Connexion
We love hearing from members of the community and sharing the stories of amazing young people, volunteers, and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them.
In our latest story, we’re heading to Alkmaar, the Netherlands, to meet Arno and Timo, CoderDojo enthusiasts who have transitioned from club members to supportive mentors. Their journey at CoderDojo and their drive to give back and support the next generation of coders in their community has been an inspiration to those around them.
Arno and Timo have been friends since childhood, and embarked on their CoderDojo journey at the age of 12, eager to explore the world of coding. Under the guidance of mentors like Sanneke, Librarian and Chair of CoderDojo Netherlands, they not only honed their technical skills, but also learned about the value of collaboration, curiosity, and perseverance. As they grew older, they in turn were inspired to support young coders, and wanting to remain part of the CoderDojo community, they decided to become mentors to the next generation of club attendees.
Having been helping younger members of the club for years, the transition to official mentors and proud owners of the much-coveted mentor T-shirt was seamless.
Sanneke reflects on the impact young mentors like Timo and Arno have on the young learners at CoderDojo:
“Having young mentors who are just slightly older than our youngest… I think it helps them to see what happens when you grow up and how they can help. They can be examples for how to help others.” – Sanneke, Librarian, CoderDojo mentor, and Chair of CoderDojo Netherlands
Timo echoes this sentiment, highlighting how mentoring provides a fantastic opportunity to help people and make a positive impact in the local community:
“I think volunteering is important, because you’re doing something for the community, in a city or village, supporting them in their journey in learning coding.” – Timo
As they continue their journey, Timo and Arno remain committed to supporting and inspiring the next generation of coders. They also encourage anyone who is thinking of volunteering at a club to give it a go:
“If you want to volunteer at the CoderDojo, just go for it. You don’t really need that much experience. […] The kids can learn it, so can you.” – Arno
The CoderDojo movement in the Netherlands is celebrating a decade of impact, and champions a culture of growth and learning. Arno and Timo’s story serves as an inspiration to us all, shining a light on the power of mentorship and the impact of volunteering in building stronger, more supportive communities.
Arno and Timo’s story showcases the importance of mentorship for both individuals and communities, and the real impact you can have by donating an hour of your time a week. If you’re interested in becoming a CoderDojo volunteer, head to coderdojo.com to find out how to get started.
Help us celebrate Arno and Timo and their inspiring journey by sharing their story on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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We love hearing from members of the community and sharing the stories of inspiring young people, volunteers, and educators all over the world who have a passion for technology.
With this latest story, we’re taking you to Leeds, UK, to meet Micah, a young space enthusiast whose confidence has soared since he started attending a Code Club at his local library.
Computing skills are essential in today’s world, and Micah’s mum Catherine was keen for him to be introduced to coding from a young age.
While Micah is known to people close to him for his inquisitive nature, cheeky behaviour, and quick-witted sense of humour, he can be a little shy when meeting new people. And he isn’t always keen on his mum’s suggestions about trying new things and attending after-school clubs! However, when Catherine saw there was a Code Club running at their local library, she knew it was the perfect opportunity for Micah to try out computing.
What Catherine didn’t know is that not only would Micah find out he was a talented coder, but Code Club would also set the path for him to become a regular attendee at many of the library’s other clubs.
Based in Leeds, the Compton Centre Code Club is part of the Leeds Libraries network, which runs seven Code Clubs throughout the city. Liam, Senior Librarian for Digital at Leeds Libraries, described the importance of these spaces for the community and for engaging children in tech:
“Libraries are safe spaces that provide free access to exciting and innovative technology to those in our communities who might not get that opportunity. We’re proud that our Code Clubs can support young people to engage with tech, learn some new skills, and meet like-minded peers in a friendly and positive environment.
Our Code Clubs are aimed at 9- to 13-year-olds. We do have some learners that will come that have a younger sister or brother that wants to get involved as well. We never want to turn anyone away. So we’re more than welcoming for that age group to come in and have a play, get used to the equipment, and join in.”
— Liam, Senior Librarian for Digital at Leeds Libraries
Code Club provides a safe and friendly space for Micah to connect with other children, and he has embraced coding with enthusiasm. This is possible thanks to the work, support, and encouragement of Micah’s Code Club mentor Basia (they/them), the librarian at the Compton Centre who runs the club.
“Micah loves coming [to Code Club] and learning all the different things that he can do with coding. And he also loves Basia. They’re brilliant and run the club really well. It’s a super child-friendly place to be and he loves the support that he gets from them.”
– Catherine, Micah’s mum
Support from an inspiring mentor is so often an important part of a young coder’s journey, and Basia’s own journey from a coding beginner to a confident mentor highlights the positive influence Code Club has on both children and mentors.
Basia reflected on how they felt when they first heard they were going to be running Code Club sessions, and how their skills and confidence have grown.
“I was daunted for a bit. But actually one of the first things I did when I started this job was to go through some of [the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s] resources and do a project in Scratch. And it was just so simple and straightforward. You know, all the resources are absolutely great and I don’t really need to think about it. I think my confidence has increased quite significantly.”
— Basia, Librarian and Code Club mentor
Since joining Code Club, Micah has become involved in other extracurricular activities, like Lego club and drama club. These experiences have contributed to Micah’s overall personal growth, showcasing the transformative power of Code Club for children.
Micah has exciting dreams for the future, including becoming an astrophysicist, a marine biologist, and the founder of a company named Save The Planet. Supported by dedicated mentors like Basia, Code Clubs are not just about teaching coding — they are helping shape the leaders of tomorrow.
If you are interested in encouraging your child to explore coding, take a look at the free coding project resources we have available to support you. If you would like to set up a Code Club for young people in your community, head to codeclub.org for information and support.
Help us celebrate Micah and his inspiring journey by sharing his story on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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La célèbre sitcom de 6 saisons Community quitte très bientôt le catalogue Netflix. Mais pas de panique, la série reste disponible en streaming en France.
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.
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It’s the last week of Black History Month 2024 in the USA, but by no means is the celebration over. The beautiful thing about history is that it’s not an isolated narrative about the past, but an ongoing dialogue in which we talk about how our collective past informs our present, and what more can be achieved in the future. The fact is this: we make history every single day. That’s why it’s so important for everyone to actively engage with history, and for us to celebrate the achievements of all.
When we talk about the history of STEM and computing, it’s necessary to highlight the achievements of people from groups that are still underrepresented in these fields: communities of colour, female and gender non-conforming people, people with disabilities, and underresourced communities. When we highlight their achievements, everyone can gain a fuller understanding of this history, and more young people from these groups can see they have a place in these fields and in moving them forward.
[When young kids of colour help inform the technology they use,] we end up with technology that is more inclusive to diverse communities […], and we help the kids become creators instead of just consumers.
Qumisha Goss
So to keep the conversation going about Black history in STEM and computing and how people make it every day, today we’re highlighting stories of Black community members. You’ll find out how they got involved in coding and creating with technology, and who their Black role models in tech are — past and present.
Meet Qumisha Goss, a brilliant source of inspiration and a shining light for youth in the ‘Motor City’ of Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Growing up, Qumisha always had an interest in tech, often tinkering and putting projects together, and her interest quickly transformed into a dream of becoming an engineer one day. Fast forward to now, and Qumisha has done exactly that and so much more.
She’s the Interim Executive Director of Peer 2 Peer University, the Digital Literacy Subject Matter Expert for Connect 313, the Creator and Lead Instructor of Code Grow, and a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator. Talk about impact! We asked Qumisha a few questions to explore her incredible story and to learn how she’s giving back to her community today:
Qumisha: “When I was a kid, my grandmas, Gloria and Cassandra, helped my brother and I make a shrinking machine out of a cardboard box, some batteries, and some lights. There was a minimum of science used, but my grandma swapped out our test ear of corn for a baby corn and my curiosity was rewarded with success. In elementary school, my ‘hero’ was Mae Carol Jemison, engineer, doctor, and astronaut. She was the first African American woman to go to space, in 1992 on the Endeavor. I found someone who looked like me who was doing something that I wanted to do, and that was encouraging.”
Qumisha: “It’s important that young kids of colour help inform the technology that they use. The benefits are twofold: we end up with technology that is more inclusive to diverse communities because it is informed by them, and we help the kids become creators instead of just consumers.”
Qumisha: “I eventually went to college to study engineering. I ended up switching majors and studying history and classical languages, but later returned to the tech world when I joined the Python and Raspberry Pi communities. I learned how to code outside of a traditional classroom and have been running physical computing classes and workshops for kids in my hometown of Detroit.”
Qumisha: “Even if kids don’t stick with it, they learn that coding — and lots of things — are not beyond them. The next Bill Gates might be sitting on the library stoop. The difference between them being able to make it or not is: ‘Did they ever get the opportunity to touch the thing that really sparks their genius?’ And for me, I want to help as many kids as possible interact with tech in a fun and engaging way so that they know that they can be technologists too.”
The difference between [kids] being able to make it or not is: ‘Did they ever get the opportunity to touch the thing that really sparks their genius?’
Qumisha Goss
To connect with Qumisha and learn how you can support the incredible, history-making work that she’s doing, follow her on X at @QatalystGoss.
Keep reading to meet more Black history makers across the USA, and to find resources to learn how you can help increase diversity in the technology sector in your community.
Explore our research seminars for educators who want to learn how to make computer science more accessible to all.
Listen to the stories of other Black community members who are making history all over the US. Siblings Sophia and Sebastian, researcher Randi Williams, and aspiring filmmaker Jordan chatted to us about their interest in coding, tech, and getting creative with digital tools.
Try out one of our guided projects for young people to get creative with tech. Check out Coolest Projects, our free online showcase for young tech creators, and how you can get young people involved.
And if you want to share the story of how you got into tech and how you’re inspiring kids to do the same, reach out to us on social media so we can amplify your voice.
Happy Black History Month!
The post Black role models in tech are making history every day appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In our series of community stories, we celebrate some of the wonderful things young people and educators around the world are achieving through the power of technology.
In our latest story, we’re heading to Vivek High School in Mohali, India, to meet Sahibjot, a 14-year-old coding enthusiast who has taken his hobby to the next level thanks to mentorship, Code Club, and the exciting opportunity to take part in the Coolest Projects 2023 global online showcase.
When he was younger, Sahibjot loved playing video games. His interest in gaming led him to discover the world of game development, and he was inspired to find out more and try it out himself. He began to learn to code in his spare time, using tutorials to help him develop his skills.
Keen to share the joy he had experienced from gaming, Sahibjot set himself the challenge of creating a game for his cousin. This project cemented his enthusiasm for coding and developing games of his own.
“I always felt that I have played so many games in my life, why not make one and others will enjoy the same experience that I had as a child.
For my cousin, I made a personal game for him, and he played it and he liked it very much, so once he played it, I felt that, yes, this is what I want to do with my life.” – Sahibjot
While continuing to hone his computing skills at home, Sahibjot heard that his school had started a Code Club. After initially feeling nervous about joining, his enthusiasm was bolstered by the club mentor, Rajan, talking about artificial intelligence and other interesting topics during the session, and he soon settled in.
At Code Club, with support and encouragement from Rajan, Sahibjot continued to develop and grow his coding skills. Alongside his technical skills, he also learned about teamwork and working collaboratively. He embraced the opportunity to help his peers, sharing his knowledge with others and becoming a mentor for younger club members.
“Last year, we joined this coding club together and we became friends. He’s a very friendly person. Whenever we need him, he just quickly helps us. He helps us to troubleshoot, find any bugs, or even fix our codes.” – Akshat, fellow Code Club member
The next step for Sahibjot came when Rajan introduced him and his fellow Code Club members to Coolest Projects. Coolest Projects is a celebration of young digital creators and the amazing things they make with technology. It offers participants the opportunity to share their tech creations in a global, online showcase, and local in-person events celebrating young creators are also held in several countries.
Sahibjot was eager to take part and showcase what he had made. He submitted a Python project, a ping-pong game, to the online showcase, and was very excited to then see his creation receive a special shout-out during the Coolest Projects global livestream event. He was delighted to share this achievement with his friends and family, and he felt proud to be representing his school and his country on a global stage.
“I told everyone around me that there was going to be a livestream and I possibly might be featured in that, so that was really exciting. I learned a lot about just not representing my school and myself as an individual, I learned about representing my whole nation.” — Sahibjot
Sahibjot’s passion for computing has helped shape his aspirations and ambitions. Looking to the future, he hopes to use his technology skills to benefit others and make an impact.
“Using code and technology and all of the things like that, I aspire to make effort to do something with the world, like help out people with technology.” — Sahibjot
To find out how you and young creators you know can get involved in Coolest Projects, visit coolestprojects.org. If the young people in your community are just starting out on their computing journey, visit our projects site for free, fun beginner coding projects.
For more information to help you set up a Code Club in your school, visit codeclub.org.
Join us in celebrating Sahibjot’s inspiring journey by sharing his story on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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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.
Vous avez envie de garder une ambiance cocooning, juste après la folie de Noël ? Voici donc 5 séries parfaites pour vous réchauffer le cœur : Community, This is Us, Young Sheldon, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel et One Mississippi.
Big news for young tech creators: Coolest Projects will return in 2024. The world’s leading showcase for young creators of digital tech will be open for registration in the online gallery, and we want young people worldwide to showcase their tech projects.
In 2024, we are hosting the Coolest Projects online showcase and livestream celebration for all young creators around the world, and also in-person events in the UK and Ireland for young creators who live there.
All young tech creators can take part — for free — in the Coolest Projects online showcase:
Coolest Projects is an opportunity for young tech creators to share what they have made with the world. Young people register their tech creations to show them in the Coolest Projects online showcase gallery. Alongside mentors, parents, friends, and family members in their local and global communities, they can explore the gallery and celebrate what they and their peers have made.
If your kids want to learn about creating with technology, check out our free guided coding project paths. These paths are designed to support all young people to learn how to make their own tech projects and develop their coding skills. For example:
Young creators can take a look at the Coolest Projects 2023 online showcase gallery for inspiration if they are not sure what they want to make. You can also watch the story of Zaahra and Eesa, siblings who participated in Coolest Projects 2020.
If you are a young creator in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, or the UK, then Coolest Projects is also coming to you in person in 2024. Participants will be able to meet other young tech creators, connect to their community, and celebrate each other’s creations. Young people are encouraged to take part in both the Coolest Projects global online showcase and their local in-person event.
Coolest Projects Ireland will take place at DCU St Patrick’s College Campus, Drumcondra in Dublin. It’s open to young creators in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and their families and friends are invited to come along to celebrate them and see all the incredible projects on show. Participants can apply for partial bursaries for the costs of attending the event.
Very soon we will announce the date and venue for Coolest Projects UK for all young creators in the UK. Sign up for email updates to be the first to hear about it. We will also share full details of each in-person event on the Coolest Projects website when registration opens.
If there’s not an in-person Coolest Projects event near you, you can still join in the fun: the Coolest Projects online showcase is open to any young creator aged up to 18, from anywhere in the world. We also work with brilliant partner organisations around the world to bring Coolest Projects events to their countries and communities. Sign up to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be the first to know about any in-person event in your country.
Coolest Projects registration opens soon in 2024, and young creators can start thinking of ideas and working on their projects now. Or if young people have already made something they are really proud of, they can showcase that creation once registration is open.
Sign up for email updates to always get the latest news about all things Coolest Projects, from event updates to the fun swag coming for 2024.
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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.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
After researchers flagged verified users on X (formerly known as Twitter) as top superspreaders of Israel/Hamas misinformation and the European Union launched a probe into X, Elon Musk has vowed to get verified X users back in check.
On Sunday, Musk announced that "any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes"—X's community-sourced fact-checking feature—will "become ineligible for revenue share."
"The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism," Musk said, warning that "any attempts to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious, because all code and data is open source."
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.
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We love hearing from members of the community and how they use their passion for computing and digital making to inspire others. Our community stories series takes you on a tour of the globe to meet educators and young tech creators from the USA, Iraq, Romania, and more.
For our latest story, we are in the UK with Spencer, a Computer Science teacher at King Edward VI Sheldon Heath Academy (KESH), Birmingham. After 24 years as a science teacher, Spencer decided to turn his personal passion for digital making into a career and transitioned to teaching Computer Science.
From the moment he printed his name on the screen of an Acorn Electron computer at age ten, Spencer was hooked on digital making. He’s remained a member of the digital making community throughout his life, continuing to push himself with his creations and learn new skills whenever possible. Wanting to spread his knowledge and make sure the students at his school had access to computer science, he began running a weekly Code Club in his science lab:
“Code Club was a really nice vehicle for me to get students into programming and digital making, before computer science was an option at the school. So Code Club originally ran in my science lab around the Bunsen burners and all the science equipment, and we do some programming on a Friday afternoon making LEDs flash and a little bit of Minecraft. And from that, the students really got an exciting sense of what programming and digital making could be.”
– Spencer
While running his Code Club, Spencer really embedded himself in the Raspberry Pi community, attending Raspberry Jams, engaging with like-minded people on Twitter, and continuing to rely on our free training to upskill.
When leadership at KESH began to explore introducing Computer Science to the curriculum, Spencer knew he was the right person for the job, and just where to look to make sure he had the right support:
“So when I decided to change from being a science teacher to a computer science teacher, there were loads of course options you could find online, and a lot of them required some really specific prior knowledge and skills. The Foundation’s resources take you from a complete novice, complete beginner — my very first LED flashing on and off — to being able to teach computational thinking and algorithms. So it was a really clear progression from using the Foundation resources that helped take me from a Physics teacher, who could use electricity to light an LED, to a programmer who could teach how to use this in our digital making for our students.”
– Spencer
Thanks to the support from KESH and Spencer’s compelling can-do attitude, he was soon heading up a brand-new Computer Science department. This was met with great enthusiasm from the learners at KESH, with a willing cohort eagerly signing up for the new subject.
“It’s really exciting to see how students have embraced Computer Science as a brand-new subject at school. The take-up for our first year at GCSE was fantastic with 25 students, and this year I’ve really got students asking about, ‘Is there an option for next year, and how can I get on to it?’ Students are almost blown away by the resources now.”
– Spencer
Spencer has a mission to make sure all of KESH’s learners can learn about computing, and making his lessons accessible to all means he’s become a firm favourite amongst the students for his collaborative teaching approach.
“Mr Organ teaches you, and then he just puts you in. If you do need help, you can ask people around you, or him, but he lets you make your own mistakes and learn from there. He will then give you help so you don’t make those mistakes the next time.”
– Muntaha, 16, GCSE Computer Science student, KESH
Spencer’s work is shaped by his awareness that many of the learners at KESH come from under-resourced areas of Birmingham and backgrounds that are underrepresented in computing. He knows that many of them have previously had limited opportunities to use digital tools. This is something he is driven to change.
“I want my young students here, regardless of their background, regardless of their area they’ve been brought up in, to have the same experiences as all other students in the country. And the work I do with Raspberry Pi, and the work I do with Code Club, is a way of opening those doors for our young people.”
– Spencer
As a passionate member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation community, Spencer has been counted on as a friendly face for many years, sharing his enthusiasm on training courses, at Foundation events, and as a part of discussions on Twitter. With the goal to introduce Computer Science at A level shortly, and an ever-growing collection of digital makes housed in his makerspace, Spencer shows no signs of slowing down.
If you are interested in changing your teaching path to focus on Computer Science, take a look at the free resources we have available to support you on your journey.
Help us celebrate Spencer and his dedication to opening doors for his learners by sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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On 24 and 25 March, more than 140 members of the Code Club and CoderDojo communities joined us in Cambridge for our first-ever Clubs Conference.
At the Clubs Conference, volunteers and educators came together to celebrate their achievements and explore new ways to support young people to create with technology. The event included community display tables, interactive workshops, discussions, and talks.
For everyone who couldn’t join us in person, we recorded all of the talks that community members gave on the main stage. Here’s what you can learn from the speakers.
Thank you to everyone who gave talks, ran workshops, presented posters, and had conversations to share their questions and insights. It was wonderful to meet all of you, and we came away from the Clubs Conference feeling super inspired by the amazing work Code Club and CoderDojo volunteers all over the world do to help young people learn to create with digital technologies.
We learned so much from listening to you, and we will take the lessons into our work to support you and your clubs in the best way we can.
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We meet many young people with an astounding passion for tech, and we also meet the incredible volunteers and educators who help them find their feet in the digital world. Our series of community stories is one way we share their journeys with you.
Today we’re introducing you to Nadia from Maysan, Iraq. Nadia’s achievements speak for themselves, and we encourage you to watch her video to see some of the remarkable things she has accomplished.
Nadia’s journey with the Raspberry Pi Foundation started when she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Brunel University. As an international student, she wanted to find a way to be part of the local community and make the most of her time abroad. Through her university’s volunteer department, she was introduced to Code Club and began supporting club sessions for children in her local library. The opportunity to share her personal passion for all things computer science and coding with young people felt like the perfect fit.
“[Code Club] added to my skills. And at the same time, I was able to share my expertise with the young children and to learn from them as well.”
Nadia Al-Aboody
Soon, Nadia saw that the skills young people learned at her Code Club weren’t just technical, but included team building and communication as well. That’s when she realised she needed to take Code Club with her when she moved back home to Iraq.
With personal awareness of just how important it is to encourage girls to engage with computing and digital technologies, Nadia set about training the Code Club network’s first female-only training team. Her group of 15 trainers now runs nine clubs — and counting— throughout Iraq, with their goal being to open a club in every single school in the country.
Reaching new areas can be a challenge, one that Nadia is addressing by using Code Club resources offline:
“Not every child has a smartphone or a device, and that was one of the biggest challenges. The [Raspberry Pi] Foundation also introduced the unplugged activities, which was amazing. It was very important to us because we can teach computer science without the need for a computer or a smart device.”
Nadia Al-Aboody
Nadia also works with a team of other volunteers to translate our free resources related to Code Club and other initiatives for young people into Arabic, making them accessible to many more young people around the world.
Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club here at the Foundation, shares just how important volunteers like Nadia are in actively pushing our shared mission forwards.
“Volunteers like Nadia really show us why we do the work we do. Our Code Club team exists to support volunteers who are out there on the ground, making a real difference to young people. Nadia is a true champion for Code Club, and goes out of her way to help give more children access to learning about computing. By translating resources, alongside overseeing a growing network of clubs, she helps to support more volunteers and, in turn, reach more young people. Having Nadia as a member of the community is really valuable.”
Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club
If you are interested in becoming a Code Club volunteer, visit codeclub.org for all the information you need to get started.
Help us celebrate Nadia and her commendable commitment to growing the Code Club community in Iraq by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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Today is officially Pi Day.
While 14 March is an opportunity for our American friends to celebrate the mathematical constant Pi, we are also very happy to make this day a chance to say a massive thank you to everyone who supports the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s work through their generous donations.
You may know that the Raspberry Pi story started in Cambridge, UK, in 2008 when a group of engineers-cum-entrepreneurs set out to improve computing education by inventing a programmable computer for the price of a textbook.
Fast forward 15 years and there are almost 50 million Raspberry Pi computers in the wild, being used to revolutionise education and industry alike. Removing price as a barrier for anyone to own a powerful, general-purpose computer will always be an important part of our mission to democratise access to computing.
What we’ve learned over the years is that access to low-cost, high-quality hardware is essential, but not sufficient.
If we want all young people to be able to take advantage of the potential offered by technological innovation, then we also need to support teachers to introduce computing in schools, find ways to inspire young people to learn outside of their formal education, and make sure that everything we do is informed by rigorous research.
That’s the focus of our educational mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and we couldn’t do this work without your support.
We are fortunate that a large and growing community of people, corporations, trusts, and foundations makes very generous donations to support our educational mission. It’s thanks to you that we are able to achieve what we do for young people and educators:
Trust me when I say this is just a small selection of highlights, all of which are made possible by our amazing supporters. Thank you, and I hope that we made you proud.
If you haven’t yet made a donation to our Pi Day campaign, it’s not too late to get involved. Your donation will help inspire the next generation of digital makers.
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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.
When we think about a celebration, we also think about how important it is to be intentional about sound. And with this month of February being a celebration of Black history in the USA, we want to help you make some noise to amplify the voices, experiences, and achievements of the Black community.
From the past and present, to those still to come in the future, countless remarkable achievements have been made by Black individuals who have chosen to move to the beat of their own drum. Music and sound can be tools to tell stories, to express ourselves, to promote change, to celebrate, and so much more. So take some time this month to make your own music with your young coders and start dancing.
Of course, choosing to dance is not the same as choosing to devote your life to the equality and freedom of all people. But it reminds us that you can incite change by choosing to do what is right, even when you feel like you’re the only one moving to the music. It won’t be long before you see change and meet people you resonate with, and a new sound will develop in which everyone can find their rhythm.
So join us this month as we explore the power of code and music to celebrate Black History Month.
We’ve selected three of our favourite music-related projects to help you bring a joyful atmosphere to your coding sessions this month. All of the projects are in Scratch, a programming language that uses blocks to help young people develop their confidence in computer programming while they experiment with colours and sounds to make their own projects.
Find your rhythm with this clicker game where you earn points by playing the drums in different venues. The project is one of our Explore projects and it includes step-by-step instructions to help young creators develop their skills, confidence, and interest in programming. This makes it a great option for beginners who want to get started with Scratch and programming.
Code to the beat of your own drum — or any instrument you like. Use this project to create your own virtual musical instrument and celebrate a Black musician you admire. For young people who have some experience with Scratch, they may enjoy expressing themselves with this Design project. Our Design projects give young people support to build on their experience to gain more independence coding their own ideas.
Can you keep up with the beat? Prove it in this game where you play the notes of a song while they scroll down the screen. You could choose to include a song associated with a moment in Black history that is meaningful to you. This project is a great opportunity for young people to expand their programming knowledge to create lists, while they also test their reaction skills with a fun game.
For young creators who want to create projects that don’t involve music or sound, check out these projects which can help you to:
Let us know how you’re celebrating Black History Month in your community on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram all month long!
Learn about our partnership with Team4Tech and Kenya Connect, with whom we are empowering educators and students in rural Kenya to use the power of coding and computing to benefit their communities.
Meet Salome, a computer science student from the UK who shares her experiences and advice for young people interested in finding out where computer science can lead them. Salome was one of the first people we interviewed for our ‘I belong’ campaign to celebrate young role models in computer science.
We believe that creating inclusive and equitable learning environments is essential to supporting all young people to see computer science as an opportunity for them. To help engage young people, especially those who are underrepresented in computer science classrooms, we are carrying out research with teachers to make computing culturally relevant. Our work promoting culturally relevant pedagogy in educational settings in England has been impacted by projects of many US researchers who have already contributed heavily to this area. You can learn about two of these projects in this blog post.
Educators who want to find out how they can use culturally relevant pedagogy with their learners can download our free guidelines today.
We would also like to invite you to our monthly research seminar on 7 February 2023, when we will be joined by Dr Jean Salac who will be sharing their research on Moving from equity to justice in computing instruction for youth. Dr Salac’s session is part of our current series of seminars that centres on primary school (K–5) teaching and learning of computing. The seminars are free and open to everyone interested in computing education. We hope to see you there!
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In our work, we get to meet so many super inspiring young people who make things with technology. Our series of community stories is one way we share their journeys and enthusiasm for digital making with you.
Today we’re introducing you to Adarsh from California, USA.
We first met Adarsh at the Coolest Projects USA showcase in 2019, when he was 15 years old. Adarsh was chosen as the Coolest Projects judges’ favourite in the showcase’s Hardware category for making a Smart Sprinkler System, which can serve an entire community. He was inspired to create this project by the need he saw in California to manage water during a drought. Using a Raspberry Pi computer, he built a moisture sensor–based sprinkler system that integrates real-time weather forecast data and Twitter feeds to dispense only optimum amounts of water, in compliance with city water regulations. Adarsh says:
“The world around us right now has a lot of different problems that need to be solved and so the way that I get inspired is by looking outwards.”
In 2020, Coolest Projects Global went online with young people across the world sharing their tech projects, and Adarsh created a project for the showcase to solve another real-life problem he had witnessed. When Adarsh had been in middle school, his mother had to be rushed to hospital with a sudden heart problem. The experience of seeing her hooked up to lots of vital sign monitors, with the wires hindering her movement, stayed in his memory. It led Adarsh to create another tech project: the Contactless Vital Signs Monitor. This low-cost device can be used to monitor a person’s skin temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation without needing to be in direct contact with them. Adarsh’s contactless monitor lets patients rest more comfortably and also keeps healthcare staff safer from infections.
Adarsh entered his Contactless Vital Signs Monitor in the Davidson Fellows Scholarship programme, which recognises students who have completed significant projects that have the potential to benefit society.
Adarsh has this message for other young people who think they might like to try creating things with tech:
“None of these projects, to get to the stage where they are today, were without frustration or difficulties. That’s part of the process. You should expect that. Because of all the struggles I had, the fact that I was able to build all of this is so much more rewarding to me.”
A big part of coding and digital making is problem-solving and collaboration. Adarsh told us that he had a really great mentor, Johan, who introduced him to coding and Raspberry Pi hardware, and showed him where Adarsh could ask for help online.
“[The Raspberry Pi community] is such a large and inclusive community. It welcomes young students — even older adults who are first starting to develop their interest in computer science — and we all are developing our own skills, our own projects, and our own passions together, and while doing so, we’re helping each other out.”
Now a freshman at Stanford University, Adarsh is currently doing an epidemiology-related research project about the relationship between COVID-19 mutations and environmental, health, and demographic statistics. He wants to focus either on biomedical engineering or environmental engineering in his studies.
“Really [what I’m studying at university] is going to involve engineering or computer science largely due to the Raspberry Pi and the early influence it has had on my life.”
Thanks for inspiring us, Adarsh, and for letting us share your story with the community!
Help us celebrate Adarsh and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram.
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Welcome to 2023. I hope that you had a fantastic 2022 and that you’re looking forward to an even better year ahead. To help get the year off to a great start, I thought it might be fun to share a few of the things that we’ve got planned for 2023.
Whether you’re a teacher, a mentor, or a young person, if it’s computer science, coding, or digital skills that you’re looking for, we’ve got you covered.
Through our collaboration with the European Space Agency, Astro Pi, young people can write computer programs that are guaranteed to run on the Raspberry Pi computers on the International Space Station (terms and conditions apply).
Astro Pi Mission Zero is open to participants until 17 March 2023 and is a perfect introduction to programming in Python for beginners. It takes about an hour to complete and we provide step-by-step guides for teachers, mentors, and young people.
Kids all over the world are already working on their entries to Coolest Projects Global 2023, our international online showcase that will see thousands of young people share their brilliant tech creations with the world. Registration opens on 6 February and it’s super simple to get involved. If you’re looking for inspiration, why not explore the judges’ favourite projects from 2022?
While we all love the Coolest Projects online showcase, I’m also looking forward to attending more in-person Coolest Projects events in 2023. The word on the street is that members of the Raspberry Pi team have been spotted scouting venues in Ireland… Watch this space.
I am sure I wasn’t alone in disappearing down a ChatGPT rabbit hole at the end of last year after OpenAI made their latest AI chatbot available for free. The internet exploded with both incredible examples of what the chatbot can do and furious debates about the limitations and ethics of AI systems.
With the rapid advances being made in AI technology, it’s increasingly important that young people are able to understand how AI is affecting their lives now and the role that it can play in their future. This year we’ll be building on our research into the future of AI and data science education and launching Experience AI in partnership with leading AI company DeepMind. The first wave of resources and learning experiences will be available in March.
With pandemic restrictions now almost completely unwound, we’ve seen a huge resurgence in Code Clubs and CoderDojos meeting all over the world. To build on this momentum, we are delighted to be welcoming Code Club and CoderDojo mentors and educators to a big Clubs Conference in Churchill College in Cambridge on 24 and 25 March.
This will be the first time we’re holding a community get-together since 2019 and a great opportunity to share learning and make new connections.
As part of our global mission to ensure that every young person is able to learn how to create with digital technologies, we have been focused on building partnerships in India, Kenya, and South Africa, and that work will be expanding in 2023.
In India we will significantly scale up our work with established partners Mo School and Pratham Education Foundation, training 2000 more teachers in government schools in Odisha, and running 2200 Code Clubs across four states. We will also be launching new partnerships with community-based organisations in Kenya and South Africa, helping them set up networks of Code Clubs and co-designing learning experiences that help them bring computing education to their communities of young people.
Over the past few years, our research seminar series has covered computing education topics from diversity and inclusion, to AI and data science. This year, we’re focusing on current questions and research in primary computing education for 5- to 11-year-olds.
As ever, we’re providing a platform for some of the world’s leading researchers to share their insights, and convening a community of educators, researchers, and policy makers to engage in the discussion. The first seminar takes place today (Tuesday 10 January) and it’s not too late to sign up.
That’s just a few of the super cool things that we’ve got planned for 2023. I haven’t even mentioned the new online projects we’re developing with our friends at Unity, the fun we’ve got planned with our very own online text editor, or what’s next for our curriculum and professional development offer for computing teachers.
You can sign up to our monthly newsletter to always stay up to date with what we’re working on.
The post What to expect from the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2023 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.
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We are so excited to share another story from the community! Our series of community stories takes you across the world to hear from young people and educators who are engaging with creating digital technologies in their own personal ways.
In this story we introduce you to Selin, a digital maker from Istanbul, Turkey, who is passionate about robotics and AI. Watch the video to hear how Selin’s childhood pet inspired her to build tech projects that aim to help others live well.
Selin (16) started her digital making journey because she wanted to solve a problem: after her family’s beloved dog Korsan passed away, she wanted to bring him back to life. Selin thought a robotic dog could be the answer, and so she started to design her project on paper. When she found out that learning to code would mean she could actually make a robotic dog, Selin began to teach herself about coding and digital making.
Thanks to her local CoderDojo, which is part of the worldwide CoderDojo network of free, community-based, volunteer-led programming clubs where young people explore digital technology, Selin’s interest in creating tech projects grew and grew. Selin has since built seven robots, and her enthusiasm for building things with digital technology shows no sign of stopping.
One of Selin’s big motivations to explore digital making was having an event to work towards. At her Dojo, Selin found out about Coolest Projects, the global technology showcase for young people. She then set herself the task of making a robot to present at the Coolest Projects event in 2018.
When thinking about ideas for what to make for Coolest Projects, Selin remembered how it felt to lose her dog. She wondered what it must be like when a blind person’s guide dog passes away, as that person loses their friend as well as their support. So Selin decided to make a robotic guide dog called IC4U. She contacted several guide dog organisations to find out how guide dogs are trained and what they need to be able to do so she could replicate their behaviour in her robot. The robot is voice-controlled so that people with impaired sight can interact with it easily.
Selin and her parents travelled to Coolest Projects International in Dublin, thanks to support from the CoderDojo Foundation. Accompanying them was Selin’s project IC4U, which became a judges’ favourite in the Hardware category. Selin enjoyed participating in Coolest Projects so much that she started designing her project for next year’s event straight away:
“When I returned back I immediately started working for next year’s Coolest Projects.”
Selin
Many of Selin’s tech projects share a theme: to help make the world a better place. For example, another robot made by Selin is the BB4All — a school assistant robot to tackle bullying. And last year, while she attended the Stanford AI4ALL summer camp, Selin worked with a group of young people to design a tech project to increase the speed and accuracy of lung cancer diagnoses.
Through her digital making projects, Selin wants to show how people can use robotics and AI technology to support people and their well-being. In 2021, Selin’s commitment to making these projects was recognised when she was awarded the Aspiring Teen Award by Women in Tech.
Listening to Selin, it is inspiring to hear how a person can use technology to express themselves as well as create projects that have the potential to do so much good. Selin acknowledges that sometimes the first steps can be the hardest, especially for girls interested in tech: “I know it’s hard to start at first, but interests are gender-free.”
“Be curious and courageous, and never let setbacks stop you so you can actually accomplish your dream.”
Selin
We have loved seeing all the wonderful projects that Selin has made in the years since she first designed a robot dog on paper. And it’s especially cool to see that Selin has also continued to work on her robot IC4U, the original project that led her to coding, Coolest Projects, and more. Selin’s robot has developed with its maker, and we can’t wait to see what they both go on to do next.
Help us celebrate Selin and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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From experience, being connected to a community of fellow computing educators is really important, especially given that some members of the community may be the only computing educator in their school, district, or country. These professional connections enable educators to share and learn from each other, develop their practice, and importantly reduce any feelings of isolation.
It was great to see the return of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Annual Conference to an in-person event this year, and I was really excited to be able to attend.
Our small Raspberry Pi Foundation team headed to Chicago for four and a half days of meetups, professional development, and conversations with educators from all across the US and around the world. Over the week our team ran workshops, delivered a keynote talk, gave away copies of Hello World magazine, and signed up many new subscribers. You too can subscribe to Hello World magazine for free at helloworld.cc/subscribe.
We spoke to so many educators about all parts of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s work, with a particular focus on the Hello World magazine and podcast, and of course The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. In collaboration with CSTA, we were really proud to be able to provide all attendees with their own physical copy of this very special edition.
It was genuinely exciting to see how pleased attendees were to receive their copy of The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. So many came to talk to us about how they’d used the digital copy already and their plans for using the book for training and development initiatives in their schools and districts. We gave away every last spare copy we had to teachers who wanted to share the book with their colleagues who couldn’t attend.
Don’t worry if you couldn’t make it to the conference, The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy is available as a free PDF, which due to its Creative Commons licence you are welcome to print for yourself.
Another goal for us at CSTA was to support and encourage new authors to the magazine in order to ensure that Hello World continues to be the magazine for computing educators, by computing educators. Anyone can propose an article idea for Hello World by completing this form. We’re confident that every computing educator out there has at least one story to tell, lessons or learnings to share, or perhaps a cautionary tale of something that failed.
We’ll review any and all ideas and will support you to craft your idea into a finished article. This is exactly what we began to do at the conference with our workshop for writers led by Gemma Coleman, our fantastic Hello World Editor. We’re really excited to see these ideas flourish into full-blown articles over the coming weeks and months.
Our week culminated in a keynote talk delivered by Sue, Jane, and James, exploring how we developed our 12 pedagogy principles that underpin The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, as well as much of the content we create at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. These principles are designed to describe a set of approaches that educators can add to their toolkit, giving them a shared language and the agency to select when and how they employ each approach. This was something we explored with teachers in our final breakout session where teachers applied these principles to describe a lesson or activity of their own.
We found the experience extremely valuable and relished the opportunity to talk about teaching and learning with educators and share our work. We are incredibly grateful to the entire CSTA team for organising a fantastic conference and inviting us to participate.
Subscribe now to get each new Hello World straight to your digital inbox, for free! And if you’re based in the UK and do paid or unpaid work in education, you can subscribe for free print issues.
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This post has been adapted from an article in issue 19 of Hello World magazine, which explores the interaction between technology and sustainability.
We may have had the Coolest Projects livestream, but we are still in awe of the 2092 projects that young people sent in for this year’s online technology showcase! To continue the Coolest Projects Global 2022 celebrations, we’re shining a light on some of the participants and the topics that inspired their projects.
In this year’s showcase, the themes of sustainability and the environment were extremely popular. We received over 300 projects related to the environment from young people all over the world. Games, apps, websites, hardware — we’ve seen so many creative projects that demonstrate how important the environment is to young people.
Here are some of these projects and a glimpse into how kids and teens across the world are using technology to look after their environment.
Has anyone ever told you that a small change can lead to a big impact? Check out these two Coolest Projects entries that put this idea into practice with clever inventions to make positive changes to the environment.
Arik (15) from the UK wanted to make something to reduce the waste he noticed at home. Whenever lots of people visited Arik’s house, getting the right drink for everyone was a challenge and often resulted in wasted, spilled drinks. This problem was the inspiration behind Arik’s ‘Liquid Dispenser’ project, which can hold two litres of any desired liquid and has an outer body made from reused cardboard. As Arik says, “You don’t need a plastic bottle, you just need a cup!”
Amrit (13), Kingston (12), and Henry (12) from Canada were also inspired to make a project to reduce waste. ‘Eco Light’ is a light that automatically turns off when someone leaves their house to avoid wasted electricity. For the project, the team used a micro:bit to detect the signal strength and decide whether the LED should be on (if someone is in the house) or off (if the house is empty).
“We wanted to create something that hopefully would create a meaningful impact on the world.”
Amrit, Kingston, and Henry
We love to see young people invent things to have positive changes in the community, on a local and global level.
This year, Sashrika (11) from the US shared her ‘Gas Leak Detector’ project, which she designed to help people who heat their homes with diesel. On the east coast of America, many people store their gas tanks in the basement. This means they may not realise if the gas is leaking. To solve this problem, Sashrika has combined programming with physical computing to make a device that can detect if there is a gas leak and send a notification to your phone.
Sashrika’s project has the power to help lots of people and she has even thought about how she would make more changes to her project in the name of sustainability:
“I would probably add a solar panel because there are lots of houses that have outdoor oil tanks. Solar panel[s] will reduce electricity consumption and reduce CO2 emission[s].”
Sashrika
Amr in Syria was also thinking about renewable energy sources when he created his own ‘Smart Wind Turbine’.
The ‘Smart Wind Turbine’ is connected to a micro:bit to measure the electricity generated by a fan. Amr conducted tests that recorded that more electricity was generated when the turbine faced in the direction of the wind. So Amr made a wind vane to determine the wind’s direction and added another micro:bit to communicate the results to the turbine.
We’ve also seen projects created by young people to make the world a better place for future generations.
Naira and Rhythm from India have designed houses that are suited for people and the planet. They carried out a survey and from their results they created the ‘Net Zero Home’. Naira and Rhythm’s project offers an idea for homes that are comfortable for people of all abilities and ages, while also being sustainable.
“Our future cities will require a lot of homes, this means we will require a lot of materials, energy, water and we will also produce a lot of waste. So we have designed this net zero home as a solution.”
Naira and Rhythm
Andrea (9) and Yuliana (10) from the US have also made something to benefit future generations. The ‘Bee Counter’ project uses sensors and a micro:bit to record bees’ activity around a hive. Through monitoring the bees, the team hope they can see (and then fix) any problems with the hive. Andrea and Yuliana want to maintain the bees’ home to help them continue to have a positive influence on our environment.
Some young creators use Coolest Projects as an opportunity to educate and inspire people to make environmental changes in their own lives.
Sabrina (13) from the UK created her own website, ‘A Guide to Climate Change’. It includes images, text, graphics of the Earth’s temperature change, and suggestions for people to minimise their waste. Sabrina also received the Broadcom Coding with Commitment award for using her skills to provide vital information about the effects of climate change.
Kushal (12) from India wanted to use tech to encourage people to help save the environment. Kushal had no experience of app development before making his ‘Green Steps’ app. He says, “I have created a mobile app to connect like-minded people who want to do something about [the] environment.”
These projects are just some of the incredible ideas we’ve seen young people enter for Coolest Projects this year. It’s clear from the projects submitted that the context of the environment and protecting our planet resonates with so many students, summarised by Sabrina, “Some of us don’t understand how important the earth is to us. And I hope we don’t have to wait until it is gone to realise.”
Check out the Coolest Projects showcase for even more projects about the environment, alongside other topics that have inspired young creators.
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Over the past five years, we’ve made lots of online educational video content for our online courses, for our Isaac Computer Science platform for GCSE and A level, and for our remote lessons based on our Teach Computing Curriculum hosted on Oak National Academy.
We have learned a lot from experience and from learner feedback, and we want to share this knowledge with others. We’re also aware there’s always more to learn from people across the computing education community. That’s one reason we’re continually working to broaden the range of educators we work with. Another is that we want all learners to see themselves represented in our educational materials, because everyone belongs in computer science.
To make progress with all these goals, we ran a pilot programme for educators called Teach Online at the end of 2021 and the start of 2022. Through Teach Online, we provided twelve educators with training, opportunities, and financial and material support to help them with creating online educational content, particularly videos.
Over five online sessions and a final in-person day, we trained them in not only the production of educational videos, but also some of the pedagogy behind it. The pilot programme has now finished, and we thought we’d share some of the key points from the sessions with you in the wider community.
When you learn new skills and knowledge, it’s important to think about how you apply these. For this reason, a useful question you can use throughout the learning process is “Why?”. So as you think about how to create the best online learning experience, ask yourself in different contexts throughout the content design and production:
For example, it’s easy to default to creating ‘talking head’ videos featuring one person talking directly to the camera. But you should always ask why — what are the reasons for using a ‘talking head’ style. Instead, or in addition, you can make videos more engaging and support the learning experience by:
By planning your content carefully instead of jumping into production right away, you can:
The Teach Online participants told us that they particularly enjoyed learning more about planning videos:
“I now understand that a little planning can make the difference between a mediocre online learning experience and a professional-looking valuable learning experience.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
“Planning the session using a storyboard is so helpful to visualise the actual recording.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
We are committed to making computing and computer science accessible and engaging, so we embed measures to improve equity, diversity, and inclusion throughout our free learning and teaching resources, including the Teach Online programme. It’s important not to leave this aspect of creating educational content as an afterthought: you can only make sure that your content is truly as equitable and inclusive as you can make it if you address this at every stage of your process. As an added bonus, many ways of making your content more accessible not only benefit learners with specific needs, but support and engage all of your audience so everyone can learn more easily.
Best practices that you can use while creating online content include:
One of video’s key advantages is the ability to immediately connect with the audience. To help with that, you can try to talk directly to a single viewer, using “you” and “I” rather than “we”. You can also show off your personality in the presentation slides you use and the backgrounds of your videos.
“[I will use my learning from the programme] by adapting teaching and learning to actively engage learners.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
It’s important to find your own personal presenting style. There is not one perfect way to present, and you should experiment to find how you are best able to communicate with your viewers. How formal or informal will you be? Is your delivery calm or energetic? Whatever you decide, you may want to edit your script to better fit your style. A practical tip for doing this is to read your video scripts aloud while you are writing them to spot any language that feels awkward to you when spoken.
“It was really great to try the presenting skills, and I learned a lot about my style.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
Throughout the Teach Online programme, we helped participants create a community with each other. Finding your own community can give you the support that you need to create, and help you continue to develop your knowledge and skills. Working together is great, whether that’s collaborating in-person locally, or online via for example the CAS forums or social media.
“I very much liked the diverse group of educators in this programme, and appreciated everyone sharing their experiences and tips.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
The Teach Online graduate have told us about the positive impact the programme has had on their teaching in their own contexts. So far we’ve worked with graduates to create Isaac Computer Science videos covering data structures, high- and low-level languages, and string handling.
There is a growing need for online educational content, particularly videos — not only to improve access to education, but also to support in-person teaching. By investing in training educators, we help diversify the pool of people working in this area, improve the confidence of those who would like to start, and provide them with the skills and knowledge to successfully create great content for their learners.
In the future we’d also like to support the wider community of educators with creating online educational content. What resources would you find useful? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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It’s wonderful hearing from people in the community about what learning and teaching digital making means to them and how it impacts their lives. So far, our community stories series has involved young creators, teachers, and mentors from the UK and US, India, Romania, and Ireland, who are all dedicated to making positive change in their corner of the world through getting creative with technology.
For our next story, we travel to a tiny school in North Yorkshire in the UK to meet teacher Sophie Hudson, who’s been running a Code Club since February 2021.
A teacher for 10 years, Sophie is always looking for new opportunities and ideas to inspire and encourage her learners. The school where she teaches, Linton-on-Ouse Primary School & Nursery in rural Yorkshire, is very small. With only five teachers supporting the children, any new activity has to be meticulously planned and scheduled. Sophie was also slightly nervous about setting up a Code Club because she doesn’t have a computer science background, sharing that “there’s always one subject that you feel less confident in.”
Sophie started the Code Club off small, with only a few learners. But then she grew it quickly, and now half of the learners in Key Stage 2 attend, and the club sessions have become a regular fixture in the school week.
“Once I did have a look at it [Code Club], it really wasn’t as scary as I thought. […] It has had a really positive influence on our school.”
Sophie Hudson, primary school teacher
Thanks to our free Code Club project guides and coding challenges like Astro Pi Mission Zero, Sophie’s Code Club has plenty of activities and resources for the children to learn to code with confidence — while having fun too. Sophie says: “I like the idea that the children can be imaginative: it’s play, but it’s learning at the same time. They might not even realise it.”
Visiting the Code Club at Linton-on-Ouse Primary School was a joyful experience. The children listened intently as Sophie kicked off the lunchtime club session. As they started to code, there were giggles and gasps throughout, and the classroom filled with sounds and intermittent squeaks from the ‘Stress ball’ project. It was clear how much enjoyment the learners felt, and how engaged everyone was with their coding projects. Learner Erin told us she likes Code Club because she can “have a little fun with it”. Learners Maise and Millie enjoy it because “it makes you worry less about getting stuff wrong, because you always know there’s a back-up plan.”
“It’s amazing. Anything is possible.”
Millie (10), learner at Sophie’s Code Club
Attending Code Club had a profound impact on a 9-year-old learner called Archie, who shares that his confidence has improved since taking part in the sessions: “I would never, ever think of doing things that I do now in Code Club,” he says. His mum Jenni has also seen a difference in Archie since he joined Code Club, with his confidence improving generally at school.
The positive impact that Sophie has on Linton-on-Ouse Primary School & Nursery is undeniable, not only by running Code Club as an extracurricular activity but also by joint-leading science and leading PE, computing, and metacognition. Head teacher Davinia Pearson says, “How could you not be influenced by someone who’s just out there looking for the best for their class and children, and making a difference?”
Help us celebrate Sophie and her Code Club at Linton-on-Ouse Primary School & Nursery by sharing their story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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Congratulations to the thousands of creators from 46 countries who participated in Coolest Projects Global 2022. Their projects awed and inspired us. Yesterday STEM advocate and television host Fig O’Reilly helped us celebrate each and every one of these creators in our online event. Check out the gallery to see all the amazing projects.
During the celebration, Fig also revealed which projects were picked by the special judges as their favourites from among the 2092 projects in this year’s showcase gallery. Let’s meet the special judges and check out their picks!
Ruth Amos is an inventor, entrepreneur, and EduTuber. She co-founded the #GirlsWithDrills movement and ‘Kids Invent Stuff’, a YouTube channel where 5- to 11-year-olds see their invention ideas become reality with the help of engineers.
Here are Ruth’s favourites:
Shawn Brown is an award-winning engineer, designer, and YouTuber. He’s also a practical pioneer for neurodiversity and innovation — raising awareness of learning differences and promoting science, engineering, and invention to young people. Together with Ruth, Shawn co-runs the YouTube channel ‘Kids Invent Stuff.’
Here are Shawn’s favourites:
Richa Shrivastava is the Director of Maker’s Asylum. It is India’s first community makerspace that fosters innovation through purpose-based learning, based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Here are Richa’s favourites:
Elaine Atherton is Director of Scratch Education Collaborative. Elaine was first introduced to Scratch as an instructional coach while working with teachers in North Carolina. “It was amazing to see the kids so excited about what they were creating. I wanted to help them transfer that same energy to designing, making, and sharing other things, too — I wanted them to stretch their creativity.”
Here are Elaine’s favourites:
Broadcom Foundation has partnered with us for Coolest Projects Global to encourage young people who are solving problems that impact their communities. Their projects could relate to health, sanitation, energy, climate change, or other challenges set out in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Broadcom Coding with Commitment illuminates how coding is a language, skill set, and invaluable tool for college and careers.
The Broadcom Coding with Commitment recognition goes to A Guide to Climate Change, a website created by Sabrina in the United Kingdom. Sabrina’s site not only provides vital information about the effects of climate change, but also gives users a visual to show how important it is to lower our carbon footprint. Congratulations to Sabrina for using her coding skills to give people a guide to understanding climate change in an easily digestible and stylish project webpage.
You can explore all the young tech creators’ projects — games, hardware builds, Scratch projects, mobile apps, websites, and more — in our showcase gallery now.
All creators who are taking part this year can now log into their Coolest Projects accounts to:
The support of our Coolest Projects Global sponsors has enabled us to make this year’s online showcase the inspiring experience it is for the young people taking part. We want to say a big thank you to all of them!
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Connecting face to face with educators around the world is a key part of our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and it’s something that we’ve sorely missed doing over the last two years. We’re therefore thrilled to be joining over 1000 computing educators in the USA at the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Annual Conference in Chicago in July.
You will find us at booth 521 in the expo hall throughout the conference, as well as running four sessions. Gemma, Kevin, James, Sue, and Jane are team members representing Hello World magazine, the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, and our other free programmes and education initiatives. We thank the team at CSTA for involving us in what we know will be an amazing conference.
Developing and sharing effective computing pedagogy is our theme for CSTA 2022. We’ll be talking to you about our 12 pedagogy principles, laid out in The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, available to download for free.
An exciting piece of news is that everyone attending CSTA 2022 will find a free print copy of the Big Book in their conference goodie bag!
We’re really looking forward to sharing and discussing the book and all our work with US educators, and to seeing some familiar faces. We’re also hoping to interview lots of old and new friends about your approaches to teaching computing and computer science for future Hello World podcast episodes.
Our team will also be running a number of sessions where you can join us to learn, discuss, and prepare lesson plans.
Thursday 14 July, 9am–12pm: Pre-conference workshop (booking required) with James Robinson and Jane Waite
If you enjoy explaining concepts using unplugged activities, analogy, or storytelling, then this practical pre-conference session is for you. In the session, we’ll introduce the idea of semantic waves, a learning theory that supports learners in building knowledge of new concepts through careful consideration of vocabulary and contexts. Across the world, this approach has been successfully used to teach topics ranging from ballet to chemistry — and now computing.
You’ll learn how this theory can be applied to deliver powerful explanations that connect abstract ideas and concrete experiences. By taking part in the session, you’ll gain a solid understanding of semantic wave theory, see it in practice in some freely available lesson plans, and apply it to your own planning.
Friday 15 July, 1–2pm: Workshop with Gemma Coleman
Do you enjoy sharing your teaching ideas, successes, and challenges with others? Do you want to connect with a global community of over 30,000 computing educators? Have you always wanted to be a published author? Then come along to this workshop session.
Every single computing or CS teacher out there has at least one lesson to share, idea to voice, or story to tell. In the session, you’ll discuss what makes a good article with Gemma Coleman, Hello World’s Editor, and you’ll learn top tips for how to communicate your ideas in writing. Gemma will also guide you through writing a plan for your very own article. Even if you’re not sure whether you want to write an article, doing this is a powerful way to reflect on your teaching practice.
Saturday 16 July, 4–5pm: Keynote talk by Sue Sentance
To teach any subject requires good teaching skills, knowledge about the subject being taught, and specific knowledge that a teacher gains about how to teach a particular topic, to their particular students, in a particular context. Teaching computer science is no different, and it’s a challenge for teachers to develop a go-to set of pedagogical strategies for such a new subject, especially for elements of the subject matter that they are just getting to grips with themselves.
In this keynote talk, our Chief Learning Officer Sue Sentance will focus on some of the 12 pedagogy principles that we developed to support the teaching of computer science. We created this set of principles together with other teachers and researchers to help us and everyone in computing and computer science education reflect on how we teach our learners. Sue will share how we arrived at the principles, and she’ll use classroom examples to illustrate how you can apply them in practice.
Sunday 17 July, 9–10am: Workshop with Sue Sentance
The set of 12 pedagogy principles we’ve developed for teaching computing are presented in our Hello World Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. The book includes summaries, teachers’ perspectives, and lesson plans for each of the 12 principles.
All CSTA attendees will get their own print copy of the Big Book, and in this practical session, we will use the book to explore together how you can use the 12 principles in the planning and delivery of your lessons. The session will be very hands-on, so bring along something you know you want or need to teach.
CSTA is now just a month away, and we can’t wait to meet old friends, make new connections, and learn from each other! Come find us at booth 521 or at our sessions to meet the team, discover Hello World magazine and the Hello World podcast, and find out more about our educational work. We hope to see you soon.
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We love being able to share how young people across the world are getting creative with technology and solving problems that matter to them. That’s why we put together a series of films that celebrate the personal stories of young tech creators.
For our next story, we met up with young digital maker Jay in Preston, UK, who wants to share what coding and robotics mean to him.
Watch Jay’s video to see how Jay created a homemade ventilator, Oxy-Pi, and how he’s making sure people in his local community also have the opportunity to create with technology.
Jay (11) wants everyone to learn about programming. At a young age, Jay started to experiment with code to make his own games. He attended free coding groups in his area, 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.
“My mission is to spread the word of computing and programming, because not many people know about these subjects.”
Jay
When he found out about Coolest Projects, our global tech showcase where young creators share their projects, Jay decided to channel his creativity into making something to exhibit there. He brought along a security alarm he had built, and he left Coolest Projects having made lots of new friends who were young tech creators just like himself.
“With robotics and coding, what Jay has learned is to think outside of the box and without any limits.”
Biren, Jay’s dad
While Jay has made many different tech projects, all of his ideas involve materials that are easily accessible and low-cost. Lots of his creations start out made with cardboard, and repurposed household items often feature in his final projects. Jay says, “I don’t want to spend much money, because it’s not necessary when you actually have an alternative that works perfectly fine.”
One of Jay’s recent projects, which he made from repurposed materials, is called Oxy-Pi. It’s a portable ventilator for use at home. Jay was inspired to make Oxy-Pi during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this project is especially important to him as his dad was hospitalised during this time. With his digital making approach, Jay is an example to everyone that you can use anything you have to hand to create something important to you.
Digital making has helped Jay express himself creatively, test his skills, and make new friends, which is why he is motivated to help others learn about digital making too. In his local community, Jay has been teaching children, teenagers, and adults about coding and robotics for the last few years. He says that he and the people around him get a lot from the experience.
“When I go out and teach, I love it so much because it’s really accessible. It helps me build my confidence, it helps them to discover, to learn, to create. And it’s really fun.”
Jay
Using tech to create things and solve problems, and helping others to learn to do the same, is incredibly important to Jay, and he wants it to be important to you too!
Help us celebrate Jay and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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All young people deserve meaningful opportunities to learn how to create with digital technologies. But according to UNESCO, as much as 40% of people around the world don’t have access to education in a language they speak or understand. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we offer more than 200 free online projects that people all over the world use to learn about computing, coding, and creating things with digital technologies. To make these projects more accessible, we’ve published over 1700 translated versions so far, in 32 different languages. You can check out these translated resources by visiting projects.raspberrypi.org and choosing your language from the drop-down menu.
Most of this translation work was completed by an amazing community of volunteer translators. In 2021 alone, learners engaged in more than 570,000 learning experiences in languages other than English using our projects.
So how do we know it’s important to put in the effort to make our projects available in many different languages? Various studies show that learning in one’s first language leads to better educational and social outcomes.
Education policy specialists Chloe O’Gara and Nancy Kendall describe in a USAID-funded guide document (1996, p. 100) that girls living in multilingual communities are less likely to know the official language of school instruction than boys, because girls’ lives tend to be more restricted to home and family, where they have fewer opportunities to become proficient in a second language. These restrictions limit their access to education, and if they go to school, they are more likely to have a limited understanding of the dominant language, and therefore learn less. Observations in research studies (Hovens, 2002; Benson 2002a, 2002b) suggest that making education available in a local language greatly increases female students’ opportunities for educational access and attainment.
Research studies conducted in Guinea and Senegal (Clemons & Yerende, 2009) suggest that education in a local language, which is more likely to focus on the learner’s circumstances, community, and learning and development needs, increases the learner’s belief in their abilities and skills, compared to education in a dominant language.
Learning in a language other than one’s own has a negative effect on learning outcomes, especially for learners living in poverty. For example, a UNESCO-funded case study in Honduras showed that 94% of pupils learned reading skills if their home language was the same as the language of assessment. In contrast, among pupils who spoke a different language at home, this proportion dropped to 62%. Similarly, a UNESCO-funded case study in Guatemala showed that when students were able to learn in a bilingual environment, attendance and promotion rates increased, while rates of repetition and dropout rates decreased. Moreover, students attained higher scores in all subjects and skills, including the mastery of the dominant language (UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, Policy Paper 24, February 2016).
A survey conducted by a researcher from the University of California San Diego showed that non-native English speakers found it challenging to learn programming languages when the majority of instructional materials and technical communications were only available in English (Guo, 2018). Moreover, a computing education research study of the association between local language use and the rate at which young people learn to program showed that beginners who learned to program in a programming language with keywords and environment localised into their primary language demonstrated new programming concepts at a faster rate, compared with beginners from the same language group who learned using a programming interface in English (Dasgupta & Hill, 2017).
It is clear from these studies that in order to achieve the most impact and to benefit disadvantaged and underserved communities, educational initiatives must work to make learning resources available in the language that learners are most familiar with.
By translating our learning resources, we not only support people who have English as a second language, we also make the resources useful for people who don’t speak any English — estimated as four out of every five people on Earth.
If you’re interested in helping us translate our learning resources, which are completely free, you can find out more at rpf.io/translate.
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Scratch Week is a global celebration of Scratch that takes place from 15 to 21 May this year. Below, we’ve put together some free resources to help get kids coding with this easy-to-use, block-based programming language. If you’re not sure what Scratch is, check out our introduction video for parents.
Code Club World is a great place to start coding for children who have never done any coding or programming before. The Code Club World online platform lets them begin their coding journey with fun activities, starting by creating their own personal avatar.
Then on Scratch Island, kids can code a game to find a hidden bug, design a fun ‘silly eyes’ app, or animate a story. No experience necessary! We’ve just added a parents’ guide to explain how Code Club World works.
For kids who feel ready to move beyond the basics of Scratch this Scratch Week, our Projects site offers a catalogue of projects that further enhance kids’ coding skills as they earn badges and explore, design, and invent.
With the More Scratch path, they will create six projects to make apps, games, and simulations using message broadcasting, if..then and if..then..else decisions, and variables. Then with the Further Scratch path, they can explore the advanced features of Scratch in another six projects to use boolean logic, functions, and clones while creating apps, games, computer-generated art, and simulations.
If you think your kids would like to learn how to build physical projects they can program in Scratch, then take a look at our Physical computing with Scratch and Raspberry Pi path. In these six projects, your young people will learn how to use Scratch on a Raspberry Pi computer to control LEDs, buttons, and buzzers to make interactive games, displays, and instruments.
Be inspired by the amazing things young tech creators worldwide code in Scratch by visiting the Coolest Projects Global 2022 showcase. Young people are showing off Scratch games, stories, art, and more. In our Coolest Projects online gallery, these creations are displayed amongst hundreds of others from around the world — it’s the ideal place to get inspired.
Are you curious about coding too? If you would like to start learning so you can better help young people with their creative projects, our online course Introduction to Programming with Scratch is perfect for you. It’s available on-demand, so you can join at any time and receive four weeks’ free access (select the ‘limited access’ option when you register). This course is a fun, inspiring, and colourful starting point if you have never tried coding before.
If you’re a parent looking for more coding activities to share with your kids, you can sign up to our parent-focused newsletter.
We hope you enjoy exploring these resources during Scratch Week.
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Hello World magazine, our free magazine written by computing educators for computing educators, has been running for 5 years now. In the newest issue, Alan O’Donohoe shares his top tips for educators to make the most out of Hello World.
Alan has over 20 years’ experience teaching and leading technology, ICT, and computing in schools in England. He runs exa.foundation, delivering professional development to engage digital makers, supporting computing teaching, and promoting the appropriate use of technology.
Years before there was a national curriculum for computing, Hello World magazines, or England’s National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE), I had ambitious plans to overhaul our school’s ICT curriculum with the introduction of computer science. Since the subject team I led consisted mostly of non-specialist teachers, it was clear I needed to be the one steering the change. To do this successfully, I realised I’d need to look for examples and case studies outside of our school, to explore exactly what strategies, resources and programming languages other teachers were using. However, I drew a blank. I couldn’t find any local schools teaching computer science. It was both daunting and disheartening not knowing anyone else I could refer to for advice and experience.
Thankfully, ten years later, the situation has significantly improved. Even with increased research and resources, though, there can still be the sense of feeling alone. With scarce prospects to meet other computing teachers, there’s fewer people to be inspired by, to bounce ideas off, to celebrate achievement, or share the challenges of teaching computing with. Some teachers habitually engage with online discussion forums and social media platforms to plug this gap, but these have their own drawbacks.
It’s great news then that there’s another resource that teachers can turn to. You all know by now that Hello World magazine offers another helping hand for computing teachers searching for richer experiences for their students and opportunities to hone their professional practice. In this Insider’s Guide, I offer practical suggestions for how you can use Hello World to its full potential.
Teachers have often told me that strategies like PRIMM and pair programming have had a positive impact on their teaching, after first reading about them in Hello World. Over the five years of its publication, there’s likely to have been an article or research piece that particularly struck a chord with you — so why not try putting the learnings from that article into practice?
You may choose to go this route on your own, but you could persuade colleagues to join you. Not only is there safety in numbers, but the shared rewards and motivation that come from teamwork. Start by choosing an article. This could be an approach that made an impression on you, or something related to a particular theme or topic that you and your colleagues have been seeking to address. You could then test out some of the author’s suggestions in the article; if they represent something very different from your usual approach, then why not try them first with a teaching group that is more open to trying new things? For reflection and analysis, consider conducting some pupil voice interviews with your classes to see what their opinions are of the activity, or spend some time reflecting on the activity with your colleagues. Finally, you could make contact with the author to compare your experiences, seek further support, or ask questions.
Authors generally welcome correspondence from readers, even those that don’t agree with their opinions! While it’s difficult to predict exactly what the outcome may be, it could lead to a productive professional correspondence. Here are some suggestions:
Take inspiration from book clubs, but rather than discuss works of fiction, instead invite members of your professional groups or curriculum teams to discuss content from issues of Hello World. This could become a regular feature of your meetings where attendees can be invited to contribute their own opinions. To achieve this, firstly identify a group that you’re a part of where this is most likely to be received well. This may be with your colleagues, or fellow computing teachers you’ve met at conferences or training days. To begin, you might prescribe one specific single article or broaden it to include a whole issue. It makes sense to select an article likely to be popular with your group, or one that addresses a current or future area of concern.
To familiarise attendees with the content, share a link to the issue for them to read in advance of the meeting. If you’re reviewing a whole issue, suggest pages likely to be most relevant. If you’re reviewing a single article, make it clear whether you are referring to the page numbers as printed or those in the PDF. You could make it easier by removing all other pages from the PDF and sending it as an attachment. Remember that you can download back issues of Hello World as PDFs, which you can then edit or print.
Encourage your attendees to share the aspects of the article that appealed to them, or areas they could not agree with the author or struggled to see working in their particular setting. Invite any points of issue for further discussion and explanation — somebody in the group might volunteer to strike up a conversation with the author by passing on the feedback from the group. Alternatively, you could invite the author of the piece to join your meeting via video conference to address questions and promote discussion of the themes. This could lead to developing a productive friendship or professional association with the author.
“I wish!” is a typical response I hear when I suggest to a teacher that they should seriously consider writing an article for Hello World. I often get the responses, “I don’t have enough time”, “Nobody would read anything I write”, or, “I don’t do anything worth writing about”. The most common concern I hear, though, is, “But I’m not a writer!”. So you’re not the only one thinking that!
“We strongly encourage first-time writers. My job is to edit your work and worry about grammar and punctuation — so don’t worry if this isn’t your strength! Remember that as an educator, you’re writing all the time. Lesson plans, end-of-term reports, assessment feedback…you’re more of a writer than you think! If you’re not sure where to start, you could write a lesson plan, or contribute to our ‘Me and my Classroom’ feature.”
— Gemma Coleman, Editor of Hello World
Help and support is available from the editorial team. I for one have found this to be extremely beneficial, especially as I really don’t rate my own writing skills! Don’t forget, you’re writing about your own practice, something that you’ve done in your career — so you’ll be an expert on you. Each article starts with a proposal, the editor replies with some suggestions, then a draft follows and some more refinements. I ask friends and colleagues to review parts of what I’ve written to help me and I even ask non-teaching members of my family for their opinions.
Writing an article for Hello World can really help boost your own professional development and career prospects. Writing about your own practice requires humility, analytical thinking and self reflection. To ensure you have time to write an article, make it fit in with something of interest to you. This could be an objective from your own performance management or appraisal. This reduces the need for additional work and adds a level of credibility.
If that isn’t enough to persuade you, for contributors based outside of the UK (who usually aren’t eligible for free print copies), Hello World will send you a complimentary print copy of the magazine that you feature in to say thank you. Picture the next Hello World issue arriving featuring an article written by you. How does this make you feel? Be honest — your heart flutters as you tear off the wrapper to go straight to your article. You’ll be impressed to see how much smarter it looks in print than the draft you did in Microsoft Word. You’ll then want to show others, because you’ll be proud of your work. It generates a tremendous sense of pride and achievement in seeing your own work published in a professional capacity.
Hello World offers busy teachers a fantastic, free and accessible resource of shared knowledge, experience and inspiring ideas. When we feel most exhausted and lacking inspiration, we should treasure those mindful moments where we can sit down with a cup of tea and make the most of this wonderful publication created especially for us.
We marked Hello World’s fifth anniversary with a recent Twitter Spaces event with Alan and Catherine Elliot as our guests. You can catch up with the event recording on the Hello World podcast. And the newest Hello World issue, with a focus on cybersecurity, is available as a free PDF download — dive it today.
How have you been using Hello World in your practice in the past five years? What do you hope to see in the magazine in the next five? Let us know on Twitter by tagging @HelloWorld_Edu.
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Ten years ago, Raspberry Pi started shipping its first computers in order to inspire young people to reimagine the role of technology in their lives. What started with a low-cost, high-performance computer has grown into a movement of millions of people of all ages and backgrounds.
Today, Raspberry Pi is the UK’s best-selling computer, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is one of the world’s leading educational non-profits. Raspberry Pi computers make technology accessible to people and businesses all over the world. They are used everywhere from homes and schools to factories, offices, and shops.
To help celebrate this 10-year milestone, we’ve partnered with The National Museum of Computing, located at the historic Bletchley Park, to open a new temporary exhibit dedicated to telling the story of the Raspberry Pi computer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the global community of innovators, learners, and educators we’re a part of.
In the exhibit, you’ll be able to get hands-on with Raspberry Pi computers, hear the story of how Raspberry Pi came to be, and see a few of the many ways that Raspberry Pi has made an impact on the world.
We know that not everyone will be able to experience the exhibit in person, and so we’ll live-stream the grand opening this Saturday 5 March 2022 at 11:15am GMT.
If you’re able to make it to the National Museum of Computing on Saturday, tickets are available to purchase.
We’re delighted to celebrate 10 years with all of you, and we’re excited about the next 10 years of Raspberry Pi.
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It’s time for young tech creators to share with the world what they’ve made! Coolest Projects Global 2022 registration is NOW OPEN. Starting today, young people can register their technology creation on the Coolest Projects Global website, where it will be featured in the online showcase gallery for the whole world to see.
By registering a tech project, you’ll represent your community, and you’ll get the coolest, limited-edition swag. You may even win a prize and earn the recognition of the special project judges.
Now in its 10th year, Coolest Projects is all about celebrating young people and what they create with code. Here’s what you need to know:
Here are just a few of the reasons why young tech creators should register their project for the Coolest Projects Global showcase:
If you don’t have a tech project or an idea for one yet, you’ve got plenty of time to imagine and create, and we’re here to support you. Check out our guides to designing and building a tech creation — one that you’ll be proud to share with the Coolest Projects community in the online showcase gallery. And there’s no shortage of inspiration among the projects that young tech creators shared in last year’s showcase gallery.
We have a lot more exciting stuff to share about Coolest Projects Global in the coming months, so be sure to subscribe for email updates. Until next time… be cool, creators!
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For those of us living in the USA, February is Black History Month, our month-long celebration of Black history. This is an occasion to highlight the amazing accomplishments of Black Americans through time. Simply put, the possibilities are endless! Black history touches every area of our lives, and it is so important that we seize the opportunity to honor Black freedom fighters who fought for the equality and freedom of ALL people.
That’s why we encourage you to join us in celebrating Black History Month with the help of free, specially chosen coding and computing education resources. We’ve got something for everyone: whether you’re a learner, an educator, a volunteer, or any lover of tech, everyone can participate.
This month, we want to empower young people to think about how they can use code as a tool to celebrate Black history with innovation and creativity. We’ve designed a project card listing the perfect projects to jumpstart young learners’ imagination:
There are projects for beginner coders, as well as intermediate and advanced coders, in Scratch, Python, HTML/CSS, and Ruby plus Raspberry Pi.
We’re working on research to better understand how to support the Black community and other underrepresented communities to engage with computer science.
Take some time this month to explore the following resources to make sure we’re growing into a more diverse and inclusive community:
Uplifting Black voices is one of the best things we can all do this February in observance of Black History Month. We’ve had the privilege of hearing from members in our community about their experiences in tech, and their stories are incredibly insightful and inspiring.
Happy Black History Month! Share with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram how you’re celebrating in your community.
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Today we bring you the sixth film in our series of inspirational community stories. It’s wonderful to share how people all across the world are getting creative with tech and solving problems that matter to them.
Our next community story comes from Drogheda, Ireland, where a group of programmers set up one of the country’s very, very first CoderDojo coding clubs for young people. One of that Dojo’s attendees was Cian Martin Bohan, whose story we’re sharing today.
“I can’t create anything I want in real life, but I can create anything I want on a computer.”
Cian Martin Bohan
Watch Cian’s video to find out how this keen programmer went from his first experience with coding at his local CoderDojo as an 11-year-old, to landing a Software Engineering apprenticeship at Google.
Cian (20) vividly remembers the first time he heard about CoderDojo as a shy 11-year-old: he initially told his dad he felt too nervous to attend. What Cian couldn’t have known back then was that attending CoderDojo would set him on an exciting journey of creative digital making and finding life-long friends.
Right from the beginning, the CoderDojo gave Cian space to make friends and develop his coding skills and his curiosity about creating things with technology. He started to attend the Dojo regularly, and before long he had created his own website about the planets in our solar system with basic CSS and HTML.
“I made a website that talked about the planets, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. In fact, I actually still have that website.”
Cian Martin Bohan
In over 6 years of being part of his CoderDojo community, Cian was able to share his passion for programming with others and grow his confidence.
From meeting like-minded peers and developing apps and websites, to serving as a youth member on the Digital Youth Council, Cian embraced the many experiences that CoderDojo opened up for him. They were all of great benefit when he decided to apply for an apprenticeship at Google.
As someone who didn’t follow the university route of education, Cian’s time at CoderDojo and the mentors he met there had a profound impact on his life and his career path. His CoderDojo mentors always encouraged Cian to learn new skills and follow his interests, and in this way they not only helped him reach his current position at Google, but also instilled in him a steady desire to always keep learning.
The future is limitless for Cian, and we cannot wait to hear what he does next.
Help us celebrate Cian, and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by liking and sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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In Hello World issue 17, Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Cat Lamin talks about how building connections and sharing the burden can help make us better educators, even in times of great stress:
In March 2020, the world suddenly changed. For educators, we jumped from face-to-face teaching to a stark new landscape, with no idea of how the future would look. As generous teachers pushed out free resources, I felt like I needed to play my part. Suddenly, an idea struck me. In September 2017, I had decided to be brave and submit a talk to PyConUK to discuss my mental health. Afterwards, several people in the audience shared their own stories with me or let me know that it helped them just to hear that someone else struggled too. I realised that in times of pressure, we need a chance to talk and we had lost these outlets. In school, we would pop to the staffroom or a friend’s classroom for a quick vent, but that wasn’t an option anymore. People were feeling isolated, scared, stressed and didn’t have anyone to turn to.
I realised that in times of pressure, we need a chance to talk, and we had lost these outlets.
Cat Lamin
Thus, the first Global Google Educator Group Staffroom: Mental Health Matters was launched on 14 March 2020, which coincided with the US government announcing school closures and UK teachers still waiting anxiously to hear when doors would close. The aim of Staffroom was to give teachers a safe space to talk about how they’re feeling under the overwhelming weight of school closures. To say it was a success would be an understatement, with teachers joining the calls from Australia, Malaysia, the USA, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Europe and more!
“Staffroom for me is a place and time to connect with other teachers from around the world. I remember seeing the calendar invites by mail and I kept thinking I should join but was afraid to do it. The first time I did it, I listened first and it made me realize that my struggles during pandemic online teaching were the same struggles as everywhere else.” – Pily Hernandez, Monterrey, Mexico
In those early days, we just gave teachers a chance to talk. The format of our meetings was simple: what’s your name, where are you from, and then an ice breaker question like ‘What colour do you feel like?’ or ‘What song represents your current mood?’ It wasn’t long before we hit upon a winning formula by making our own ‘Which image are you today?’ picture scale (see the ‘Which William’ image below!). Using the picture scales allowed people to really express how they felt. Often someone who had been happily chatting would explain that they were actually struggling to keep their head above water because a silly image allowed them to be honest.
One of the most important messages from Staffroom was that many people involved with technology in schools were feeling alone. After years of suggesting teachers use technology, suddenly they were blamed for schools not being properly prepared. They were struggling with not necessarily knowing what to suggest to teachers with technology difficulties, as they were grappling with their own personal lockdown situations. Hearing that other people, all around the world, were experiencing something similar was hugely eye-opening and took a great amount of weight off their shoulders.
“As someone who thrived from having in person connections and networking opportunities, lockdown hit me hard. Staffroom really helped to keep those connections going and has developed into such a lovely safe space to talk and connect with others.” – Abid Patel, London, UK
We varied the tone of the sessions depending on the needs of the attendees. In the first few months, we shared our lockdown situations and our different experiences across the world. We could share advice and tips, as well as best practice for delivering content and things that had gone terribly wrong since switching to remote teaching. Or we’d discuss food in different countries around the world (did you know that in Australia, fish and chips is made from shark?) or joke about whether Vegemite was actually an edible product (it’s ok, I tried it live on camera during one Staffroom). Other days, we would discuss how difficult we were finding teaching, isolation or life in general during a pandemic.
One of the things that people continuously mentioned was that Staffroom was a safe place where they felt they could share, be listened to, and be understood. We made it clear that no one had to speak unless they wanted to. I made a point of always being completely honest about my own mental health. As a person who had suffered from depression and anxiety in the past, it was no surprise to me when I was diagnosed with both near the end of 2020, and I was fortunate enough to get virtual therapy. I shared my story with the group, which allowed attendees to feel more comfortable being open and talking about their own struggles, in some cases leading to their own diagnosis and getting much-needed support.
“Staffroom has been the best ‘out of my comfort zone’ leap that I have ever taken. I have met educators from all over the world and learned that there are more things that unite us than divide us in this world of education.” – Frederick Ballew, Minnesota, USA
People would join Staffroom to share new jobs, engagements, even cross-country moves, but equally they would join after losing a loved one or hearing of a pupil sick in hospital. Staffroom became a safe haven for teachers, coaches, IT directors, and pretty much anyone involved in technology within education. It is a place where we could bond over shared experience, share a joke, ask questions, get ideas, and even plan our futures.
Do not underestimate the power of connections, and of sharing your story.
Cat Lamin
Alongside Staffroom, I also built a website to allow teachers to share their mental health stories and to feel a little less alone (mentalhealthineducation.com). I continue to host regular Staffrooms, although less frequently. 18 months ago, we needed a chance to talk three times a week, but now we meet two or three times a month instead. You can find current Staffroom dates at www.globalgeg.org/events. If you take one thing away from this article, however, it is this: do not underestimate the power of connections, and of sharing your story.
Cat Lamin is a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator, CAS Master Teacher, and Google Certified Innovator who works as a freelance trainer and coach, supporting schools with digital strategy and enabling educators to use technology more effectively. For running this regular mental health staffroom, she was awarded a Mental Health Champion Award from Edufuturist.
Your insights are invaluable to help us make Hello World as useful as it can be for computing educators around the globe. Hello World is a magazine for educators from educators — so if you are interested in having a 20-minute chat with me about what you like about the magazine, and what you would like to change, then please sign up here. I look forward to speaking with you.
The brand-new issue of our free Hello World magazine for computing educators focuses on all things health and well-being.
It is full of inspiring stories and practical ideas for teaching your learners about computing in this context, and supporting them to use digital technologies in beneficial ways.
Download the new issue of Hello World for free today:
To never miss a new issue, you can subscribe to Hello World for free. Also check out the first-ever special edition of Hello World, The Big Book of Pedagogy. It focuses on approaches to teaching computing in the classroom, and you can download the special edition for free.
Wherever you are in the world, you can listen to our Hello World podcast too! Each episode, we explore a new topic with some of the computing educators who’ve written for the magazine.
The post Cat Lamin on building a global educator family | Hello World #17 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
On the occasion of Black History Month UK, we speak to Joe Arday, Computer Science teacher at Woodbridge High School in Essex, UK, about his experiences in computing education, his thoughts about underrepresentation of Black students in the subject, and his ideas about what needs to be done to engage more Black students.
For me personally it’s an opportunity to celebrate our culture, but my view is it shouldn’t be a month — it should be celebrated every day. I am of Ghanaian descent, so Black History Month is an opportunity to share my culture in my school and my community. Black History Month is also an opportunity to educate yourself about what happened to the generations before you. For example, my parents lived through the Brixton riots. I was born in 1984, and I got to secondary school before I heard about the Brixton riots from a teacher. But my mother made sure that, during Black History Month, we went to a lot of extracurricular activities to learn about our culture.
For me it’s about embracing the culture I come from, being proud to be Black, and sharing that culture with the next generation, including my two kids, who are of mixed heritage. They need to know where they come from, and know their two cultures.
So I was a tech professional in the finance sector, and I was made redundant when the 2008 recession hit. I did a couple of consulting jobs, but I thought to myself, “I love tech, but in five years from now, do I really want to be going from job to job? There must be something else I can do.”
At that time there was a huge drive to recruit more teachers to teach what was called ICT back then and is now Computing. As a result, I started my career as a teacher in 2010. As a former software consultant, I had useful skills for teaching ICT. When Computing was introduced instead, I was fortunate to be at a school that could bring in external CPD (continued professional development) providers to teach us about programming and build our understanding and skills to deliver the new curriculum. I also did a lot of self-study and spoke to lots of teachers at other schools about how to teach the subject.
Not really — I had to seek them out. In my environment, there are very few Black teachers, and I was often the only Black Computer Science teacher. A parent once said to me, “I hope you’re not planning to leave, because my son needs a role model in Computer Science.” And I understood exactly what she meant by that, but I’m not even a role model, I’m just someone who’s contributing to society the best way I can. I just want to pave the way for the next generation, including my children.
My current school is supporting me to lead all the STEM engagement for students, and in that role, some of the things I do are running a STEM club that focuses a lot on computing, and running new programmes to encourage girls into tech roles. I’ve also become a CAS Master Teacher and been part of a careers panel at Queen Mary University London about the tech sector, for hundreds of school students from across London. And I was selected by the National Centre for Computing Education as one of their facilitators in the Computer Science Accelerator CPD programme.
But there’s been a lack of leadership opportunities for me in schools. I’ve applied for middle-leadership roles and have been told my face doesn’t fit in an interview in a previous school. And I’m just as skilled and experienced as other candidates: I’ve been acting Head of Department, acting Head of Year — what more do I need to do? But I’ve not had access to middle-leadership roles. I’ve been told I’m an average teacher, but then I’ve been put onto dealing with “difficult” students if they’re Black, because a few of my previous schools have told me that I was “good at dealing with behaviour”. So that tells you about the role I was pigeonholed into.
It is very important for Black students to have role models, and to have a curriculum that reflects them.
Joe Arday
I’ve never worked for a Black Headteacher, and the proportion of Black teachers in senior leadership positions is very low, only 1%. So I am considering moving into a different area of computing education, such as edtech or academia, because in schools I don’t have the opportunities to progress because of my ethnicity.
I think it is, that’s why the number of Black teachers is so low. And as a Black student of Computer Science considering a teaching role, I would look around my school and think, if I go into teaching, where are the opportunities going to come from?
There’s a lack of role models across the board: in schools, but also in tech leadership roles, CEOs and company directors. And the interest of Black students isn’t fostered early on, in Year 8, Year 9 (ages 12–14). If they don’t have a teacher who is able to take them to career fairs or to tech companies, they’re not going to get exposure, they’re not going to think, “Oh, I can see myself doing that.” So unless they have a lot of interest already, they’re not going to pick Computer Science when it comes to choosing their GCSEs, because it doesn’t look like it’s for them.
But we need diverse people in computing and STEM, especially girls. As the father of a boy and a girl of mixed heritage, that’s very important to me. Some schools I’ve worked in, they pushed computer science into the background, and it’s such a shame. They don’t have the money or the time for their teachers to do the CPD to teach it properly. And if attitudes at the top are negative, that’s going to filter down. But even if students don’t go into the tech industry, they still need digital skills to go into any number of sectors. Every young person needs them.
It is very important for Black students to have role models, and to have a curriculum that reflects them. Students need to see themselves in their lessons and not feel ignored by what is being taught. I was very fortunate to be selected for the working group for the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s culturally relevant teaching guidelines, and I’m currently running some CPD for teachers around this. I bet in the future Ofsted will look at how diverse the curriculum of schools is.
I think tech organisations need to work with schools and offer work experience placements. When I was a student, 20 years ago, I went on a placement, and that set me on the right path. Nowadays, many students don’t do work experience, they are school leavers before they do an internship. So why do so many schools and organisations not help 14- or 15-year-olds spend a week or two doing a placement and learning some real-life skills?
And I think it’s very important for teachers to be able to keep up to date with the latest technologies so they can support their students with what they need to know when they start their own careers, and can be convincing doing it. I encourage my GCSE Computer Science students to learn about things like cloud computing and cybersecurity, about the newest types of technologies that are being used in the tech sector now. That way they’re preparing themselves. And if I was a Headteacher, I would help my students gain professional certifications that they can use when they apply for jobs.
Teachers could run a STEM or computing club with a Black History Month theme to get Black students interested — and it doesn’t have to stop at Black History Month. And you can make computing cross-curricular, so there could be a project with all teachers, where each one runs a lesson that involves a bit of coding, so that all students can see that computing really is for everyone.
Because of my role working for the NCCE, I always encourage teachers to join the NCCE’s Computer Science Accelerator programme and to retrain to teach Computer Science. It’s a beautiful subject, all you need to do is give it a chance.
Thank you, Joe, for sharing your thoughts with us!
Joe was part of the group of teachers we worked with to create our practical guide on culturally relevant teaching in the computing classroom. You can download it as a free PDF now to help you think about how to reflect all your students in your lessons.
The post Engaging Black students in computing at UK schools — interview with Joe Arday appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We are inviting you all to a very special event this week: the CoderDojo team is hosting a 10th birthday livestream to celebrate the CoderDojo community and all that they have achieved over the last ten years.
Everyone is welcome, so mark your diary and make sure you and your favourite young coders join us for all the fun at 18:00 BST this Thursday, 28 October!
Together we will hear stories from young people and volunteers around the world, and from James Whelton and Bill Liao, the co-founders of CoderDojo.
In July 2011, James Whelton and Bill Liao held the first-ever CoderDojo session in Cork, Ireland. They created a space for young people to learn how to create a website, design a game, or write their first program. The session was also a chance for volunteers to share their experience and time with a younger generation and their peers. It was here that the CoderDojo grassroots community came into existence, built on the values of ‘being cool’: creativity, collaboration, openness, and fun.
These values continue to inspire young people (Ninjas) and volunteers around the world to be part of their local Dojos. In 2017, the CoderDojo Foundation, which was founded to support the CoderDojo movement, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation joined forces to better support the community to bring opportunities to more young people worldwide.
The tenth year of the movement is an especially important time for us to celebrate the volunteers who have put so much into CoderDojo. As well as the livestream celebration on 28 October, the CoderDojo team has put together free digital assets to get volunteers and Ninjas in the birthday spirit, and a special birthday giveaway for Ninjas who are coding projects to mark this momentous anniversary.
In celebration of the CoderDojo movement’s 10th birthday, here’s a list of some of our favourite things about the CoderDojo community.
Whether you’re working together in person or online, you are always having a blast!
The pandemic has been an extremely difficult time for Dojos. It has also been a time of adaptation. We have been so impressed by how community members have switched their ways of running with positivity and commitment to 6. do what is best for their clubs.
Every day, Dojo volunteers support each other locally and globally to sustain the movement and help Ninjas learn — from sharing how they run sessions when social distancing is necessary, to translating online resources and web pages so that more people around the world can join the CoderDojo community.
“We know that we’re not out there alone, that there’s a whole world of people who are all collaborating with the same mission in mind is really thrilling as well.”
Nikole Vaughn, CoderDojo Collaborative in San Antonio, Texas
Filling in surveys, emailing the CoderDojo team here, attending webinars, sharing your insights — these are all the ways you’re great at communicating your Dojo’s needs. We love supporting you!
We love to hear about how CoderDojo volunteers help young people to create and learn with technology, and to become mentors for their peers. Recently we shared the stories of Avye, Laura, and Toshan, three incredible digital makers who, thanks to CoderDojo, are using technology to shape the world around them.
From coding for the CoderDojo 10th birthday giveaway to the European Astro Pi Challenge, CoderDojo members love to put themselves to the test!
Coolest Projects is the world-leading technology fair for young people, and it originated in the CoderDojo community!
This year, in its ninth year running, Coolest Projects again was a platform for fantastic tech projects from Ninjas, including an AI bicycle app and a glove that makes music.
CoderDojo is a space for everyone to create and learn with technology. We love that Dojos get involved in projects such as the ‘Empowering the future’ guide to getting more girls involved in coding, and the CoderDojo Accessibility Guide to making Dojo sessions accessible for young people of all abilities and neurodiversity.
Over the last ten years, more than 3900 Dojos in 115 countries have run sessions for over 270000 young people and have been regularly supporting 100000 young coders! You’ve certainly brought the movement a long way from that very first session in Cork.
All the volunteers who have put their time and energy into CoderDojo have made the movement what it is today, and we’d like to say a massive thank you to each and every one of you.
So prepare your favourite celebratory food and join us for the birthday livestream on Thursday 28 October at 18:00 BST! Take this chance to say hi to community members and celebrate everything that they have achieved in the last ten years.
Set a reminder for the livestream, and tell us how you are celebrating CoderDojo’s 10th birthday using the hashtag #10YearsOfCoderDojo on Twitter.
The post Celebrate CoderDojo’s 10th birthday with us! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
On the occasion of Black History Month UK, we speak to Lynda Chinaka, Senior Lecturer in Computing in Education at the University of Roehampton, about her experiences in computing education, her thoughts about underrepresentation of Black students in the subject, and her ideas about what needs to be done to engage more Black students.
Black history is a really important topic, obviously, and I think that, when Black History Month was first introduced, it was very powerful — and it continues to be in certain places. But I think that, for where we are as a society, it’s time to move past talking about Black history for only one month of the year, albeit an important, focused celebration. And certainly that would include integrating Black history and Black figures across subjects in school. That would be a very useful way to celebrate the contributions that Black people have made, and continue to make, to society. Children need to be taught a history in which they are included and valued. Good history is always a matter of different perspectives. Too often in schools, children experience a single perspective.
In terms of my journey, I’ve always been passionate about Computing — formerly ICT. I’ve been a Computing subject lead in schools, moving on into senior management. Beyond my career in schools, I have worked as an ICT consultant and as a Teacher Leader for a London authority. During that time, my interest in Computing/ICT led me to undertake an MA in Computing in Education at King’s College London. This led me to become a teacher trainer in my current role. In some sense, I’m carrying on the work I did with the local authorities, but in a university setting. At the University of Roehampton, I teach computing to BA Primary Education and PGCE students. Training teachers is something that I’m very much interested in. It’s about engaging student teachers, supporting them in developing their understanding of Computing in the primary phases. Students learn about the principles of computing, related learning theories, and how children think and learn. Perhaps more importantly, I am keen to instil a love of the subject and broaden their notions about computing.
In terms of the support I’ve received, I’ve worked in certain schools where Computing was really valued by the Headteacher, which enabled me to promote my vision for the subject. Supportive colleagues made a difference in their willingness take on new initiatives that I presented. I have been fortunate to work in local authorities that have been forward-thinking; one school became a test bed for Computing. So in that sense, schools have supported me. But as a Black person, a Black woman in particular, I would say that I faced barriers throughout my career. And those barriers have been there since childhood. In the Black community, people experience all sorts of things, and prejudice and barriers have been at play in my career.
Prejudice sometimes is very overt. An example I think I can share because it prevented me from getting a job: I went for an interview in a school. It was a very good interview, the Headteacher told me, “It was fantastic, you’re amazing, you’re excellent,” the problem was that there weren’t “enough Black pupils”, so she “didn’t see the need…”. And this is a discussion that was shared with me. Now in 2021 a Headteacher wouldn’t say that, but let’s just wind the clock back 15 years. These are the kinds of experiences that you go through as a Black teacher.
So what happens is, you tend to build up a certain resilience. People’s perceptions and low expectations of me have been a hindrance. This can be debilitating. You get tired of having to go through the same thing, of having to overcome negativity. Yes, I would say this has limited my progress. Obviously, I am speaking about my particular experiences as a Black woman, but I would say that these experiences are shared by many people like me.
But it’s my determination and the investment I’ve made that has resulted in me staying in the field. And a source of support for me is always Black colleagues, they understand the issues that are inherent within the profession.
There need to be more Black teachers, because children need to see themselves represented in schools. As a Black teacher, I know that I have made a difference to Black children in my class who had a Black role model in front of them. When we talk about the poor performance of Black pupils, we need to be careful not to blame them for the failures of the education system. Policy makers, Headteachers, teachers, and practitioners need to be a lot more self-aware and examine the impact of racism in education. People need to examine their own policies and practice, especially people in positions of power.
A lot of collective work needs to be done.
Lynda Chinaka
Some local authorities do better than others, and some Headteachers I’ve worked with have been keen to build a diverse staff team. Black people are not well-represented at all in education. Headteachers need to be more proactive about their staff teams and recruitment. And they need to encourage Black teachers to go for jobs in senior management.
In all settings I taught in, no matter how many students of colour there were, these students would experience something in my classroom that their white counterparts had experienced all their lives: they would leave their home and come to school and be taught by someone who looks like them and perhaps speaks the same language as them. It’s enormously affirming for children to have that experience. And it’s important for all children actually, white children as well. Seeing a Black person teaching in the classroom, in a position of power or influence — it changes their mindset, and that ultimately changes perspectives.
So in terms of that route into Computing, Black students need to see themselves represented.
It’s absolutely vital to teach children about Computing. As adults, they are going to participate in a future that we know very little about, so I think it’s important that they’re taught computer science approaches, problem solving and computational thinking. So children need to be taught to be creators and not simply passive users of technology.
One of the things some of my university students say is, “Oh my goodness, I can’t teach Computing, all the children know much more than me.”, but actually, that’s a little bit of a myth, I think. Children are better at using technologies than solving computing problems. They need to learn a range of computational approaches for solving problems. Computing is a life skill; it is the future. We saw during the pandemic the effects of digital inequity on pupils.
In education, we need to look at the curriculum and how to decolonise it to really engage young people. This also includes looking out for bias and prejudice in the things that are taught. Even when you’re thinking about specific computer science topics. So for example, the traditional example for algorithm design is making a cup of tea. But tea is a universal drink, it originates in China, and as a result of colonialism made its way to India and Kenya. So we drink tea universally, but the method (algorithm) for making tea doesn’t necessarily always include a china tea pot or a tea bag. There are lots of ways to introduce it, thinking about how it’s prepared in different cultures, say Kenya or the Punjab, and using that as a basis for developing children’s algorithmic thinking. This is culturally relevant. It’s about bringing the interests and experiences children have into the classroom.
For children to be engaged in Computing, there needs to be a payoff for them. For example, I’ve seen young people developing their own African emojis. They need to see a point to it! They don’t necessarily have to become computer scientists or software engineers, but Computing should be an avenue that opens for them because they can see it as something to further their own aims, their own causes. Young people are very socially and politically aware. For example, Black communities are very aware of the way that climate change affects the Global South and could use data science to highlight this. Many will have extended family living in these regions that are affected now.
So you don’t compromise on the quality of your teaching, and it require teachers to be more reflective. There is no quick fix. For example, you can’t just insert African masks into a lesson without exploring their meaning in real depth within the culture they originate from.
So in your Computing or Computer Science lessons, you need to include topics young people are interested in: climate change, discrimination, algorithms and algorithmic bias in software, surveillance and facial recognition. Social justice topics are close to their hearts. You can get them interested in AI and data science by talking about the off-the-shelf datasets that Big Tech uses, and about what impact these have in terms of surveillance and on minority communities specifically.
‘Culturally relevant’ is easier to sit with. ‘Decolonising the curriculum’ provokes a reaction, but it’s really about teaching children about histories and perspectives on curricula that affect us all. We need to move towards a curriculum that is fit for purpose where children are taught different perspectives and truth that they recognise. Even if you’re in a school without any Black children at all, the curriculum still needs to be decolonised so that children can actually understand and benefit from the many ways that topics, events, subjects may be taught.
When we think about learning in terms of being culturally relevant and responsive, this is about harnessing children’s heritage, experiences, and viewpoints to engage learners such that the curriculum is meaningful and includes them. The goal here is to promote long-term and consistent engagement with Computing.
Diversity initiatives are a good step, but we need to give it time.
The selection process for subjects at GCSE can sometimes affect the uptake of computing. Then there are individual attitudes and experiences of pupils. It has been documented that Black and Asian students have often been in the minority and experience marginalisation, particularly noted in the case of female students in GCSE Computer Science.
ITE (Initial Teacher Education) providers need to consider their partnerships with schools and support schools to be more inclusive. We need more Black teachers, as I said. We also need to democratise pathways for young people getting into computing and STEM careers. Applying to university is one way — there should be others.
Schools could also develop partnerships with organisations that have their roots in the Black community. Research has also highlighted discriminatory practices in careers advice, and in the application and interview processes of Russell Group universities. These need to be addressed.
There are too few Black academics at universities. This can have an impact on student choice and decisions about whether to attend an institution or not. Institutions may seem unwelcoming or unsympathetic. Higher education institutions need to eliminate bias through feedback and measuring course take-up.
Outside the field of education, tech companies could offer summer schemes, short programmes to stimulate interest amongst young Black people. Really, the people in leadership positions, all the people with the power, need to be proactive.
A lot of collective work needs to be done. It’s a whole pipeline, and everybody needs to play a part.
You can present children with Black pioneers in computing and tech. They can show Black children how to achieve their goals in life through computing. For example, create podcasts or make lists with various organisations that use data science to further specific causes.
It’s not a one-off, one teacher thing, it’s a project for the whole school.
Lynda Chinaka
Also, it’s not a one-off, one teacher thing, it’s project for the whole school. You need to build it into a whole curriculum map, do all the things you do to build a new curriculum map: get every teacher to contribute, so they take it on, own it, research it, make those links to the national curriculum so it’s relevant. Looking at it in isolation it’s a problem, but it’s a whole school approach that starts as a working group. And it’s senior management that sets the tone, and they really need to be proactive, but you can start by starting a working group. It won’t be implemented overnight. A bit like introducing a school uniform. Do it slowly, have a pilot year group. Get parents in, have a coffee evening, get school governors on board. It’s a whole staff team effort.
People need to recognise the size of the problem and not be discouraged by the fact that things haven’t happened overnight. But people who are in a position of influence need to start by having those conversations, because that’s the only way that change can happen, quite frankly.
Lynda, thank you for sharing your insights with us!
Lynda was one of the advisors in the group we worked with to create our recently published, practical guide on culturally relevant teaching. You can download it as a free PDF now. We hope it will help you kickstart conversations in your setting.
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I am delighted to announce the launch of raspberrypi.com — a new website dedicated to Raspberry Pi computers and associated technologies. Head on over to find all about our low-cost, high-performance PCs, add-on boards or HATs, microcontrollers, accessories, and much more.
As well as being able to learn about and purchase the full range of hardware products, on the new website you can download our latest software, find detailed technical documentation, connect with the community on the forums, and read the latest news about Raspberry Pi technologies and how they’re being used to change the world.
This website (raspberrypi.org) will continue to be the home for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and all of our educational initiatives to help young people learn about computers and how to create with digital technologies.
That includes online resources to help young people learn how to code, information about our networks of Code Clubs and CoderDojos, training and support for teachers and other educators, and access to the world’s leading-edge research into computing education.
You’ll still be able to find loads of resources about Raspberry Pi computers in education, and cool opportunities for young people to learn how to code and create with Raspberry Pi technologies, whether that’s our space programme Astro Pi, or building robots with Raspberry Pi Pico.
When raspberrypi.org was first launched as a WordPress blog in 2011, we were talking about a low-cost, programmable computer that was being designed for education.
Fast-forward a decade, and we are now speaking about an increasingly broad range of technology and education products and services to industry, hobbyists, educators, researchers, and young people. While there is lots of overlap between those communities and their interests, it is becoming increasingly difficult to address everyone’s needs on one website. So this change is really all about making life easier for you.
We will continue to provide lots of links and connections between the two sites to make sure that you can easily find what you’re looking for. As ever, we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below.
Alongside the changes to the websites, we’re also launching new social channels that are focused on the Foundation’s educational initiatives. We look forward to seeing you there.
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So far in our series of community stories, we’ve collaborated with young people from the UK, India, and Romania who are getting creative with technology to change the world around them.
Our next community story comes from a highly regarded community member who has been connecting young people with opportunities to learn and create with technology throughout her career. A US-based educator with over twenty years of experience, Yolanda Payne shares our mission to put computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.
“The biggest reason I’m so invested in technology is because people invested in me.”
Yolanda Payne
Yolanda Payne is an educator you might recognise from our online courses. Based in Atlanta, Georgia in the USA, she’s passionate about making technology accessible to all and helping young people become technology creators.
Yolanda says, “The biggest reason I’m so invested in technology is because people invested in me. They saw something that I was good at, showed me opportunities, and so in turn, that was my philosophy in teaching.”
Yolanda got her first computer at a young age and was hooked instantly: it opened up many new opportunities and led her to choosing a career in education. She says, “The computer gives me the tools to be an artist, it gives me the tools to create things, and if it does that for me, then just imagine what it will do for kids!”
“If you give a teacher a Raspberry Pi and show them these resources, they’re going to be hooked.”
Yolanda Payne
Yolanda has spent her entire professional life dedicated to education. She gained a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Mississippi University for Women; a master’s degree in Instructional Technology from Mississippi State University; and Educational Specialist degrees from the University of Florida and the University of Georgia in Curriculum and Instruction, and in Language and Literacy.
Throughout her twenty-one years as a classroom teacher and her time running Code Clubs, Yolanda found joy in supporting students who have multiple challenges or complex needs, and in seeing them thrive in the subject of computer science. Yolanda points out, “I worked with both students that were considered to be in special education and students that were gifted. And one of the biggest things that I saw that I don’t think people realise, especially about students in special education: they are used to solving problems. […] You’d be very surprised at how real-life problem-solving skills flow very easily into computer science.”
Yolanda now works as a Research Associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We are tremendously thankful for her contributions as an educator and an advocate for technology and young people.
Please join us in celebrating her story by sharing it on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook!
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It’s an incredibly sad day for the British computing industry.
We’re always going to be very grateful to Sir Clive for being one of the founding fathers of the UK home computing boom that helped so many of us at Raspberry Pi get hooked on programming as kids.
He was someone from whom the business behind Raspberry Pi has drawn great inspiration. He’ll be very sadly missed.
The post Sir Clive Sinclair, 1940-2021 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Today we bring you the fourth film in our series of inspirational community stories! Incredible young people from the community have collaborated with us to create these videos, where they tell their tech stories in their own words.
Watch the new film to meet a “mischievous” tech creator who is helping other young people in his community to use technology to bring their ideas to life.
Toshan’s story takes place in his hometown of Bangalore, India, where his love for electronics and computing sent him on a journey of tech discovery!
Toshan (16) first encountered coding aged 12, thanks to his computing teacher Miss Sonya. Describing his teacher, he says: “The unique thing is, she just doesn’t stop where the syllabus ends.” The world of digital making and Raspberry Pi computers that Miss Sonya introduced him to offered Toshan “limitless opportunities”, and he felt inspired to throw himself into learning.
“If we help people with their ideas, they might bring something new into the world.”
Toshan
Having found help in his local community and the online Raspberry Pi Foundation community that enabled him to start his tech journey, Toshan decided to pass on his skills: he set up a CoderDojo for other young people in Bangalore when he was 14. Toshan says, “I wanted to give something back.” Mentoring others as they learn coding and digital making helped his confidence grow. Toshan loves supporting the learners at his Dojo with problem-solving because “if we help people with their ideas, they might bring something new into the world.”
Supported by his mum and dad, Toshan’s commitment to helping others create with technology is leading him to extend his community beyond the city he calls home. Through his YouTube channel, he reaches people outside of Bangalore, and he has connected with a worldwide community of like-minded young tech creators by taking part in Coolest Projects online 2020 with an automated hand sanitiser he built.
Toshan’s enthusiasm and love for tech are already motivating him to empower others, and he has only just begun! We are delighted to be a part of his journey and can’t wait to see what he does next.
Help us celebrate Toshan by liking and sharing his story on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook!
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Laura Kampf, the Köln-based wood and metalworker with a mild tiny house and Leatherman obsession sat down (virtually) with Alex Bate to talk about prison tattoo machines, avoiding your nightmares, and why aggressive hip-hop and horror movies inspire her weekly project builds.
Smudo the workshop dog was also there, which seems to be becoming a recurring and pleasant feature of HackSpace magazine interviews.
Laura: Yeah, that’s absolutely it. I mean, I document it for YouTube because I’m aware that this is the only place for me. And the documentation, that’s the work part, like setting up the camera, thinking about the story. But the physical work of building something, that’s a form of meditation. That’s just my happy place. And I know I have to document my work because I have to do something to make a living, right? I can’t just play. So YouTube is my work. But making is just, it’s just what I do, and I feel more and more that this is the only place for me.
And this is probably how musicians feel when they are performing on stage. You know, this – being in my shop, I feel so comfortable. And I feel so good. I don’t have that anywhere else.
My brother is super-creative, but my parents, not so much. My grandfather was an engineer. So I think
it kind of skipped a generation.
In design school, there was a project where we had to build something out of everyday objects. And it was for us, the designers, to get away from the computers and just do something with our hands. I built a tattoo machine, like a prison-style tattoo machine. And I was hooked. I remember coming home and I was so moved by the whole thing. Even though the machine looks terrible, everything fell into place.
Because all my life, people were telling me you need to find this one thing that you’re really good at and then just keep doing that. I think it’s also a German thing, you know, like, be perfect at one thing, and then you’ll be the best in your field. And I could never focus on one thing and building this tattoo machine; there were so many different things coming together.
I had all this interest in so many different fields and I could use them for the project – I enjoyed drawing fonts and learned how to do old-school tattoo lettering, and I could do a little bit of electronics to hook up a switch. All these things, I thought it was super-interesting. It was the first time I could just use little bits of everything I knew to make something that was really cool, and I was hooked after that.
I wanted to and then, thank God, because I was really young, it’s very likely that I would have done that, a tattoo artist came by and I showed him the machine, and he was like, “Don’t do it. It’s running way too fast. You will make mincemeat out of your skin”. But I bought pigs legs and pig’s ears and tattooed them. I couldn’t eat pig for probably two years after that. It was so warm, and tattooing the piece for a couple hours, the fat was running out of it – it was disgusting.
Looking back, I remember the little things that I made; when I showed them to people, they just didn’t show the same excitement for them as I did. And it was such a disappointment until I realised that no, the stuff I was making was really bad. That’s why no one was excited, because I didn’t know what I was doing. Once I got better and better, and especially with YouTube and talking to the community – well, I’m preaching to the choir here; everyone knows making is fantastic, and we have a very focused, niche community – and they get it.
I didn’t to begin with, I have to say. In the beginning, I felt more that it wasn’t about me, it was about the things that I make, and my sexuality and my gender don’t play a role in this. I don’t think about my sexuality all day long; I don’t think about the fact I’m a girl all day long, so why would it be in my videos? But I have to say that I changed my mind about these things. Because visibility is really important.
I had this really weird experience at the 10 Maker event a few years ago. I was wearing this T-shirt I got for free on one Christopher Street Day, it says ‘Gay Okay’. I love that shirt; it’s a really nice fit. I went to get some groceries with Brett from Skull and Spade and Hassan from HABU, and there was this girl, maybe eleven or twelve years old, and she saw me wearing that shirt, hanging out with regular dudes, doing regular stuff in a regular supermarket, and her jaw dropped. We were in the countryside, you don’t see things like rainbow flags there. And I could tell she’s maybe gay too, and it was so good for her to see that. There’s nothing different about you – you can still hang out with guys, you can still, you know, go shopping and all these things. That’s when I realised, institutions like Christopher Street Day are so important, but it’s also important to just have it integrated into regular stuff, not just special occasions. Today’s International Women’s Day? Well, we need to celebrate girls every day; every day you need to celebrate these things.
So, I kind of made it a habit to have rainbow flags in my videos. Not every video, and never super-obvious, but in the background, when I talk to the camera sometimes. I do wear my Gay Okay shirt every once in a while. I don’t want to make it a point because people like to put you in drawers. And, once you’re the queer maker, you’re the queer maker, and that’s all people want to talk about. And I don’t want that because I still think, at the end of the day, it’s about the things I build and not about me and my sexuality and gender. But, yeah, to just sprinkle it in every once in a while, I think it’s very important.
I don’t get much negativity about this. I was surprised, pleasantly so, obviously, but yeah, a couple of days ago, I wore my Gay Okay t-shirt in my Instagram Stories, and people applauded me for it, and that’s really interesting. I would never have thought that.
I think, at the beginning of my YouTube career, I was growing really fast and really, like, exponentially. And I had a couple of videos that went viral, like the beer bike, that went outside of the community. For those viral videos, you get negativity. They don’t know who you are, they don’t know the context, they don’t know what I’m doing. That’s why I hate having viral videos. It brings in the worst. I like to be in this little lake, surrounded by my followers.
Yeah, they take you out of context. Those people, they see one of my videos, they don’t know that I’m building something. And that’s another interesting thing that your community learns about you. They know I build something every week for the past six years. Every week, it can’t be the Holy Grail every freaking week. Sometimes it’s bad, but it’s stuff that I did that week – it’s documentation.
When I was a kid, I remember my mind was blown that The Simpsons had a different intro every episode. Something different happens every time. I couldn’t believe that, and how much work went into it. I think it primed me for being a weekly creator.
Haha, but not every video is a good idea. Some of them are really bad ideas. But that’s my privilege, you know, that I can still do that. Because I have to, otherwise there wouldn’t be a video, and I love that because the pressure helps me keep going. And the process is the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re building a tiny house or a scratch post for a cat. The process is me, being in the shop, listening to podcasts, listening to music, enjoying my tools, playing with the material – it’s all the same, it doesn’t really matter.
So, the public bench stuff that I’ve been doing lately, I get so many questions like, “Oh no, how could you leave the bench” and, like, I don’t give a damn about the bench. It’s not the bench, it’s the process that I enjoy. I could literally throw everything that I build away – I could throw it in the trash right away. I wouldn’t mind. I’m so focused on the process.
I was expecting it to break eventually. And, to be honest, I was kinda hoping for it because I wanted to do it again. And, this time, I’m actually hoping for it to get broken again because I want to do it again.
Yeah, it’s a very broad description of this, but the craftsmanship in Germany is of a very high standard, right? At least we like to think so. So, if you want to be a carpenter, you’re first an apprentice for three years or so, then you can be a carpenter and work under a master carpenter. If you want to educate other apprentices, or if you want to sell certain furniture, I think chairs is one of them, then you have to be a master. And it’s the same for every field. I think the most plausible is electricians. If you are not a master electrician, you cannot, say, make a lamp and sell it.
But my interest is so general. I wanted to make lamps, but the notion of designing a lamp that’s made out of wood and then obviously has electricity in it, it’s just impossible.
I spoke to the TÜV and asked them, if I design a lamp and want to sell it in a store, how do I do it. And I would have to get it checked by their institution, which is a couple of hundred euros, and get a certificate. But I would have to do this for the next lamp design, and the next. And that makes them so expensive. I can’t sell a lamp for 150 euros if it costs me more than that to get it checked. I’m not interested in mass production, I want to make one-off pieces.
I had already quit my job when I discovered this and remember having a big knot in my stomach thinking, ‘what do I do?’, and YouTube was the answer.
Yeah, there are loopholes – this is not a lamp, this is art. But, when I quit my job to become a self-employed lamp seller, I really only quit my job because I hated working for other people, not because it was my dream to sell furniture and lamps. I didn’t know YouTube really existed as a thing for me, and once I figured out people were actually making money off this, I was like, OK, I need to get a camera, I need to give this a try. Because that would be better than building stuff to sell it. I wasn’t interested in selling stuff. I don’t want clients. I don’t want that pressure from anyone else except me, so YouTube worked out perfectly for me.
It was. It was a great job, but it wasn’t for me. It was probably the perfect job, but I am not a good employee. I was asked a couple of years ago if I would do a talk about my career and how I made this job for myself and followed my dreams, blah, blah. I don’t like ‘follow your dreams’. It was the other way around. I avoided my nightmares. That’s how I got here. I never dreamed of this, I didn’t know this existed. So, I think avoiding your nightmares is much more efficient than following your dreams.
It’s more, and this is hard to explain, but I have this internal measuring unit of how much work should go into a project. I know how much time I can put into a project, and there’s this bucket of work I’ve put into it, and depending on how full the bucket is determines how the project looks and whether I use pocket holes or dovetails, for example.
All YouTube. That’s the cool thing. It’s all full circle. There are some things – I had a couple of jobs where I learned some skills. I worked as a flight case builder for three years, just filling those black flight cases. Which sounds very, very trivial. It’s not though, It’s crazy. You have to work so precisely, otherwise, the catches won’t close and all these things, and everything is building boxes. So I learned a bunch of stuff there. It was my Karate Kid apprenticeship. But a lot of it is YouTube. I remember watching Jimmy DiResta – I saw his TV show online, and then I watched a bunch of his videos without realising it was the same guy. Eventually, I noticed he had a weekly schedule and a podcast, and it was all exactly what I needed to see and hear. Right when I quit my job and I couldn’t sell lamps, there were these people telling me that they do this for a living. It was perfect timing. I feel like I’m the second generation YouTuber and they’re the first.
I like to listen to a lot of hip-hop, like super-aggressive hip-hop that is the complete opposite of me and has nothing to do with my world. And I like to watch horror movies, super-scary and bloody horror movies. I like to explore the opposite of what I have. A view into a completely different world. The Fantasy Filmfest is a huge inspiration for me. These movies that go right to DVD; they don’t go into the big theatres. I like to think about how they got made? How did they think of that? That’s the biggest inspiration. And, with hip-hop, the personas, and why they feel like they do, and how do they come up with those lines. They’re in their own universe, they have their own rules. I just love that. It’s how I feel when I’m building stuff. I’m telling myself a story that I don’t know the ending of. I don’t like to make sketches, I don’t like to know if it works. If I see someone else had the idea and did a full video about it, I don’t even want to do the idea anymore. I want to have that unknown. This is the idea, this is the stuff you have, now try to make it happen.
I don’t know if you saw it on Instagram, but I bought a Multicar. It’s so good. It’s the slowest car ever; it is painfully slow – 45 kilometres an hour and that’s it. But it has torque; you can tow pretty much everything with it. So my plan is to take the world’s smallest pub that I built a couple months ago and put it on at the back of the Multicar.
Something is holding me back at the moment, though. I have all the parts, I should be able to do it, but I don’t know what it is. I experience that quite often – I have an idea, and everything should be good to go, but I’m not doing it. And then, eventually, it turns out I wasn’t sure about the colour, or something else that was missing that I didn’t know at the time. So I don’t push it. But that’s the project I’m looking forward to.
I don’t know. Like, that’s the one thing that I’m really scared of, like, what happens when I get sick? Because at the beginning of the year, I hired my best friend. So now we’re both relying on my mental and physical health. So I think it’s a good idea to broaden stuff and have more income streams. I love doing the TV stuff [Laura recently started presenting a new TV show], because whenever I’m working with the TV people, I think, like, oh man, I love YouTube. And, when I do too much YouTube, I start really looking forward to working with actual professionals again. It’s a cool balance. I kind of hope that I can keep doing this. You know, I think it’s really cool. And as I said, there’s no other place for me. Where would I go?
I think I would like to actually have a couple of products now. Some of the furniture I’m building, if you look at them in a different context to ‘this is just what I built this week’ and is only the product of seven days’ worth of work, I think some of those ideas aren’t that bad. And if you put some more work into them, they could be pieces that would sell. But I would want someone who takes the prototypes and does the whole production for me. I’m not interested in all that. But I think it would be cool to have a line of plywood furniture.
A newspaper interviewed me about the bench. And for the interview, they also approached the city saying, hey, wouldn’t you want to work with her? And you know, maybe collaborate on this because this might be a cool thing. And they said that they don’t have the personnel. But honestly, if they would have done it, that would have made it so boring. Working with somebody in an office telling me where the broken benches are so I can go and fix them. That’s a job.
Until I hit publish, I feel like that every week. It feels like I’m just making it for myself. I talk very positively about YouTube, and that’s genuinely how I feel about it, but sometimes it’s really hard on me because I’ll work seven days on a video, think it’s the best thing I ever did, and it makes me so happy. I’ll edit it for hours, sink all this time into it, all this energy, and then the video tanks, and it kinda ruins it for me. I’m in a super-good mood right now because the bench video did so well, and people understand what I’m trying to say. But, there are other cases where it doesn’t work as well, and where I feel like I’ve dropped the ball and couldn’t get my excitement across. And that’s always super-disappointing because I’m always excited about the stuff I make; I always have some angle I find super-interesting, otherwise, I’m not motivated to do it. And, when the video tanks, it makes me feel like I lost the opportunity to spread that excitement, to spread that motivation, and that feels like I wasted my time. And that’s the downside of YouTube.
I mean, I think every creator takes it in a different way. And you need to find a way to deal with this, and it’s really important to talk about it. This is my dream job and I can do whatever I want to do as long as I don’t drop the ball. I hired my friend, so now I can’t drop the ball for the both of us.
Laura Kampf produces a video every Sunday on her YouTube channel. You can also follow her on Instagram and, for any German-speaking readers, her podcast – Raabe & Kampf – with friend and journalist Melanie Raabe can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.
Each month, HackSpace magazine brings you the best projects, tips, tricks and tutorials from the makersphere. You can get it from the Raspberry Pi Press online store or your local newsagents.
As always, every issue is free to download from the HackSpace magazine website.
The post Meet Laura Kampf: Wood and metalworker appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We love seeing all the wonderful things people are doing in the community — that’s why we’re sharing our new series of short films documenting some of the incredible journeys of community members in all corners of the globe!
Today we bring you the third wonderful film in this series of community stories. For the series, we’ve been super lucky to collaborate with digital makers all over the world, and today’s story exemplifies how truly global the community is.
Watch our video to find out how this ambitious young digital maker’s passion for creating with technology has propelled her around the world!
Laura’s journey began in her hometown of Timișoara, Romania. In Laura’s words: “I joined my local CoderDojo, and it changed my life.”
Laura (17) started attending her CoderDojo coding club four years ago because she loves problem-solving and wanted to learn more about how digital technology works. Her biggest discovery at CoderDojo, however, was the other young people there, who were just as passionate about technology as she was. Laura says, “I had the opportunity to meet people with the same interests. Everybody was working, exchanging ideas, having fun!”
Laura and the new friends she made worked together to solve problems in their local community: they built an autonomous waste-collecting robot and a drone-mounted air pollution monitor.
“I want to bring a change to the world.”
Laura
But Laura’s tech journey did not stop there. In 2017, she travelled to Dublin to present her latest project — a Raspberry Pi-powered, mind-controlled robot! — at Coolest Projects International, which introduced her to a global community of digital makers. And since then she’s even taken part in a robotics competition at MIT!
Working alongside like-minded peers and connecting with a global community of young tech creators has had a profound impact on Laura. She says, “I never imagined that I would have so many opportunities to travel, expand my horizons, and meet so many people. It’s thanks to CoderDojo and Coolest Projects that I’ve been able to build an amazing network of friends, and together we’re ready to take on the world.”
We are so excited to see what Laura will do next. Help us celebrate Laura by liking and sharing her story on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook!
The post Celebrating the community: Laura appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We’re excited to share another incredible story from the community — the second in our new series of inspirational short films that celebrate young tech creators across the world.
These stories showcase some of the wonderful things that young people are empowered to do when they learn how to create with technology. We hope that they will inspire many more young people to get creative with technology too!
This time, you will meet an accomplished, young community member who is on a quest to encourage more girls to join her and get into digital making.
For as long as she can remember, Avye (13) has enjoyed creating things. It was at her local CoderDojo that seven-year-old Avye was introduced to the world of robotics. Avye’s second-ever robot, the Raspberry Pi–powered Voice O’Tronik Bot, went on to win the Hardware category at our Coolest Projects UK event in 2018.
Coding and digital making have become an integral part of Avye’s life, and she wants to help other girls discover these skills too. She says, “I believe that it’s important for girls and women to see and be aware of ordinary girls and women doing cool things in the STEM world.” Avye started running her own workshops for girls in their community and in 2018 founded Girls Into Coding. She has now teamed up with her mum Helene, who is committed to helping to drive the Girls Into Coding mission forwards.
I want to get other girls like me interested in tech.
Avye
Avye has received multiple awards to celebrate her achievements, including the Princess Diana Award and Legacy Award in 2019. Most recently, in 2020, Avye won the TechWomen100 Award, the Women in Tech’s Aspiring Teen Award, and the FDM Everywoman in Tech Award!
We cannot wait to see what the future has in store for her. Help us celebrate Avye and inspire others by liking and sharing her story on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook!
The post Celebrating the community: Avye appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Today we are launching an exciting series of impact stories from the community, to shine a spotlight on some of the young people who are learning and creating with technology through our educational initiatives.
These stories get to the heart of our mission: to put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.
Designed in close collaboration with families across the world, our new series of short inspirational films showcases some of the wonderful things that young people are empowered to do when they learn to use technology to address the issues that matter to them.
We are incredibly proud to be a part of these young people’s journeys — and to see the positive impact of engaging with our free programmes, coding clubs, and resources. We can’t wait to share their unique experiences and achievements with you as we roll out the series over the next few months.
And we invite you to celebrate these young people by liking and sharing their stories on social media!
The first story takes you to a place not far from our home: London, UK.
Zaahra (12) and Eesa (8) are a sister and brother coding team and live in East London. For the last four years they’ve been learning about computing and digital making by attending regular sessions at their local Code Club. Zaahra and Eesa love working as a team and using technology to solve problems around them. When they found it difficult to communicate with their grandparents in their first language, Sylheti, the siblings decided to code a language learning app called ‘Easy Sylheti’. Eesa says, “We wanted to create something that was helpful to us, but also to our family and the community.”
When Zaahra and Eesa decided to take part in the Coolest Projects online tech showcase with their app, they never expected that it would be picked as a favourite by Coolest Projects special judge Eben Upton, CEO and co-inventor of Raspberry Pi!
“I’ve discovered that I’m capable of a lot more than I thought.”
Zaahra
Describing the effect of learning to create with technology and seeing the success of their app, Zaahra declares, “I’ve discovered that I’m capable of a lot more than I thought.” And she’s using her new-found confidence to continue helping her community: Zaahra has recently taken up a role as youth member on the Newham Youth Empowerment Fund Panel.
Help us celebrate Zaahra and Eesa by liking and sharing their story on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook!
The post Celebrating the community: Zaahra and Eesa appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
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