the workshop had increased their understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy and of how it could impact on learners. For example, one teacher said:
“The workshop has developed my understanding of how culturally adapted resources can support pupil progress and engagement. It has also highlighted how contextual appropriateness of resources can help children to access resources.” – Participating teacher
Some teachers also highlighted how important it had been to talk to teachers from other schools during the workshop, and how they could put their new knowledge into practice in the classroom:
“The dedicated time and value added from peer discourse helped make this authentic and not just token activities to check a box.” – Participating teacher
“I can’t wait to take some of the work back and apply it to other areas and subjects I teach.” – Participating teacher
After our research team made the adaptations to the units set out in the four plans made during the workshop, the adapted units were delivered by the teachers to more than 500 Year 4 and 5 pupils. We visited some of the teachers’ schools to see the units being taught, and we have interviewed all the teachers about their experience of delivering the adapted materials. This observational and interview data, together with additional survey responses, will be analysed by us, and we’ll share the results over the coming months.
In our next blog post about this work, we will delve into the fascinating realm of parental attitudes to culturally relevant computing, and we’ll explore how embracing diversity in the digital landscape is shaping the future for both children and their families.
We’ve also written about this professional development activity in more detail in a paper to be published at the UKICER conference in September, and we’ll share the paper once it’s available.
Finally, we are grateful to Cognizant for funding this academic research, and to our cohort of primary computing teachers for their enthusiasm, energy, and creativity, and their commitment to this project.
The post Running a workshop with teachers to create culturally relevant Computing lessons appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
A network of more than 40 partner organisations in over 30 countries works with us to grow and sustain the worldwide Code Club and CoderDojo networks of coding clubs for young people. These organisations, our Global Clubs Partners, share our mission to enable young people to realise their potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. We support them in various ways, and recently we invited them to two calls with our researchers to discuss new research findings about computing education in primary schools.
Global Clubs Partners work to train educators and volunteers, provide access to computing equipment, run clubs and events for young people at a local or national level, and much more. Our aim is to provide support that helps the Global Clubs Partners in their work, including tailored resources and regular group calls where we discuss topics such as volunteer engagement and fundraising.
Recently, we were excited to be able to highlight research from our newest seminar series to the network. This ongoing seminar series focuses on teaching and learning in primary (K-5) computing education. Many of the Global Clubs Partners work with schools or local education bodies — some partner representatives even come from a teaching background themselves. That’s why we hoped they would be able to use insights from the seminars in their work, whether with learners and educators directly, or to grow their network of Code Clubs or CoderDojos; we know this is easier for them when they can provide evidence to show why these programmes are so beneficial for young people.
We were also very interested to hear the Global Clubs Partners’ perspectives, as they work in a wide variety of contexts around the world. For example, would the research resonate the same way with an organisation based in Kenya as one based in Nepal? This kind of insight is useful for making decisions about our research work in future.
Each of the two calls featured a speaker from the research seminar series summarising their work and inviting attendees to share their own thoughts. We had some fascinating conversations; with partner representatives from seven countries across four continents, the discussions were a great showcase of the different experiences in our partner network. Dr Bobby Whyte, one of the speakers, noted: “Being able to share and discuss work within a global audience has been a really valuable experience.”
We found the opportunity to connect our partner network with work from other areas of the Foundation really beneficial, and the Global Clubs Partners did too: their feedback from the calls was uniformly positive. Dr Jane Waite, our Senior Research Scientist, commented that “it’s really important for us to share research with people in different contexts and so exciting to hear when findings resonate and can be used in practice.”
You can find out more about our Global Clubs Partner network on the CoderDojo and Code Club websites, or contact us directly about partnerships.
The post Bringing computing education research to a new global audience appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Our ‘Intro to Unity’ educational project path is a big success, sparking lots of young people’s passion for 3D game design and programming. Today we introduce the ‘More Unity‘ project path — the perfect next step for young people who have completed our ‘Intro to Unity‘ path. This new free path is designed to bridge the gap for young people before they start on the tutorials on the Unity learning platform.
Our work to create this path builds on our partnership with Unity, through which we aim to offer any young person, anywhere, the opportunity to take their first steps in creating virtual worlds using real-time 3D.
After young people have tried out the Unity Engine and C# programming through the ‘Intro to Unity’ path, they’re ready for a deeper exploration of 3D game design. ‘More Unity’ helps them build on the foundational skills they learned in the ‘Intro to Unity’ path. After completing this new path, they’ll be able to add complexity, new challenges, and heaps of fun to all their 3D creations.
We’ve prepared a comprehensive Unity Guide to assist with getting ready to start either the ‘Intro to Unity’ or ‘More Unity’ path. To create with Unity, learners need access to a computer with a graphics card, the latest version of the free Unity Games Engine, and a code editor. For the extra Blender-based projects (see below), they need the latest version of the free Blender software.
The project path consists of six projects. Like in ‘Intro to Unity’, each project introduces new skills bit by bit, enabling young people to independently code their own, next-level Unity creation in the final project.
This first project shows how to build an exciting 3D simulation. With ‘Rainbow run’, learners create colourful tracks and guide a marble to race along them. We also offer them an extra project guide where they can customise the look of their marble using Blender.
Next, with ‘Disco dance floor’, learners code an interactive, tilting dance floor that responds to a rolling ball with sound and colour. They can add their own style to the dance floor by following our extra Blender project.
‘Don’t fall through’ is the third project in the path. Here, learners code a two-player game that requires strategy and timing as marbles traverse a vanishing tiled floor.
‘Pixel art reveal’ comes next in the path. It helps learners design unique pixel art on a tiled floor and reveal their awesome artwork by rolling a ball across the surface.
In ‘Track designer’, we invite learners to truly think like game designers. This project empowers learners to design unique tilting tracks filled with obstacles, personalised effects, sounds, and more.
Finally ‘Marble mayhem’ lets young people bring to life all the principles of physics and materials in the Unity Game Engine they’ve learned about while following the ‘More Unity’ path. This is their place to create a one-of-a-kind game or digital toy that truly reflects their creativity.
‘More Unity’ promotes young people’s creativity, problem-solving, and independence. Each project presents them with the chance to create a virtual world of physics, materials, and mechanics. With each project they’ll learn lots of new skills in 3D modeling, gameplay design, and programming.
The path includes a community gallery where young people can share their new 3D creations and see what their peers all over the world have made.
The skills young people gain through the ‘Intro to Unity’ and ‘More Unity’ path provide them with a solid foundation to continue to learn and create with Unity. To follow their passion for 3D worlds, game design, and programming further, they can move on to the hundreds of tutorials available on Unity’s learning platform.
Our detailed Unity guide will help you get everything set up for your young people to start with Unity, and the ‘Intro to Unity‘ path is the place for them to begin before they move on to ‘More Unity‘.
If you or your young people want to get a taste of the fun ‘More Unity’ has in store, there’s the Collision and colours Discover project to try out. This short learning experience showcases the new components the ‘More Unity’ path introduces.
To help our community of CoderDojo and Code Club volunteers bring Unity to their learners, we will host a free Unity-focused webinar on 13 July. Sign up to get a walkthrough of the path from our Learning Manager Mac Bowley, and to ask him any questions you might have.
The post More Unity: Dive deeper into 3D worlds, game design and programming appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
After seven successful years on the International Space Station, 250 vertical miles above our planet, the original two Astro Pi computers that we sent to the ISS to help young people run their code in space have been returned to Earth.
From today, one of these Astro Pi computers will be displayed in the Science Museum, London. You can visit it in the new Engineers Gallery, which is dedicated to world-changing engineering innovations and the diverse and fascinating range of people behind them.
The original Astro Pis, nicknamed Izzy and Ed, have played a major part in feeding tens of thousands of young people’s understanding and passion for science, mathematics, engineering, computing, and coding. In their seven years on the International Space Station (ISS), Izzy and Ed had the job of running over 70,000 programs created by young people as part of the annual Astro Pi Challenge.
Nicki Ashworth, 21, took part in the first-ever Astro Pi challenge after hearing about the opportunity at a science fair: “I thought it sounded like an interesting project, and good practice for my programming skills. I was young and had no idea of the extent of the project and how much it would influence my future.”
Like many young people who have participated in the Astro Pi Challenge, Nicki credits the Astro Pi Challenge as an inspiration to learn more about space and programming, and to decide on a career path: “My experience with Astro Pi definitely helped to shape my future choices. I’m currently in my third year of a Mechanical Engineering degree at University of Southampton, specialising in Computational Engineering and Design. I’ve always loved programming, which is why I took part in the Astro Pi competition, but it led to a fascination with space. This encouraged me to look at engineering as a future, and led me to where I am today!”
It all started in 2014, when we started collaborating with organisations including the UK Space Agency and European Space Agency (ESA) to fly two Astro Pi computers to the ISS for educational activities during the six-month Principia mission of British ESA astronaut Tim Peake.
The Astro Pi computers each consist of a Raspberry Pi computer integrated with a digital camera and an add-on board filled with environmental sensors, all enclosed in a protective aluminium flight case.
Commander Tim Peake, Britain’s first visitor to the ISS, accompanied the two first Astro Pi computers on the ISS. He used them to run experiments imagined, designed, and coded by school-age young people across the UK.
We held a competition in UK schools and coding clubs to invite young people to create experiments that could be run on the Astro Pis. Students conceived experiments and coded them in Python; we tested their Python programs and eventually picked seven to run on Izzy and Ed on the ISS.
The students’ experiments ranged from a simple but beautiful program to display the flag of the country over which the ISS was flying at a given time, to a reaction-time test for Tim Peake to measure his changing abilities across the six-month mission. The measurements from all the experiments were downloaded to Earth and analysed by the students.
“I still feel incredibly honoured to have competed in the very first [Astro Pi Challenge],” says Aaron Chamberlain, 18, who was 11 years old when he took part in the first-ever Astro Pi Challenge in 2015. “The experience was incredible and really cemented my enthusiasm for all things computing and coding. Finally looking at the photos the Raspberry Pi had taken of the astronauts floating 400 km above us was a feeling of awe that I will never forget.”
The next year, 2016, we expanded our partnership with ESA Education to be able to open up Astro Pi to young people across ESA Member states. The European Astro Pi Challenge has been going from strength to strength each year since, inspiring young people and adult mentors alike.
In 2021 we decided it was time to retire Izzy and Ed and replace them with upgraded Astro Pi computers with plenty of new and improved hardware, including a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 8 GB RAM.
Dave Honess, STEM Didactics Expert at the European Space Agency, was engineering lead at the Foundation for the first Astro Pi Challenge, and the return of the original hardware is a special event and moment of reflection for him: “It was a strange experience to open the box and hold the original Astro Pis again after all that time and distance they have travelled — literally billions of miles. Even though their mission is over, we will continue to learn from them with a tear-down analysis to find out if they have been affected by their time in space. Since Principia, I have watched the European Astro Pi Challenge grow with pride year on year, but I still feel very fortunate to have been there at the beginning.”
Thanks to the upgraded hardware, we are able to continue to grow the Astro Pi Challenge in collaboration with ESA Education. And each year it’s so exciting to see the creative and ingenious programs tens of thousands of young people from across Europe send us; 24,850 young people took part in the Challenge in the 2022/2023 cycle.
But how have Astro Pis Izzy and Ed fared in space over these seven years? Jonathan Bell, Principal Software Engineer at Raspberry Pi Limited, had a chance to find out first-hand: “I was lucky enough to have a look inside the returned Astro Pis. I was looking for the cosmetic effects of the unit being on the ISS for so long. On the inside they still look as pristine as when I assembled them! Barely a speck of dust on the internal boards, nor any signs that the external interface ports were worn from their years of use. A few dings and scrapes on the anodised exterior were all that I could see — and a missing joystick cap (as it turns out, hot-melt glue isn’t a permanent adhesive…). It was great to see that they still worked! It made me feel proud for what the team and the Astro Pi programme has achieved over the years. It’s good to have Izzy and Ed back!”
The new Engineers Gallery in the Science Museum opens today and is free to visit. Astro Pi computer Izzy is among the amazing exhibits. Learn more at sciencemuseum.org.uk/engineers.
To find out more about the Astro Pi Challenge and how to get involved with your kids at home, your school, or your STEM or coding club, visit astro-pi.org.
The next round of the Challenge starts in September — sign up for news to be the first to hear when we launch it.
The post Welcome home! An original Astro Pi computer back from space is now on display at the Science Museum appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In the Columbus module of the International Space Station (ISS), there are two Astro Pi computers called Marie Curie and Nikola Tesla. These computers run the programs young people create as part of the annual European Astro Pi Challenge.
For this year’s Astro Pi Mission Zero, young people sent us over 15000 programs to show the ISS astronauts colourful images and animations of animals and plants on the Astro Pi displays and remind them of home.
Mission Zero is a free beginners’ coding activity. It gives young people the unique opportunity to follow our step-by-step guide to write a simple program in Python that can run in space on the ISS orbiting planet Earth.
The Mission Zero activity this year was to write code to use the Astro Pi’s colour sensor to measure the lighting conditions in the Columbus module, and to then use that measurement to set a colour in an image or animation on the Astro Pi’s 8×8 LED display. We invited young people to design images of fauna and flora to give the astronauts on board the ISS a reminder of the beautiful creatures, plantlife, and landscapes found on planet Earth.
The Mission Zero activity is ideal for learners trying text-based programming for the first time. It covers some key programming concepts, including variables, sequence, and iteration.
This year we received 15551 Mission Zero programs, and after carefully checking them against the entry and safety criteria, we were able to run 15475 programs. They were sent to us by 23605 learners working in teams or independently, and 10207 of this year’s participants were girls.
This year the most Mission Zero programs came from young people in the UK, followed by Spain, France, Italy, and Greece. Lots of different organisations supported young people to take part, including publicly funded primary and secondary schools, as well as educator- and volunteer-led Code Clubs and CoderDojos we support.
We’re celebrating the many different people involved in this year’s mission with a mosaic of the Mission Zero logo made up of lots of the inspiring designs participants sent us. You can explore an interactive version of the image too!
All of the participants whose programs ran on the ISS will be receiving a certificate to recognise their efforts, which will include the time and coordinates of the ISS when their program ran. Programs created by young people from across Europe ran on board the ISS in the final week of May.
If you enjoyed Astro Pi Mission Zero this year, we would be delighted to see you again in the next annual round. If you’re feeling inspired by the images young people have created, we invite you to get involved too. We provide guides and help for all adult mentors who want to support young people to take part, and the step-by-step guide for coding a Mission Zero program in 19 European languages.
The activity of designing an image has been really popular, and we have been super impressed with the creativity of young people’s designs. That’s why we’ll be running Mission Zero in the same format again starting in September.
If you’d like to hear news of the Astro Pi Challenge, please sign up to the newsletter on astro-pi.org:
We are always interested to hear your feedback about Mission Zero, as a mentor or participant. If you would like to share your thoughts with us, please email enquiries@astro-pi.org.
PS Look out for some cool news about the Astro Pi computers, which we’ll announce soon on this blog!
The post Young people designed 15000 images for astronauts in Astro Pi Mission Zero 2022/23 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
What do we talk about when we talk about artificial intelligence (AI)? It’s becoming a cliche to point out that, because the term “AI” is used to describe so many different things nowadays, it’s difficult to know straight away what anyone means when they say “AI”. However, it’s true that without a shared understanding of what AI and related terms mean, we can’t talk about them, or educate young people about the field.
So when we started designing materials for the Experience AI learning programme in partnership with leading AI unit Google DeepMind, we decided to create short explanations of key AI and machine learning (ML) terms. The explanations are doubly useful:
As an example, here is our explanation of the term “artificial intelligence” for learners aged 11–14:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the design and study of systems that appear to mimic intelligent behaviour. Some AI applications are based on rules. More often now, AI applications are built using machine learning that is said to ‘learn’ from examples in the form of data. For example, some AI applications are built to answer questions or help diagnose illnesses. Other AI applications could be built for harmful purposes, such as spreading fake news. AI applications do not think. AI applications are built to carry out tasks in a way that appears to be intelligent.
You can find 32 explanations in the glossary that is part of the Experience AI Lessons. Here’s an insight into how we arrived at the explanations.
In order to ensure the explanations are as precise as possible, we first identified reliable sources. These included among many others:
Vocabulary is an important part of teaching and learning. When we use vocabulary correctly, we can support learners to develop their understanding. If we use it inconsistently, this can lead to alternate conceptions (misconceptions) that can interfere with learners’ understanding. You can read more about this in our Pedagogy Quick Read on alternate conceptions.
Some of our principles for writing explanations of AI terms were that the explanations need to:
We engaged in an iterative process of writing explanations, gathering feedback from our team and our Experience AI project partners at Google DeepMind, and adapting the explanations. Then we went through the feedback and adaptation cycle until we all agreed that the explanations met our principles.
An important part of what emerged as a result, aside from the explanations of AI terms themselves, was a blueprint for how not to talk about AI. One aspect of this is avoiding anthropomorphism, detailed by Ben Garside from our team here.
As part of designing the the Experience AI Lessons, creating the explanations helped us to:
One of the ways education research informed the explanations was that we used semantic waves to structure each term’s explanation in three parts:
Most explanations also contain ‘middle of the wave’ sentences, which add additional abstract content, bridging the ‘bottom of the wave’ concrete example to the ‘top of the wave’ abstract content.
Here’s the “artificial intelligence” explanation broken up into the parts of the semantic wave:
Some of the explanations went through 10 or more iterations before we agreed they were suitable for publication. After months of thinking about, writing, correcting, discussing, and justifying the explanations, it’s tempting to wonder whether I should have just prompted an AI chatbot to generate the explanations for me.
I tested this idea by getting a chatbot to generate an explanation of “artificial intelligence” using the prompt “Explain what artificial intelligence is, using vocabulary suitable for KS3 students, avoiding anthropomorphism”. The result included quite a few inconsistencies with our principles, as well as a couple of technical inaccuracies. Perhaps I could have tweaked the prompt for the chatbot in order to get a better result. However, relying on a chatbot’s output would mean missing out on some of the value of doing the work of writing the explanations in collaboration with my team and our partners.
The visible result of that work is the explanations themselves. The invisible result is the knowledge we all gained, and the coherence we reached as a team, both of which enabled us to create high-quality resources for Experience AI. We wouldn’t have gotten to know what resources we wanted to write without writing the explanations ourselves and improving them over and over. So yes, it was worth our time.
The process of creating and iterating the AI explanations highlights how opaque the field of AI still is, and how little we yet know about how best to teach and learn about it. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we now know just a bit more about that and are excited to share the results with teachers and young people.
You can access the Experience AI Lessons and the glossary with all our explanations at experience-ai.org. The glossary of AI explanations is just in its first published version: we will continue to improve it as we find out more about how to best support young people to learn about this field.
Let us know what you think about the explanations and whether they’re useful in your teaching. Onwards with the exciting work of establishing how to successfully engage young people in learning about and creating with AI technologies.
The post How we’re learning to explain AI terms for young people and educators appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
An absolutely huge congratulations to each and every single young creator who participated in Coolest Projects 2023, our digital technology showcase for young people! 5801 young people from 37 countries took part. This year’s participants made projects that entertained, inspired, and wowed us — creators showcased everything from robotic arms to platformer games.
We celebrated every project and maker in a special livestream event this Tuesday:
Each year, we invite VIP judges to pick their favourite projects. This year they had the difficult job of choosing between 4111 incredible projects young people showcased. Meet the judges and find out which projects were their favourites.
Yewande is a chartered engineer, innovator, and speaker. She has worked on projects in the UK, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia, and has been named the UK Young Woman Engineer of the Year by the Institution of Engineering & Technology.
See Yewande’s favourites:
Vaishali is an Indian engineer, innovator, and revolutionary educationist. She is the co-founder of Young Tinker Academy and Young Tinker Foundation, started in 2015 to educate the less-privileged students of rural India. Her team at Young Tinker Foundation has impacted the lives of 150,000+ students.
Lella is an award-winning 18-year-old Digital Changemaker and Power of Youth Champion. Since she taught herself to code at age 8, Lella fosters purpose-driven innovation to create global industry opportunities that ensure young people are at the forefront of the ongoing digital transformation.
Lella’s favourite projects are:
Aoife is the Head of Community Development for Meta Data Centres in Europe and Asia. She and her team deliver on Meta’s commitment to playing a positive role and investing in the long-term vitality of Meta Data Centre communities in Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, and Singapore.
See Aoife’s favourite projects:
Broadcom Foundation has partnered with us for Coolest Projects to encourage young people who are solving problems that impact their communities. Broadcom Coding with Commitment™ is a special recognition for a Coolest Projects creator aged 11–14 who has learned basic coding as an essential problem-solving tool in STEM and is “thinking globally while acting locally.”
The Broadcom Coding with Commitment™ recognition goes to Smart Farm, a project by Dang, Chi, and An from Vietnam. They designed Smart Farm to help farmers in their community regulate the temperature of animals, feed them on time, and check them for diseases. The team also built a fish pond model that tests the pH of the water and a vegetable garden model that detects when vegetables are wilting, all with the aim of helping local farmers to care for their livestock and protect their livelihoods. Huge congratulations to the team!
Our judges have chosen their favourite projects — but what about yours? You can explore thousands of incredible projects for 2023 young creators in the Coolest Projects showcase gallery and discover your favourites today.
All young creators who took part will shortly receive their own unique certificate to recognise their amazing achievements. They’ll also be able to log into their Coolest Projects account to find personalised feedback on their projects from our judging team.
Support from our Coolest Projects sponsors means we can make the online showcase and celebration livestream an inspiring experience for the young people taking part. We want to say a big thank you to all of them: Allianz Technologies, Broadcom Foundation, EPAM Systems, Liberty Global, Meta, and Qube Research and Technologies.
The post Celebrating 5801 young people’s digital creations at Coolest Projects 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Over 15,000 teams of young people from across Europe had their computer programs run on board the International Space Station (ISS) this month as part of this year’s European Astro Pi Challenge.
Astro Pi is run in collaboration by us and ESA Education, and offers two ways to get involved: Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab.
Mission Zero is the Astro Pi beginners’ activity. To take part, young people spend an hour writing a short Python program for the Astro Pi computers on the International Space Station (ISS). This year we invited them to create an 8×8 pixel image or animation on the theme of fauna and flora, which their program showed on an Astro Pi LED matrix display for 30 seconds.
This year, 23605 young people’s Mission Zero programs ran on the ISS. We need to check all the programs before we can send them to space and that means we got to see all the images and animations that the young people created. Their creativity was absolutely incredible! Here are some inspiring examples:
Mission Space Lab runs over eight months and empowers teams of young people to design real science experiments on the ISS, executed by Python programs they write themselves. Teams choose between two themes: ‘Life in space’ and ‘Life on Earth’.
This year, the Mission Space Lab programs of 1245 young people in 294 teams from 21 countries passed our rigorous judging and testing process. These programs were awarded flight status and sent to the Astro Pis on board the ISS, where they captured data for the teams to analyse back down on Earth.
Mission Space Lab teams this year decided to design experiments such as analysing cloud formations to identify where storms commonly occur, looking at ocean colour as a measure of depth, and analysing freshwater systems and the surrounding areas they supply water to.
Teams will be receiving their experiment data later this week, and will be analysing and interpreting it over the next few weeks. For example, the team analysing freshwater systems want to investigate how these systems may be affected by climate change. What their Mission Space Lab program has recorded while running on the Astro Pis is a unique data set that the team can compare against other scientific data.
For the ‘Life on Earth’ category of Mission Space Lab experiments this year, the Astro Pis were positioned in a different place to previous years: in the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF). Therefore the Astro Pis could take photos with a wider view. Combined with the High Quality Camera of the upgraded Astro Pi computers we sent to the ISS in 2021, this means that the teams got amazing-quality photos of the Earth’s surface.
Once the experiments for ‘Life on Earth’ were complete, the astronauts moved the Astro Pis back to the Columbus module and replaced their SD cards, ready for capturing the data for the ‘Life in Space’ experiments.
Running programs in an environment as unique as the ISS, where all hardware and software is put to the test, brings many complexities and challenges. Everything that happens on the ISS has to be scheduled well in advance, and astronauts have a strict itinerary to follow to keep the ISS running smoothly.
As usual, this year’s experiments met with their fair share of challenges. One initial challenge the Astro Pis had this year was that the Canadarm, a robotic arm on the outside of the ISS, was in operation during some of the ‘Life on Earth’ experiments. Although it’s fascinating to see part of the ISS in-shot, it also slightly obscured some of the photos.
Another challenge was that window shutters were scheduled to close during some of the experiments, which meant we had to switch around the schedule for Mission Space Lab programs to run so that all of the experiments aiming to capture photos could do so.
Well done to all the young people who’ve taken part in the European Astro Pi Challenge this year.
If you’d like to hear about upcoming Astro Pi Challenges, sign up to the newsletter at astro-pi.org.
The post 24850 young people’s programs ran in space for Astro Pi 2022/23 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
How do we teach our youngest learners digital and computing skills? Hello World‘s issue 21 will focus on this question and all things primary school computing education. We’re excited to share this new issue with you on Tuesday 30 May. Today we’re giving you a taste by sharing an article from it, written by our own Sway Grantham.
How are you preparing young children for a world filled with digital technology? Technology use of our youngest learners is a hotly debated topic. From governments to parents and from learning outcomes to screen-time rules, everyone has an opinion on the ‘right’ approach. Meanwhile, many young children encounter digital technology as a part of their world at home. For example in the UK, 87 percent of 3- to 4-year-olds and 93 percent of 5- to 7-year-olds went online at home in 2023. Schools should be no different.
As educators, we have a responsibility to prepare learners for life in a digital world. We want them to understand its uses, to be aware of its risks, and to have access to the wide range of experiences unavailable without it. And we especially need to consider the children who do not encounter technology at home. Education should be a great equaliser, so we need to ensure all our youngest learners have access to the skills they need to realise their full potential.
A major aspect of early-years or kindergarten education is about learners sharing their world with each other and discovering that everyone has different experiences and does things in their own way. Using digital technology is no different.
Allowing learners to share their experiences of using digital technology both accepts the central role of technology in our lives today and also introduces them to its broader uses in helping people to learn, talk to others, have fun, and do work. At home, many young learners may use technology to do just one of these things. Expanding their use of technology can encourage them to explore a wider range of skills and to see technology differently.
In their classroom environment, these explorations can first take place as part of the roleplay area of a classroom, where learners can use toys to show how they have seen people use technology. It may seem counterintuitive that play-based use of non-digital toys can contribute to reducing the digital divide, but if you don’t know what technology can do, how can you go about learning to use it? There is also a range of digital roleplay apps (such as the Toca Boca apps) that allow learners to recreate their experiences of real-world situations, such as visiting the hospital, a hair salon, or an office. Such apps are great tools for extending roleplay areas beyond the resources you already have.
Another aspect of a child’s learning that technology can facilitate is their understanding of the world beyond their local community. Technology allows learners to explore the wider world and follow their interests in ways that are otherwise largely inaccessible. For example:
Each of these opportunities gives children a richer understanding of the world while they use technology in meaningful ways.
Beyond helping children to better understand our world, technology offers opportunities to be expressive and imaginative. For example, alongside your classroom art activities, how about using an app like Draw & Tell, which helps learners draw pictures and then record themselves explaining what they are drawing? Or what about using filters on photographs to create artistic portraits of themselves or their favourite toys? Digital technology should be part of the range of tools learners can access for creative play and expression, particularly where it offers opportunities that analogue tools don’t.
Using technology is also invaluable for learners who struggle with communication and language skills. When speaking is something you find challenging, it can often be intimidating to talk to others who speak much more confidently. But speaking to a tablet? A tablet only speaks as well as you do. Apps to record sounds and listen back to them are a helpful way for young children to learn about how clear their speech is and practise speech exercises. ChatterPix Kids is a great tool for this. It lets learners take a photo of an object, e.g. their favourite soft toy, and record themselves talking about it. When they play back the recording, the app makes it look like the toy is saying their words. This is a very engaging way for young learners to practise communicating.
No matter how we feel about the role of technology in the lives of young people, it is a part of their world. We need to ensure we are giving all learners opportunities to develop digital skills and understand the role of technology, including how people can use it for social good.
This is not just about preparing them for their computing education (although that’s definitely a bonus!) or about online safety (although this is vital — see my articles in Hello World issue 15 and issue 19 for more about the topic). It’s about their right to be active citizens in the digital world.
So I ask again: how are you preparing young children for a digital world?
The first experiences children have with learning about computing and digital technologies are formative. That’s why primary computing education should be of interest to all educators, no matter what the age of your learners is. This issue covers for example:
And there’s much more besides. So don’t miss out on this upcoming issue of Hello World — subscribe for free today to receive every PDF edition in your inbox on the day of publication.
The post Preparing young children for a digital world | Hello World #21 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Today we share a guest blog from Chris Roffey, who manages the UK Bebras Challenge, a computational thinking challenge we run every year in partnership with the University of Oxford.
Bebras is a free annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their learners through online, self-marking tasks. Taking part in Bebras, students solve accessible, interesting problems using their developing computational thinking skills. No programming is involved in taking part. The UK challenge is for school students aged 6 to 18 years old, with a special category for students with severe visual impairments.
While UK schools take part in Bebras throughout two weeks in November, for me the annual cycle starts much earlier. May is the time of the annual Bebras international workshop where the year’s new tasks get decided. In 2022, 60 countries were represented — some online, some in person. For nearly a week, computer scientists and computing teachers met to discuss and work on the new cycle’s task proposals submitted by participating countries a little earlier.
After the workshop, in collaboration with teams from other European countries, the UK Bebras team chose its task sets and then worked to localise, copy-edit, and test them to get them ready for schools participating in Bebras during November. From September, schools across the UK create accounts for their students, with over 360,000 students ultimately taking part in 2022. All in all, more than 3 million students from 59 countries took part in the 2022/2023 Bebras challenge cycle.
In this cycle, the UK Bebras partnership between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the University of Oxford has been extended to include the Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC). This is an invitation-based, online coding challenge for students aged 10 to 18, offered in the UK as well as Australia, Jamaica, and China. We invited the students with the top 10% best results in the UK Bebras challenge to take part in the OUCC — an exciting opportunity for them.
In contrast to Bebras, which doesn’t require participants to do any coding, the OUCC asks students to create code to solve computational thinking problems. This requires students to prepare and challenges them to develop their computational thinking skills further. The two younger age groups, 10- to 14-year-olds, solve problems using the Blockly programming language. The older two age groups can use one of the 11 programming languages that Bebras supports, including all the most common ones taught in UK schools.
Over 20,000 Bebras participants took up the invitation to the first round of the OUCC in the third week of January. Then in March, the top 20 participants from each of the four OUCC age groups took part in the final round. The finalists all did amazingly well. In the first round, many of them had solved all the available tasks correctly, even though the expectation is that participants only try to solve as many as they can within the round’s time limit. In the final round, a few of the finalists managed to repeat this feat with the even more advanced tasks — which is, in modern parlance, literally impossible!
Many of the participants are about to take school exams, so the last stage of the annual cycle — the prize winners’ celebration day— takes place when the exam period has ended. This year we are holding this celebration on Friday 30 June at the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s headquarters in Cambridge. It will be a lovely way to finish the annual Bebras cycle and I am looking forward to it immensely.
The post UK Bebras participants in the Oxford University Computing Challenge appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We are excited to share that 294 teams of young people participating in this year’s Astro Pi Mission Space Lab achieved Flight Status: their programs will run on the Astro Pis installed on the International Space Station (ISS) in April.
Mission Space Lab is part of the European Astro Pi Challenge, an ESA Education project run in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It offers young people the amazing opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space, by writing computer programs that run on Raspberry Pi computers on board the International Space Station.
To take part in Mission Space Lab, young people form teams and choose between two themes for their experiments, investigating either ‘Life in space’ or ‘Life on Earth’. They send us their experiment ideas in Phase 1, and in Phase 2 they write Python programs to execute their experiments on the Astro Pis onboard the ISS. As we sent upgraded Astro Pis to space at the end of 2021, Mission Space Lab teams can now also choose to use a machine learning accelerator during their experiment time.
In total, 771 teams sent us ideas during Phase 1 in September 2022, so achieving Flight Status is a huge accomplishment for the successful teams. We are delighted that 391 teams submitted programs for their experiments. Teams who submitted had their programs checked for errors and their experiments tested, resulting in 294 teams being granted Flight Status. 134 of these teams included some aspects of machine learning in their experiments using the upgraded Astro Pis’ machine learning accelerator.
The 294 teams to whom we were able to award Flight Status this year represent 1245 young people. 34% of team members are female, and the average participant age is 15. The 294 successful teams hail from 21 countries; Italy has the most teams progressing to the next phase (48), closely followed by Spain (37), the UK (34), Greece (25), and the Czech Republic (25).
Teams can use the Astro Pis to investigate life inside ESA’s Columbus module of the ISS, by writing a program to detect things with at least one of the Astro Pi’s sensors. This can include for example the colour and intensity of light in the module, or the temperature and humidity.
81 teams that created ‘Life in space’ experiments have achieved Flight Status this year. Examples of experiments from this year are investigating how the Earth’s magnetic field is felt on the ISS, what environmental conditions the astronauts experience compared to those on Earth directly beneath the ISS as it orbits, or whether the cabin might be suitable for other lifeforms, such as plants or bacteria.
In the ‘Life on Earth’ theme, teams investigate features on the Earth’s surface using the cameras on the Astro Pis, which are positioned to view Earth from a window on the ISS.
This year the Astro Pis will be located in the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF), which is larger than the window the computers were positioned in in previous years. This means that teams running ‘Life on Earth’ experiments can capture better images. 206 teams that created experiments in the ‘Life on Earth’ theme have achieved Flight Status.
Thanks to the upgraded Astro Pi hardware, this is the second year that teams could decide whether to use visible-light or infrared (IR) photography. Teams running experiments using IR photography have chosen to examine topics such as plant health in different regions, the effects of deforestation, and desertification. Teams collecting visible light photography have chosen to design experiments analysing clouds in different regions, changes in ocean colour, the velocity of the ISS, and classification of biomes (e.g. desert, forest, grassland, wetland).
Each of this year’s 391 submissions has been through a number of tests to ensure they follow the challenge rules, meet the ISS security requirements, and can run without errors on the Astro Pis. Once the experiments have started, we can’t rely on astronaut intervention to resolve any issues, so we have to make sure that all of the programs will run without any problems.
This means that the start of the year is a very busy time for us. We run tests on Mission Space Lab teams’ programs on a number of exact replicas of the Astro Pis, including a final test to run every experiment that has passed all tests for the full three-hour experiment duration. The 294 experiments that received Flight Status will take over 5 weeks to run.
97 programs submitted by teams during Phase 2 of Mission Space Lab this year did not pass testing and so could not be awarded Flight Status. We wish we could run every experiment that is submitted, but there is only limited time available for the Astro Pis to be positioned in the ISS window. Therefore, we have to be extremely rigorous in our selection, and many of the 97 teams were not successful because of only small issues in their programs. We recognise how much work every Mission Space Lab team does, and all teams can be very proud of designing and creating an experiment.
Even if you weren’t successful this year, we hope you enjoyed participating and will take part again in next year’s challenge.
Once all of the experiments have run, we will send the teams the data collected during their experiments. Teams will then have time to analyse their data and write a short report to share their findings. Based on these reports, we will select winners of this year’s Mission Space Lab. The winning and highly commended teams will receive a special surprise.
Congratulations to all successful teams! We are really looking forward to seeing your results.
The post Astro Pi Mission Space Lab 2022/23: 294 teams achieved Flight Status appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We are delighted to announce that we’ve launched Experience AI, our new learning programme to help educators to teach, inspire, and engage young people in the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Experience AI is a new educational programme that offers cutting-edge secondary school resources on AI and machine learning for teachers and their students. Developed in partnership by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and DeepMind, the programme aims to support teachers in the exciting and fast-moving area of AI, and get young people passionate about the subject.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications are already changing many aspects of our lives. From search engines, social media content recommenders, self-driving cars, and facial recognition software, to AI chatbots and image generation, these technologies are increasingly common in our everyday world.
Young people who understand how AI works will be better equipped to engage with the changes AI applications bring to the world, to make informed decisions about using and creating AI applications, and to choose what role AI should play in their futures. They will also gain critical thinking skills and awareness of how they might use AI to come up with new, creative solutions to problems they care about.
The AI applications people are building today are predicted to affect many career paths. In 2020, the World Economic Forum estimated that AI would replace some 85 million jobs by 2025 and create 97 million new ones. Many of these future jobs will require some knowledge of AI and ML, so it’s important that young people develop a strong understanding from an early age.
Something we get asked a lot is: “How do I teach AI and machine learning with my class?”. To answer this question, we have developed a set of free lessons for secondary school students (age 11 to 14) that give you everything you need including lesson plans, slide decks, worksheets, and videos.
The lessons focus on relatable applications of AI and are carefully designed so that teachers in a wide range of subjects can use them. You can find out more about how we used research to shape the lessons and how we aim to avoid misconceptions about AI.
The lessons are also for you if you’re an educator or volunteer outside of a school setting, such as in a coding club.
As part of this exciting first phase, we’re inviting teachers to participate in research to help us further develop the resources. All you need to do is sign up through our website, download the lessons, use them in your classroom, and give us your valuable feedback.
We’ve designed the Experience AI lessons with teacher support in mind, and so that you can deliver them to your learners aged 11 to 14 no matter what your subject area is. Each of the lesson plans includes a section that explains new concepts, and the slide decks feature embedded videos in which DeepMind’s AI researchers describe and bring these concepts to life for your learners.
We will also be offering you a range of new teacher training opportunities later this year, including a free online CPD course — Introduction to AI and Machine Learning — and a series of AI-themed webinars.
We will be inviting schools across the UK to test and improve the Experience AI lessons through feedback. We are really looking forward to working with you to shape the future of AI and machine learning education.
Visit the Experience AI website today to get started.
The post Experience AI: The excitement of AI in your classroom appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In the 1950s, Alan Turing explored the central question of artificial intelligence (AI). He thought that the original question, “Can machines think?”, would not provide useful answers because the terms “machine” and “think” are hard to define. Instead, he proposed changing the question to something more provable: “Can a computer imitate intelligent behaviour well enough to convince someone they are talking to a human?” This is commonly referred to as the Turing test.
It’s been hard to miss the newest generation of AI chatbots that companies have released over the last year. News articles and stories about them seem to be everywhere at the moment. So you may have heard of machine learning (ML) chatbots such as ChatGPT and LaMDA. These chatbots are advanced enough to have caused renewed discussions about the Turing Test and whether the chatbots are sentient.
Without any knowledge of how people create such chatbots, it’s easy to imagine how someone might develop an incorrect mental model around these chatbots being living entities. With some awareness of Sci-Fi stories, you might even start to imagine what they could look like or associate a gender with them.
The reality is that these new chatbots are applications based on a large language model (LLM) — a type of machine learning model that has been trained with huge quantities of text, written by people and taken from places such as books and the internet, e.g. social media posts. An LLM predicts the probable order of combinations of words, a bit like the autocomplete function on a smartphone. Based on these probabilities, it can produce text outputs. LLM chatbots run on servers with huge amounts of computing power that people have built in data centres around the world.
AI applications are often described as “black boxes” or “closed boxes”: they may be relatively easy to use, but it’s not as easy to understand how they work. We believe that it’s fundamentally important to help everyone, especially young people, to understand the potential of AI technologies and to open these closed boxes to understand how they actually work.
As always, we want to demystify digital technology for young people, to empower them to be thoughtful creators of technology and to make informed choices about how they engage with technology — rather than just being passive consumers.
That’s the goal we have in mind as we’re working on lesson resources to help teachers and other educators introduce KS3 students (ages 11 to 14) to AI and ML. We will release these Experience AI lessons very soon.
Our researchers at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre have started investigating the topic of AI and ML, including thinking deeply about how AI and ML applications are described to educators and learners.
To support learners to form accurate mental models of AI and ML, we believe it is important to avoid using words that can lead to learners developing misconceptions around machines being human-like in their abilities. That’s why ‘anthropomorphism’ is a term that comes up regularly in our conversations about the Experience AI lessons we are developing.
To anthropomorphise: “to show or treat an animal, god, or object as if it is human in appearance, character, or behaviour”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/anthropomorphize
Anthropomorphising AI in teaching materials might lead to learners believing that there is sentience or intention within AI applications. That misconception would distract learners from the fact that it is people who design AI applications and decide how they are used. It also risks reducing learners’ desire to take an active role in understanding AI applications, and in the design of future applications.
Avoiding anthropomorphism helps young people to open the closed box of AI applications. Take the example of a smart speaker. It’s easy to describe a smart speaker’s functionality in anthropomorphic terms such as “it listens” or “it understands”. However, we think it’s more accurate and empowering to explain smart speakers as systems developed by people to process sound and carry out specific tasks. Rather than telling young people that a smart speaker “listens” and “understands”, it’s more accurate to say that the speaker receives input, processes the data, and produces an output. This language helps to distinguish how the device actually works from the illusion of a persona the speaker’s voice might conjure for learners.
Another example is the use of AI in computer vision. ML models can, for example, be trained to identify when there is a dog or a cat in an image. An accurate ML model, on the surface, displays human-like behaviour. However, the model operates very differently to how a human might identify animals in images. Where humans would point to features such as whiskers and ear shapes, ML models process pixels in images to make predictions based on probabilities.
The Experience AI lesson resources we are developing introduce students to AI applications and teach them about the ML models that are used to power them. We have put a lot of work into thinking about the language we use in the lessons and the impact it might have on the emerging mental models of the young people (and their teachers) who will be engaging with our resources.
It’s not easy to avoid anthropomorphism while talking about AI, especially considering the industry standard language in the area: artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, to name but a few examples. At the Foundation, we are still training ourselves not to anthropomorphise AI, and we take a little bit of pleasure in picking each other up on the odd slip-up.
Here are some suggestions to help you describe AI better:
| Avoid using | Instead use |
| Avoid using phrases such as “AI learns” or “AI/ML does” | Use phrases such as “AI applications are designed to…” or “AI developers build applications that…” |
| Avoid words that describe the behaviour of people (e.g. see, look, recognise, create, make) | Use system type words (e.g. detect, input, pattern match, generate, produce) |
| Avoid using AI/ML as a countable noun, e.g. “new artificial intelligences emerged in 2022” | Refer to ‘AI/ML’ as a scientific discipline, similarly to how you use the term “biology” |
If we are correct in our approach, then whether or not the young people who engage in Experience AI grow up to become AI developers, we will have helped them to become discerning users of AI technologies and to be more likely to see such products for what they are: data-driven applications and not sentient machines.
If you’d like to get involved with Experience AI and use our lessons with your class, you can start by visiting us at experience-ai.org.
The post How anthropomorphism hinders AI education appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We are building a new online text-based Code Editor to help young people aged 7 and older learn to write code. It’s free and designed for young people who attend Code Clubs and CoderDojos, students in schools, and learners at home.
At this stage of development, the Code Editor enables learners to:
We’ve chosen Python as the first programming language our Code Editor supports because it is popular in schools, CoderDojos, and Code Clubs. Many educators and young people like Python because they see it as similar to the English language. It is often the text-based language young people learn when they take their first steps away from a block-based programming environment, such as Scratch.
Python is also widely used by professional programmers and usually tops at least one of the industry-standard indexes that ranks programming languages.
We will be adding support for web development languages (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) to the Editor in the near future.
We’re also planning to add features such as project sharing and collaboration, which we know young people will love. We want the Editor to be safe, accessible, and age-appropriate. As safeguarding is always at the core of what we do, we’ll only make new features available once we’ve ensured they comply with the ICO’s age-appropriate design code and our safeguarding policies.
We are inviting you to test the Code Editor as part of what we call the beta phase of development. As the Editor is still in development, some things might not look or work as well as we’d like — and this is why we need your help.
We’d love you to try the Editor out and let us know what worked well for you, what didn’t work well, and what you’d like to see next.
You can now try out the Code Editor in the first two projects of our ‘Intro to Python’ path. We’ve included a feedback form for you to let us know which project you tried, and what you think of the Editor. We’d love to hear from you.
Your feedback helps us decide what to do next. Based on what learners, educators, volunteers, teachers, and parents tell us, we will make the improvements to the Editor that matter most to the young people we aim to support.
One of our long-term goals is to engage millions of young people in learning about computing and how to create with digital technologies. We’re developing the Code Editor with three main aims in mind.
We aim to build the Code Editor so it:
Our work on the Code Editor will:
We want to offer a Code Editor that:
We’re also planning on making the Editor available as an open source project so that other projects and organisations focussed on helping people learn to code can benefit. More on this soon.
Our work on the Code Editor has been generously funded by the Algorand Foundation and Endless, and we thank them for their generous support. If you are interested in partnering with us to fund this key work, please reach out to us via email.
The post Test our new Code Editor for young people appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We are working in partnership with Amala Education to pilot a vocational skills course for displaced learners aged 16 to 25 in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya.
Kakuma camp was set up in Kenya in 1992, following a civil war in neighbouring South Sudan in East Africa. The UNHCR estimates that 200,000 people live in the camp today, although other data sources may record larger numbers of residents. 6 out of 10 people living in Kakuma camp are age 18 or younger.
We’ve designed a 100-hour, 10-week course called Using online digital technologies to create change for the Amala learners in Kakuma camp. The course focused on digital skills including making media and websites, with its content we adapted from our Computing Curriculum. The course pilot was delivered alongside Amala’s High School Diploma programme, which is the first internationally accredited course programme enabling refugee and host community youth to complete their education through flexible study.
Our thanks go to the Ezrah Charitable Trust for generously funding our work in this partnership.
We are learning a lot during this pilot, so we are writing a set of three blogs to share these lessons with you.
Today’s blog is Amala Education‘s perspective on their learners in Kakuma Camp, the purpose of digital skills education, and the course design and facilitation. We will also share our approach to adapting learning resources for the context of the Amala learners and using data to assess the course, and what other support we’ve put in place to ensure this educational project is self-sustaining.
By Polly Akhurst (Co-founder and Co-Executive Director, Amala Education), Louie Barnett (Education Lead, Amala Education) & Ajak Mayen Jok (Programme Coordinator, Amala Education)
Our learners wanted a course that develops not just their digital literacy, but one that aligns with Amala’s agency-based learning model, which gives young people the skills to improve their communities. Many of our learners have limited experience of using digital tools but a huge desire to develop these skills, which they see as essential to improving their lives and the lives of their community members.
So we knew we needed a course that not just builds learners’ technical knowledge and skills but can also enrich their lived experience.
How would we do it?
Enter the Raspberry Pi Foundation team. We combined Amala’s agency-based educational approach with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s experience in pedagogy and teaching about technology and digital literacy to design a course that truly resonates with our learners.
Before developing the course, the Raspberry Pi Foundation team held focus groups with facilitators and learners in Kakuma camp to understand their needs. This helped them to pitch the 100 hours of course materials at the right level for the learners.
We called the course Using online technologies to create change. It takes the learners on a journey, building their foundation elements of computing and digital literacy. Learners start by finding out how digital devices work using input, process, and output. Then they move on to understanding computer networks. The course includes hands-on activities related to creating media, like filming and reviewing content and creating and choosing sounds to use in a podcast. There is also some light-touch web development with HTML and JavaScript. At the end of the course, learners design and deliver a presentation that reflects the work they’ve completed.
“Before I joined the course, I really didn’t know much about how to operate technology, but through the learning and the process, now I am able to learn something that will be beneficial for me and the people in my community.” — Learner in Kakuma refugee camp
Throughout the course, learners use their newly gained skills and knowledge to make their own project aimed at creating positive change. One example project is this website developed by Shyaka Cedric and other learners, which shares how podcasts and remote learning helped their community stay safe and healthy during the pandemic. Another group of learners used their photography and design skills to develop ID cards to keep Amala students safe within the camp. Having an Amala student ID card protects learners because they can prove their identity to their community and the police.
One of the great things about this course is that the Amala facilitators who taught the learners look, speak, and sound like them. Amala facilitators are from within the camp, and that they are relatable is great for learners’ self-confidence.
Having the course facilitated by fellow refugees removes the stigmatisation that the learners are vulnerable and sets the precedent that they can do anything if they put their mind to it.
“It gave me power of… getting involved with new things…Any challenge that comes my way I am willing to take after the Raspberry Pi class now…” — Learner in Kakuma refugee camp
While the Raspberry Pi Foundation team worked to make the course content relevant for the learners, our facilitators further localised the content to ensure its relatability for learners. Local contextualisation helps students to understand what they are learning, and to identify with the content — it’s not something out of the blue for them. Localisation is also important because it helps implement one of Amala’s cornerstones: decolonising the African curriculum.
Because the learners in Kakuma camp lead complex social lives and face high levels of precarity, we decided to make the pilot course optional through our existing Diploma programme. We anticipated a modest enrollment rate, but instead over 100 people within the Amala learner community expressed an interest in this 75-person course. This showed us that the value and urgency of digital literacy in refugee communities is more pertinent than ever.
In a world where a lack of access to technology and digital skills exacerbates existing inequalities, it is critically important for young people who are disadvantaged to access meaningful learning opportunities. As one learner put it:
“I want to study this course because the current world is a digital world and I would like to acquire the skills to boost my computer skills and be able to help myself by getting a job and transforming the community through the digital world.” — Learner in Kakuma refugee camp
We have a blueprint of what works in Kakuma refugee camp, and we are also learning what doesn’t. Bringing these lessons together will help us offer the course to more learners in Kakuma, and adapt the content in other locations, like our site in Amman, Jordan.
Look out for our follow-up blogs about the support we put in place to enable learners in Kakuma camp to participate in the course, and how we worked to create course content that is suitable for them.
The post A vocational digital skills course in Kakuma refugee camp: Connecting to learners’ lives appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
This year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) focuses on innovation and technology for gender equality. This cause aligns closely with our mission as a charity: to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. An important part of our mission is to shift the gender balance in computing education.
As the UN Women’s announcement for IWD 2023 says: “Growing inequalities are becoming increasingly evident in the context of digital skills and access to technologies, with women being left behind as the result of this digital gender divide. The need for inclusive and transformative technology and digital education is therefore crucial for a sustainable future.”
According to the UN, women currently hold only 2 in every 10 science, engineering, and information and communication technology jobs globally. Women are a minority of university-level students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, at only 35%, and in information and communication technology courses, at just 3%. This is especially concerning since the WEF predicts that by 2050, 75% of jobs will relate to STEM.
We see this situation reflected in England: computer science is the secondary school subject with the largest gender gap at A level, with girls accounting for only 15% of students. That’s why over the past three years, we have run a research programme to trial ways to encourage more young women to study Computer Science. The programme, Gender Balance in Computing, has produced useful insights for designing equitable computing education around the world.
The UN says that “across countries, girls are systematically steered away from science and math careers. Teachers and parents, intentionally or otherwise, perpetuate biases around areas of education and work best ‘suited’ for women and men.” There is strong evidence to suggest that the representation of women and girls in computing can be improved by introducing them to computing role models such as female computing students or women in tech careers.
Presenting role models was central to the Belonging trial in our Gender Balance in Computing programme. One arm of this trial used resources developed by WISE called My Skills My Life to explore the effect of introducing role models into computing lessons for primary school learners. The trial provided opportunities for learners to speak to women who work in technology. It also offered a quiz to help learners identify their strengths and characteristics and to match them with role models who were similar to them, which research shows is more effective for increasing learners’ confidence.
Teachers who used the resources reported learners’ increased understanding of the types and range of technology jobs, and a widening of learners’ career aspirations.
“Learning about computing makes me feel good because it helps me think more about what I want to be.” — Primary school learner in the Belonging trial
“When [the resources were] showing all of the females in the jobs, nobody went ‘Oh, I didn’t know that a female could do that’, but I think they were amazed by the role of jobs and the fact it was all females doing it.“ — Primary school teacher in the Belonging trial
When teachers and students enter a computing classroom, they bring with them diverse social identities that affect the dynamics of the classroom. Although these dynamics are often unspoken, they can become apparent in which students answer questions or succeed visibly in activities. Without intervention, a dominant group of confident speakers can emerge, and students who are not in this dominant group may lose confidence in their abilities. When teachers set collaborative learning activities that use defined roles or structured discussions, this gives a wider range of students the opportunity to speak up and participate.
Pair programming is one such activity that has been used in research studies to improve learner attitudes and confidence towards computing. In pair programming, one learner is the ‘driver’. They control the keyboard and mouse to write the code. The other learner is the ‘navigator’. They read out the instructions and monitor the code for errors. Learners swap roles regularly, so that both can participate equitably. The Pair Programming trial we conducted as part of Gender Balance in Computing explored the use of this teaching approach with students aged 8 to 11. Feedback from the teachers showed that learners found working in structured pairs engaging.
“Even those who are maybe a little bit more reluctant… those who put their hands up today and said they still prefer to work independently, they are still all engaging quite clearly in that with their pair and doing it really, really well. However much they say they prefer working independently, I think they clearly showed how much they enjoy it, engage with it. And you know they’re achieving with it — so we should be doing this.” – Primary school teacher in the Pair Programming trial
Another collaborative teaching approach is peer instruction. In lessons that use peer instruction, students work in small groups to discuss the answer to carefully constructed multiple choice questions. A whole-class discussion then follows. In the Peer Instruction trial with learners aged 12 to 13 in our Gender Balance in Computing programme, we found that this approach was welcomed by the learners, and that it changed which learners offered answers and ideas.
“I prefer talking in a group because then you get the other side of other people’s thoughts.” – Secondary school learner (female) in the Peer Instruction trial
“[…] you can have a bit of time to think for yourself then you can bounce ideas off other people.” – Secondary school learner (male) in the Peer Instruction trial
“I was very pleased that a lot of the girls were doing a lot of the talking.” – Secondary school teacher in the Peer Instruction trial
Our Gender Balance in Computing research programme showed that no single intervention we trialled significantly increased girls’ engagement in computing or their intention to study it further. Combining several of the approaches we tested may be more impactful. If you’re part of an educational setting where you’d like to adopt multiple approaches at the same time, you can freely access the materials associated with the research programme (see our blog posts about the trials for links).
The research programme also showed that age matters: across Gender Balance in Computing, we observed a big difference in intent to study Computing between primary school and secondary school learners (data from ages 8–11 and 12–13). Fewer secondary school learners reported intent to study the subject further, and while this difference was apparent for both girls and boys, it was more marked for girls.
This finding from England is mirrored by a study the UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2022 refers to: “A 2020 study of Filipina girls demonstrated that loss of interest in STEM subjects started as early as age 10, when girls began perceiving STEM careers as male-dominated and believing that girls are naturally less adept in STEM subjects. The relative lack of female STEM role models reinforced such perceptions.” That’s why it’s necessary that all primary school learners — no matter what their gender is — have a successful start in the computing classroom, that they encounter role models they can relate to, and that they are supported to engage in computing and creating with technology by their parents, teachers, and communities.
The Foundation’s vision is that every young person develops the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use digital technologies effectively, and to be able to critically evaluate these technologies and confidently engage with technological change. While making changes inside the computing classroom will be beneficial for gender equality, this is just one aspect of building an equitable digital future. We all need to contribute to creating a world where innovation and technology support gender equity.
In all our work, we make sure gender equity is at the forefront, whether that’s in programmes we run for young people, in resources we create for schools, or in partnerships we have, such as with Pratham Education Foundation in India or Team4Tech and Kenya Connect in Wamunyu, Kenya. Computing education is a global challenge, and we are proud to be part of a community that is committed to making it equitable.
This IWD, we invite you to share your thoughts on what equitable computing education means to you, and what you think is needed to achieve it, whether that’s in your school or club, in your local community, or in your country.
The post How can computing education promote an equitable digital future? Ideas from research appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The European Astro Pi Challenge offers young people the opportunity to write computer programs that run on Raspberry Pi computers on board the International Space Station (ISS). There are two free, annual missions to participate in: Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab.
Sending your computer program to space is amazing already, and to inspire even more young people about this opportunity, we’re sharing some of the fascinating stories European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer told last round’s Mission Space Lab team winners about his experiences on the ISS.
Last round’s winning Mission Space Lab teams were invited to a very special online session with Matthias, and he shared lots of thoughtful and surprising insights from his mission on the International Space Station. Here are three of the questions from the teams and what Matthias had to say:
Lots of the teams wanted to know about the practicalities of life on the ISS. Team Ad Astra from the UK asked “How did you and your crewmates ensure that you got on well together?” Matthias talked about how supporting each member of the team helps everyone work well together:
It was surprising to hear that the astronauts on the ISS have lots of opportunities to communicate with people on Earth. Matthias explained how the astronauts can keep in regular contact with their family while answering the question from Team Atlantes from Spain:
Team NanoKids asked Matthias about the technologies astronauts use on the ISS, and Matthias shared some fascinating glimpses into what tools help the astronauts in their surroundings:
Thank you to all the teams for these great questions. And thank you to Matthias for offering young people a peek into what life is like in space!
We hope Matthias’ stories inspire lots of young people to take part in the European Astro Pi Challenge. Registration for this round of Mission Space Lab is closed, so why not sign up for news about the next round?
But it’s not too late for young people to get involved today and become part of space history. Astro Pi Mission Zero is still open for participation a little while longer — until 17 March.
Mission Zero is a beginner’s coding activity, so it’s really easy to get involved: young people just need a grown-up to register for them, and a computer with a web browser to participate. In Mission Zero, young people up to age 19 in eligible countries have the chance to send their own simple computer program into space to display a colourful image for the astronauts to see on the ISS.
The one-hour Mission Zero activity comes with step-by-step instructions for young people to follow. No special equipment or coding skills are needed, and all eligible young people who follow the guidelines will have their program run in space. Every Mission Zero participants receives a certificate to show the exact time and the location of the ISS during their programs run, so they’ll have something to remember their stellar achievement.
The European Astro Pi Challenge is an ESA Education project run in collaboration with us here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The post Inspiring young people to code with the Astro Pi Challenge and astronaut Matthias Maurer appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Computing combines a very broad mixture of concepts and skills. We work to support any school to teach students about the whole of computing and how to create with digital technologies. A key part of this support is The Computing Curriculum.
The Computing Curriculum is our complete bank of free lesson plans and other resources that offer you everything you need to teach computing lessons to all school-aged learners. It helps you cover the full breadth of computing, including computing systems, programming, creating media, data and information, and societal impacts of digital technology.
The 500 hours of free, downloadable resources within The Computing Curriculum include all the materials you need in your classroom: from lesson plans and slide decks to activity sheets, homework, and assessments. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive set of free teaching and learning materials for computing and digital skills in the world.
Our Curriculum’s resources are based on clear progression and content frameworks we’ve designed, and we continuously update them based on the latest research and feedback from practising teachers. Doing this is particularly important for computing education resources, because computing is a young subject where thoughts and understanding about the best teaching approaches are still evolving.
With The Computing Curriculum, we support educators of all levels of experience. Whether you specialise in computing, or you are a newcomer to the subject, the Curriculum will save you time and help you deliver engaging lessons.
In our 2022 survey of teachers who have used The Computing Curriculum resources:
- 91% said the Curriculum was effective or very effective at saving teachers time
- 89% said it was effective or very effective at developing teachers’ subject knowledge
- 81% said it was effective or very effective at engaging students
The resources are organised as themed units, and they support your computing lesson planning, preparation, and delivery because they are comprehensive as well as adaptable. You are free to use the resources as they are, or adjust them to your context, access to hardware, and learners’ needs and experience level.
One aspect of The Computing Curriculum that will facilitate your teaching is the progression framework on which the resources are based. In creating the resources, we have considered the learning objectives throughout each unit and year group, and throughout the entire schooling period. This progression is detailed in curriculum maps and learning graphs, and you’ll be able to use these documents to plan your lessons and to check your learners’ understanding.
You can download and use the resources for the year groups you teach computing right now. And please tell us of your experiences using The Computing Curriculum in your classroom, so that we can make the resources even better for educators around the world.
If you are interested in curriculum resources tailored for your region, please contact us via this form. You can find out how we adapted resources from The Computing Curriculum for learners living in a refugee camp in Kenya if you’d like to learn about our approach to tailoring resources.
The post Teach your learners with The Computing Curriculum appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Today we’re sharing an Astro Pi Mission Zero codealong video to help even more young people send their code into space.
In Mission Zero, young people write a simple program and display a colourful image on an Astro Pi computer on board the International Space Station (ISS). When the astronauts on mission on the ISS are working nearby, they can see the images young people have designed.
No coding experience is needed for Mission Zero. It’s a free and inspiring beginners’ coding activity. All young people need is an hour to write the program, a web browser on any computer with internet access, and an adult mentor who can register online to access the Mission Hub (see below).
In the codealong video, Rebecca from our team shows young people how to write their Mission Zero program step by step. We hope that it will open up this amazing coding activity to even more young people. (There’s also the written step-by-step guide to creating your program, available in 20 languages.)
Young people up to age 19 in ESA Member States are invited to take part, individually or as teams (see the eligibility details).
Every participant will receive a piece of space science history to keep: a personalised, printable certificate that shows their Mission Zero program’s exact start and end time, and the position of the ISS while their program ran.
The theme to inspire images for Mission Zero this year is ‘flora and fauna’, to remind the ISS astronauts of their home. The images can show anything from flowers and trees to birds, insects, and other animals. Young people could even create a series of images to show as an animation during the 30 seconds their program will run.
Mission Zero 2022/23 is open until 17 March 2023.
If you’re an adult mentor supporting young people to take part, read the mission guidelines to find out all you need to know. You can also watch this short video showing you exactly how to register to access the Mission Hub and get the code to identify your young people’s programs.
The post Code along with our Astro Pi Mission Zero video appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Young creators, it’s time to share your ideas with the world! Registration for Coolest Projects is now open.
Coolest Projects is an online showcase celebrating all young people who create with digital technology. From today, Monday 6 February, young people can register their projects on the Coolest Projects website. Registered projects will be part of the online showcase gallery, for people all over the world to see.
By entering your digital tech creations into Coolest Projects, you’ll have the chance to get personalised feedback about your project, represent your country in the online showcase, and get fun, limited-edition swag. Your project could even be selected as a favourite by our very special VIP judges.
Coolest Projects is an online celebration of young digital tech creators worldwide, their skills, and their wonderful creative ideas. We welcome all kinds of projects, from big to small, beginner to advanced, and work in progress to completed creation.
Here’s what you need to know:
If you’d like help with your idea or project, take a look at our free, step-by-step Coolest Projects workbook and coding project guides. You can also get inspired by all the creations in the 2022 showcase gallery.
You are also very welcome to register a tech project you’ve already made and want to share with the world this year.
We offer free resources to help mentors and parents support young people through the process of taking part in Coolest Projects, from imagining ideas, to creating projects, to registration.
There are loads more announcements to come, so make sure to subscribe to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be the first to find out about this year’s VIP judges, limited-edition digital swag, and much more.
The post Register your project for Coolest Projects 2023 now appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Improving gender balance in computing is part of our work to ensure equitable learning opportunities for all young people. Our Gender Balance in Computing (GBIC) research programme has been the largest effort to date to explore ways to encourage more girls and young women to engage with Computing.
Commissioned by the Department for Education in England and led by the Raspberry Pi Foundation as part of our National Centre for Computing Education work, the GBIC programme was a collaborative effort involving the Behavioural Insights Team, Apps for Good, and the WISE Campaign.
Gender Balance in Computing ran from 2019 to 2022 and comprised seven studies relating to five different research areas:
In December we published the last of seven reports describing the results of the programme. In this blog post I summarise our overall findings and reflect on what we’ve learned through doing this research.
I was fascinated to read a paper by Deborah Butler from 2000 which starts by summarising themes from research into gender balance in computing from the 1980s and 1990s, for example that boys may have access to more role models in computing and may receive more encouragement to pursue the subject, and that software may be developed with a bias towards interests traditionally considered to be male. Butler’s paper summarises research from at least two decades ago — have we really made progress?
In England, it’s true that making Computing a mandatory subject from age 5 means we have taken great strides forward; the need for young people to make a choice about studying the subject only arises at age 14. However, statistics for England’s externally assessed high-stakes Computer Science courses taken at ages 14–16 (GCSE) and 16–18 (A level) clearly show that, although there is a small upwards trend in the proportion of female students, particularly for A level, gender balance among the students achieving GCSE/A level qualifications remains an issue:
| Computer Science qualification (England): | In 2018: | In 2021: | In 2022: |
| GCSE (age 16) | 20.41% | 20.77% | 21.37% |
| A level (age 18) | 11.74% | 14.71% | 15.17% |
In GBIC, we carried out a range of research studies involving more than 14,500 pupils and 725 teachers in England. Implementation teams came from the Foundation, Apps For Good, the WISE Campaign, and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). A separate team at BIT acted as the independent evaluators of all the studies.
In total we conducted the following studies:
Each study (apart from the exploratory research study) involved a 12-week intervention in schools. Bespoke materials were developed for all the studies, and teachers received training on how to deliver the intervention they were a part of. For the RCTs, randomisation was done at school level: schools were randomly divided into treatment and control groups. The independent evaluators collected both quantitative and qualitative data to ensure that we gained comprehensive insights from the schools’ experiences of the interventions. The evaluators’ reports and our associated blog posts give full details of each study.
The research programme ran from 2019 to 2022, and as it was based in schools, we faced a lot of challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many research programmes meant to take place in school were cancelled as soon as schools shut during the pandemic.
Although we were fortunate that GBIC was allowed to continue, we were not allowed to extend the end date of the programme. Thus our studies were compressed into the period after schools reopened and primarily delivered in the academic year 2021/2022. When schools were open again, the implementation of the studies was affected by teacher and pupil absences, and by schools necessarily focusing on making up some of the lost time for learning.
Quantitatively, none of the RCTs showed a statistically significant impact on the primary outcome measured, which was different in different trials but related to either learners’ attitudes to computer science or their intention to study computer science. Most of the RCTs showed a positive impact that fell just short of statistical significance. The evaluators went to great lengths to control for pandemic-related attrition, and the implementation teams worked hard to support teachers in still delivering the interventions as designed, but attrition and disruptions due to the pandemic may have played a part in the results.
The qualitative research results were more encouraging. Teachers were enthusiastic about the approaches we had chosen in order to address known barriers to gender balance, and the qualitative data indicated that pupils reacted positively to the interventions. One key theme across the Teaching Approach (and other) studies was that girls valued collaboration and teamwork. The data also offered insights that enable us to improve on the interventions.
We designed the studies so they could act as pilots that may be rolled out at a national scale. While we have gained sufficient understanding of what works to be able to run the interventions at a larger scale, two particular learnings shape our view of what a large-scale study should look like:
The GBIC results highlight that there is no quick fix and suggest that we should combine some of the approaches we’ve been trialling to provide a more holistic approach to teaching Computing in an equitable way. We would recommend that schools adopt several of the approaches we’ve tested; the materials associated with each intervention are freely available (see our blog posts for links).
One of the very interesting overall findings from this research programme was the difference in intent to study Computing between primary school and secondary school learners; fewer secondary school learners reported intent to study the subject further. This difference was observed for both girls and boys, but was more marked for girls, as shown in the graph below. This suggests that we need to double down on supporting children, especially girls, to maintain their interest in Computing as they enter secondary school at age 11. It also points to a need for more longitudinal research to understand more about the transition period from primary to secondary school and how it impacts children’s engagement with computer science and technology in general.
We think that more time (in excess of 12 weeks) is needed to both deliver the interventions and measure their outcome, as the change in learners’ attitudes may be slow to appear, and we’re hoping to engage in more longitudinal research moving forward.
We know that an understanding of computer science can improve young people’s access to highly skilled jobs involving technology and their understanding of societal issues, and we need that to be available to all. However, gender balance relating to computing and technology is a deeply structural issue that has existed for decades throughout the computing education and workplace ecosystem. That’s why we intend to pursue more work around a holistic approach to improving gender balance, aligning with our ongoing research into making computing education culturally relevant.
We are very keen to continue to build on our research on gender balance in computing. If you’d like to support us in any way, we’d love to hear from you. To explore the research projects we’re currently involved in, check out our research pages and visit the website of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.
The post Gender Balance in Computing — the big picture appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
As part of our mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies, we work in partnership with organisations around the globe to grow and sustain the Code Club and CoderDojo networks of coding clubs for young people. These organisations are our Global Clubs Partners, and they undertake activities including training educators and volunteers, providing access to equipment, and running clubs and events for young people at a local or national level.
Given that many people at the Raspberry Pi Foundation are based in the UK and Ireland, and that meeting in person has been restricted during the coronavirus pandemic, our work to connect with the Global Clubs Partner network has largely taken place via video calls these last years. We don’t only connect with partners one to one, we also link them to each other so they can share insights, approaches, and resources. Video calls offer a unique opportunity for bringing together partner organisations located all over the world, but they provide a very different experience to building community in person.
With a network of 41 organisations in 35 countries, meeting in person requires careful consideration so we can accommodate as many partners as possible. That’s why we decided to hold several regional meetups in 2022 to make it feasible for all partners to join at least one. In October, a meetup took place in the Netherlands, coinciding with DojoCon Netherlands run by local partners. Our most recent meetup happened in early December, the day before the Coolest Projects Malaysia 2022 event, in Penang on the west coast of Malaysia.
At the December meetup, we welcomed participants from 10 partner organisations across Asia, Oceania, and Africa. This group spent a whole day building connections and sharing their work with each other. Together we covered several areas of interest, including volunteer recruitment, training, and recognition — all crucial topics for organisations that rely on volunteers to support young people. Meet-up participants shared resources, discussed how to sustainably grow networks, and planned for the future. The next day, participants had the chance to visit Coolest Projects Malaysia to find even more inspiration while seeing local young people showcase their own tech creations.
Although it was only one day, the impact of the meetup has been clear. As we had hoped it would, feedback from the partner organisations was very positive and revolved around community and learning, with participants expressing “feeling better connected” and “interconnectedness”, as well as “learning a lot” and “sharing best practices”. One participant even volunteered to host a future meetup, saying “Next year I would like to run this in my country.”
Here at the Foundation, we very much share these sentiments. Ellie Proffitt, Code Club Global Partnerships Manager, said: “It was great to see our partners sharing how they support their clubs with each other and bouncing new ideas around. I think we all left feeling very inspired.”
After the success of these in-person meetups in 2022, we and our Global Clubs Partner network are looking forward to future opportunities to work together. Planning for 2023 is of course well underway, with creative, ambitious projects and new partnerships in the pipeline. We all feel renewed in our commitment to our work and mission, and excited for what’s on the horizon. In the words of Sonja Bienert, Senior Community Manager: “Through this collaboration, we’ve reached a new level of trust that will positively influence our work for a long time to come.”
You can find out more about joining our Global Clubs Partner network on the CoderDojo and Code Club websites, or contact us directly with your questions or ideas about a partnership.
The post Building community with our Global Clubs Partners appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In the final seminar in our series on cross-disciplinary computing, Dr Tracy Gardner and Rebecca Franks, who work here at the Foundation, described the framework underpinning the Foundation’s non-formal learning pathways. They also shared insights from our recently published literature review about the impact that non-formal computing education has on learners.
Tracy and Rebecca both have extensive experience in teaching computing, and they are passionate about inspiring young learners and broadening access to computing education. In their work here, they create resources and content for learners in coding clubs and young people at home.
UNESCO defines non-formal learning as “institutionalised, intentional, and planned… an addition, alternative, and/or complement to formal education within the process of life-long learning of individuals”. In terms of computing education, this kind of learning happens in after-school programmes or children’s homes as they engage with materials that have been carefully designed by education providers.
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we support two global networks of free, volunteer-led coding clubs where regular non-formal learning takes place: Code Club, teacher- and volunteer-led coding clubs for 9- to 13-year-olds taking place in schools in more than160 countries; and CoderDojo, volunteer-led programming clubs for young people aged 7–17 taking place in community venues and offices in 100 countries. Through free learning resources and other support, we enable volunteers to run their club sessions, offering versatile opportunities and creative, inclusive spaces for young people to learn about computing outside of the school curriculum. Volunteers who run Code Clubs or CoderDojos report that participating in the club sessions positively impacts participants’ programming skills and confidence.
Rebecca and Tracy are part of the team here that writes the learning resources young people in Code Clubs and CoderDojos (and beyond) use to learn to code and create technology.
Rebecca started the seminar by describing how the team reviewed existing computing pedagogy research into non-formal learning, as well as large amounts of website visitor data and feedback from volunteers, to establish a new framework for designing and creating coding resources in the form of learning paths.
As Rebecca explained, non-formal learning paths should be designed to bridge the so-called ‘Turing tar-pit’: the gap between what learners want to do, and what they have the knowledge and resources to achieve.
To prevent learners from getting frustrated and ultimately losing interest in computing, learning paths need to:
When Rebecca and Tracy’s team create new learning paths, they first focus on the things that learners want to make. Then they work backwards to bridge the gap between learners’ big ideas and the knowledge and skills needed to create them. To do this, they use the 3…2…1…Make! framework they’ve developed.
Learning paths designed according to the framework are made up of three different types of project in a 3-2-1 structure:
You can learn more about the framework in this blog post and this guide for adults who run sessions with young people based on the learning paths. And you can explore the learning paths yourself too.
Rebecca and Tracy’s team have created several new learning pathways based on the 3…2…1…Make! framework and received much positive feedback on them. They are now looking to develop more tools and libraries to support learners, to increase the accessibility of the paths, and also to conduct research into the impact of the framework.
In the second half of the seminar, Tracy shared what the research literature says about the impact of non-formal learning. She and researchers at the Foundation particularly wanted to find out what the research says about computing education for K–12 in non-formal settings. They systematically reviewed 421 papers, identifying 88 papers from the last seven years that related to empirical research on non-formal computing education for young learners. Based on these 88 papers, they summarised the state of the field in a literature review.
So far, most studies of non-formal computing education have looked at knowledge and skill development in computing, as well as affective factors such as interest and perception. The cognitive impact of non-formal education has been generally positive. The papers Tracy and the research reviewed suggested that regular learning opportunities, such as weekly Code Clubs, were beneficial for learners’ knowledge development, and that active teaching of problem solving skills can lead to learners’ independence.
Non-formal computing education also seems to be beneficial in terms of affective factors (although it is unclear yet whether the benefits remain long-term, since most existing research studies conducted have been short-term ones). For example, out-of-school programmes can lead to more positive perception and increased awareness of computing for learners, and also boost learners’ confidence and self-efficacy if they have had little prior experience of computing. The social aspects of participating in coding clubs should not be underestimated, as learners can develop a sense of belonging and support as they work with their peers and mentors.
The literature review showed that non-formal computing complements formal in-school education in many ways. Not only can Code Clubs and CoderDojos be accessible and equitable spaces for all young people, because the people who run them can tailor learning to the individuals. Coding clubs such as these succeed in making computing fun and engaging by enabling a community to form and allowing learners to make things that are meaningful to them.
Another thing the literature review made obvious is that there are big gaps in the existing understanding of non-formal computing education that need to be researched in more detail. For example, most of the studies the papers in the literature review described took place with female students in middle schools in the US.
That means the existing research tells us little about non-formal learning:
We would also love to see studies that hone in on:
We’re excited to continue collaborating within the Foundation so that our researchers and our team creating non-formal learning content can investigate the impact of the 3…2…1…Make! framework.
This collaboration connects two of our long-term strategic goals: to engage millions of young people in learning about computing and how to create with digital technologies outside of school, and to deepen our understanding of how young people learn about computing and how to create with digital technologies, and to use that knowledge to increase the impact of our work and advance the field of computing education. Based on our research, we will iterate and improve the framework, in order to enable even more young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
From January, you can join our new monthly seminar series on primary (K–5) teaching and learning. In this series, we’ll hear insights into how our youngest learners develop their computing knowledge, so whether you’re a volunteer in a coding club, a teacher, a researcher, or simply interested in the topic, we’d love to see you at one of these monthly online sessions.
The first seminar, on Tuesday 10 January at 5pm UK time, will feature researchers and educators Dr Katie Rich and Carla Strickland. They will share findings on how to teach children about variables, one of the most difficult aspects of computing for young learners. Sign up now, and we will send you notifications and joining links for each seminar session.
We look forward to seeing you soon, and to discussing with you how we can apply research results to better support all our learners.
The post Combining research and practice to evaluate and improve computing education in non-formal settings appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 