In both England and globally, there are few new AI-based curricula being introduced and the drive for teachers and students to learn about AI in schools is lagging, with limited initiatives supporting teachers in what to teach and how to teach it. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we decided it was time to investigate this missing link of teaching about AI, and specifically to discover what the teachers who are leading the way in this topic are doing in their classrooms.  

A day of sharing and activities in Cambridge

We organised a day-long, face-to-face symposium with educators who have already started to think deeply about teaching about AI, have started to create teaching resources, and are starting to teach about AI in their classrooms. The event was held in Cambridge, England, on 1 February 2025, at the head office of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. 

Over 150 educators and researchers applied to take part in the symposium. With only 50 places available, we followed a detailed protocol, whereby those who had the most experience teaching about AI in schools were selected. We also made sure that educators and researchers from different teaching contexts were selected so that there was a good mix of primary to further education phases represented. Educators and researchers from England, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland were invited and gathered to share about their experiences. One of our main aims was to build a community of early adopters who have started along the road of classroom-based AI curriculum design and delivery.

Inspiration, examples, and expertise

To inspire the attendees with an international perspective of the topics being discussed, Professor Matti Tedre, a visiting academic from Finland, gave a brief overview of the approach to teaching about AI and resources that his research team have developed. In Finland, there is no compulsory distinct computing topic taught, so AI is taught about in other subjects, such as history. Matti showcased tools and approaches developed from the Generation AI research programme in Finland. You can read about the Finnish research programme and Matti’s two month visit to the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre in our blog. 

Attendees were asked to talk about, share, and analyse their teaching materials. To model how to analyse resources, Ben Garside from the Raspberry Pi Foundation modelled how to complete the activities using the Experience AI resources as an example. The Experience AI materials have been co-created with Google DeepMind and are a suite of free classroom resources, teacher professional development, and hands-on activities designed to help teachers confidently deliver AI lessons. Aimed at learners aged 11 to 14, the materials are informed by the AI education framework developed at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre and are grounded in real-world contexts. We’ve recently released new lessons on AI safety, and we’ve localised the resources for use in many countries including Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

In the morning session, Ben exemplified how to talk about and share learning objectives, concepts, and research underpinning materials using the Experience AI resources and in the afternoon he discussed how he had mapped the Experience AI materials to the UNESCO AI competency framework for students.

Kelly Shiohira, from UNESCO, kindly attended our session, and gave an invaluable insight into the UNESCO AI competency framework for students. Kelly is one of the framework’s authors and her presentation helped teachers understand how the materials had been developed. The attendees then used the framework to analyse their resources, to identify gaps and to explore what progression might look like in the teaching of AI.

Throughout the day, the teachers worked together to share their experience of teaching about AI. They considered the concepts and learning objectives taught, what progression might look like, what the challenges and opportunities were of teaching about AI, what research informed the resources and what research needs to be done to help improve the teaching and learning of AI.

What next?

We are now analysing the vast amount of data that we gathered from the day and we will share this with the symposium participants before we share it with a wider audience. What is clear from our symposium is that teachers have crucial insights into what should be taught to students about AI, and how, and we are greatly looking forward to continuing this journey with them.

As well as the symposium, we are also conducting academic research in this area, you can read more about this in our Annual Report and on our research webpages. We will also be consulting with teachers and AI experts. If you’d like to ensure you are sent links to these blog posts, then sign up to our newsletter. If you’d like to take part in our research and potentially be interviewed about your perspectives on curriculum in AI, then contact us at: rpcerc-enquiries@cst.cam.ac.uk 

We also are sharing the research being done by ourselves and other researchers in the field at our research seminars. This year, our seminar series is on teaching about AI and data science in schools. Please do sign up and come along, or watch some of the presentations that have already been delivered by the amazing research teams who are endeavouring to discover what we should be teaching about AI and how in schools

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‘Teaching computing to 5- to 11-year-olds’ is one of the new course pathways we’ve designed to help educators spark young people’s interest in the subject. Our online courses are made by a team of writers, videographers, illustrators, animators, copy editors, presenters, and subject matter experts. They work together over months of production to create high-quality educational video content for participants all over the world.

This course pathway offers advice and practical activities to: 

• Support young people to create and solve problems with technology
• Promote the relevance of computing in young people’s lives
• Create inclusive learning experiences   

Our new course pathway for primary educators  

The nine courses included give you a comprehensive understanding of teaching computing to younger learners (5- to 11-year-olds). All the courses have been written by a team of subject matter experts, education professionals, and teachers. Some of the courses cover a specific topic, such as programming or physical computing, while others help educators reflect on their teaching practice. 

All of the courses include a range of ideas to use in your own programming sessions. The activities will help you to introduce concepts like computer networks and the internet to young learners in a relatable way. There are also activities to help learners progress within a topic, such as moving from a block-based programming language like Scratch to a text-based one like Python.      

What will I gain from the courses? 

The courses are an opportunity to: 

• Discover new computing activities
• Get support from our team of course facilitators
• Meet other educators from around the world!  

Do I need any previous experience with computing?

These courses will give you everything you need to teach computing to young learners. No computing experience is required. 

There is also no specific order in which you need to complete the courses. We want educators to complete the courses in an order that makes sense to them.

If you are new to teaching computing, ‘Get started teaching computing in primary schools’ is the place to start. The four-week course will encourage you to think about why it’s important for your learners to build their understanding around computing. You’ll discover how to support learners to become digital makers who can use technology to solve problems. Everyone who registers on the course will have access to an action plan to help implement what they have learnt into their teaching practice.            

Who is the pathway for? 

These are free courses for anyone, anywhere, who is interested in teaching young people about computing. 

How much time will I spend on each course? 

All of the courses take between two and four weeks to complete, based on participants spending two hours a week on a course. You will have free access to each course for the length of time it takes to complete it. For example, if it’s a two week course, like ‘Creating an inclusive classroom: approaches to supporting learners with SEND in computing’, you will have two weeks of free access to the course. 

Discover what you could learn with ‘Teaching computing to 5- to 11-year-olds’ today.

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• We’ve produced and launched 35 free online courses 
• We’ve created over 650 educational course videos 
• More than 234,000 learners have participated in the courses
• Over 19,000 teachers in England have participated through the National Centre for Computing Education

Designed and created in-house, each and every course is a real cross-team effort that involves a lot of careful planning and a number of different stages. Here we’re taking you behind the scenes to show you how we make our courses, introduce you to the people involved, and explain how we ensure our courses are of high quality.

But first, here’s some quick answers to questions you may have:

Our free online courses — key questions answered

What are the courses? 

They are online training courses to help you learn about computing and computing education. The courses are hosted on the FutureLearn website. They are asynchronous, meaning you can take them whenever and wherever you want.

Are the courses free?

Yes! All our courses are free when you sign up for time-limited access, which gives you full access to the learning materials for the complete course duration. FutureLearn also has a paid-for ‘unlimited’ option, where you receive a certificate for each course you take.

Are the courses right for me? 

They are aimed at educators, particularly classroom teachers, but they are also beneficial to anyone who wants to learn more about computing.

How long does a course take?

To help you structure your learning, our courses are divided into three or four weeks, but it’s up to you how quickly you work through them. You can complete a course in one afternoon, or spread your learning out and study for 30 minutes a day over three or four weeks. This flexibility makes it easy to fit a course into a busy schedule. 

How can I access the courses?

• Visit raspberrypi.org/courses to browse and select the course you want to sign up to.
• If you’re a teacher in England, visit the website of the National Centre for Computing Education, where our courses are part of the certificate programmes for primary and secondary teachers.

What goes into creating an engaging online course?

Creating our online courses is a team effort involving writers, videographers, illustrators, animators, copy editors, presenters, and subject matter experts working together over months of production. The entire process is guided by our online course producers, Martin O’Hanlon, Ross Exton, and Michael Conterio, who know a thing or two about creating high-quality learning experiences. We spoke to them about what it takes to create an engaging course. 

Hi guys. You’ve created courses on a wide range of computing subjects. How do you decide what the focus of your next course is going to be?

Martin: We are driven by the needs of teachers. “What are teachers telling us they want to learn? Or what are the gaps in the curriculum where our learners need additional support?”

For example, our Introduction to Machine Learning and AI course was introduced as a result of feedback from teachers that while the subject wasn’t necessarily on the curriculum, they felt underprepared to answer questions from students or provide context when teaching other topics.

How do you then go about planning it out and turning that plan into an actual course structure?

Michael: Working with the course authors, we’ll generally agree on the big topics we want to cover or questions that we want to answer. We’ll often also have individual elements that we want to fit in somewhere, for example an activity involving making a learning resource more accessible. From there it’s a case of taking the bigger topics and working out how we can split them up into smaller chunks, until we get down to individual learning activities.

Ross: But then we’ll end up shuffling things around until we are happy — not only that we’ve got everything that we wanted to cover, but that the overall structure makes sense. We often talk about the ‘narrative’ of a course.

What is your approach to pedagogy in online courses?

Martin: At the Raspberry Pi Foundation we have a set of 12 pedagogy principles that we use through our learning resources (including online courses). We take particular care to lead with concepts, model processes, and activities; add variety for our learners; and include opportunities to create projects. 

Can you tell us about some of the pitfalls with course writing that you’ve learned along the way?

Michael: Because the learner is not present, you have to be incredibly precise with instructions as you can’t help learners directly as they are working through the content. And even if you think something is obvious, it’s easy for learners to accidentally miss an instruction, so it’s generally good to try to keep them together rather than spread out.

Martin: Luckily, it is often possible to tell from comments that learners have shared when something is hard to understand so we can improve future runs of the course.

How important is the media you add to the courses, like animations and videos? What is the process for creating this type of content?

Ross: It’s essential! It brings the abstract concepts of computing to life. The media in our courses helps our learners to visualise the ideas we’re presenting in ways that are engaging and relatable. 

As we’re writing the course, we capture every creative idea that will best support our learners in gaining the knowledge and skills that they need. From ‘how-to’ guides with live coding, to physical computing demonstrations, or animations of robots, we think carefully about each image and video and how we’re not just telling the learner something, but showing them.

We then work with a brilliantly talented team of illustrators, animators, videographers, and presenters to create all of that media. 

There are lots of opportunities for social learning within the courses. Can you explain more about its importance and how we integrate it?

Ross: Social learning is a really important part of our online courses experience. Over the past year we have made significant investment to make it easier for participants to share programs they’ve written as part of their learning, for example, and for facilitators to provide support.

Martin: It is important people have the opportunity to share their learning with others. This is something often lost when taking an online course and it can feel like you are ‘on your own’. 

In the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s online courses learners are given the opportunity to ask questions, share what they have created, and provide their own insight in the comments. Educators from the Foundation facilitate the courses — responding to comments and providing advice is a big part of what they do.

Thank you Martin, Michael, and Ross. 

What new online course would you like us to create? Tell us in the comments below.

The post How do we create engaging online courses for computing educators? appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Please help us spread the word to teachers, school leaders, governors, parents, and carers. Everything we are offering here is 100% free and the more people know about it, the more young people will benefit.

Supporting teachers and pupils 

Schools and teachers all over the world have been doing a heroic job over the past ten months, managing the transition to emergency remote teaching during the first round of lockdowns, supporting the most vulnerable pupils, dealing with uncertainty, changing the way that schools worked to welcome pupils back safely, helping pupils catch up with lost learning, and much, much more.

Both in my role as Chief Executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and as chair of governors at a state school here in Cambridge, I’ve seen first-hand the immense pressure that schools and teachers are under. I’ve also seen them display the most amazing resilience, commitment, and innovation. I want to say a huge thank you to all teachers and school staff for everything you’ve done and continue to do to help young people through this crisis. 

Here’s some of the resources and tools that we’ve created to help you continue to deliver a world-class computing education: 

• The Teach Computing Curriculum is a comprehensive set of lesson plans for KS1–4 (learners aged 5–16) as well as homework, progression mapping, and assessment materials.
  
• Working with the fabulous Oak National Academy, we’ve produced 100 hours of video for 300 video lessons based on the Teach Computing Curriculum.
  
• Isaac Computer Science is our online learning platform for advanced computer science (A level, learners aged 16–18) and includes comprehensive, interactive materials and videos. It also allows you to set your learners self-marking questions. 

All of these resources are mapped to the English computing curriculum and produced as part of the National Centre for Computing Education. They are available for everyone, anywhere in the world, for free. 

Making something fun with code

Parents and carers are the other heroes of remote learning during lockdown. I know from personal experience that juggling work and supporting home learning can be really tough, and we’re all trying to find meaningful, fun alternatives to letting our kids binge YouTube or Netflix (other video platforms and streaming services are available).

That’s why we’ve been working really hard to provide parents and carers with easy, accessible ways for you to help your young digital makers to get creative with technology:

• Hundreds of step-by-step guided projects for coding in Scratch, Python, and more. The projects are self-guided, tailored for different levels of experience, and translated into dozens of languages.
  
• A YouTube channel filled with code-along videos led by our team of educators, including weekly Digital Making at Home live streams for young people and video tutorials for parents who want to support their children to learn coding.
  
• Competitions and activities to inspire young digital makers, including our Coolest Projects online technology showcase and the Astro Pi Challenge (where young people get to write code that runs in space).

Getting computers into the hands of young people who need them 

One of the harsh lessons we learned last year was that far too many young people don’t have a computer for learning at home. There has always been a digital divide; the pandemic has just put it centre-stage. The good news is that the cost of solving this problem is now trivial compared to the cost of allowing it to persist.

That’s why the Raspberry Pi Foundation has teamed up with UK Youth and a network of grassroots youth and community organisations to get computers into the hands of disadvantaged young people across the UK.

For under £200 we can provide a vulnerable child with everything they need to learn at home, including a Raspberry Pi desktop computer, a monitor, a webcam, free educational software, and ongoing support from a local youth worker and the Foundation team. So far, we have managed to get 2000 Raspberry Pi computers into the hands of the most vulnerable young people in the UK. A drop in the ocean compared to the size of the problem, but a huge impact for every single young person and family.

This has only been possible thanks to the generous support of individuals, foundations, and businesses that have donated to support our work. If you’d like to get involved too, you can find out more here.

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As a technician I attended to see what cool new tech was available for teachers, and to see if we could replace any of our current systems with something more efficient and cost effective. As a teacher I attended for much the same reasons, to get my hands on all the cool tech, but also to attend the free talks and workshops in the many areas over the course of four days.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation Education Team at Bett 2014

Last year the Raspberry Pi education team were hosted by the OCR stand and you can read about what we got up to here.

The next Bett Show takes place this coming January from Wednesday 21st January to Saturday 24th January 2015 at Excel London and we at Raspberry Pi plan to have a presence like never before. We want everyone who attends to be able to experience what it is like to teach, learn and make with Raspberry Pi. To do this we need your help.

We need you! We are looking for members of our wonderful community to help us run workshops, give talks or demos and be a part of sharing what we do with teachers and technicians. Teachers, Raspberry Pi certified educators, digital leaders, technicians, academics, parents, code club mentors, workshop leaders, Raspberry Jam event organisers, or Pi enthusiasts.

Over the course of the four days, we have 20 minute and 50 minute slots to fill on our stand that includes a Raspberry Pi classroom. You can give a talk about how you engage young people with Raspberry Pi or how to setup a Raspberry Jam. You could run a Minecraft Pi or Pibrella workshop. You could bring your code club or group of digital leaders to present what they have done with Raspberry Pi.

To submit your session or sessions for our Bett Show stand for 2015, please complete this form.

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In September 2014 (as in a couple of weeks) the new Computing curriculum will come into play in schools in England. Basically this means that ICT as a subject will be replaced by Computing and that students from the age of five will have the opportunity to learn an exciting and powerful new subject.

There has been a lot of discussion on how to prepare for this in terms of teacher training. It’s vitally important and it’s why we run Picademy for example. But as the subject matures we also need to start thinking about what an effective computing classroom looks like and how to set it up so that students can get the most from the subject.

Teaching and learning spaces

My primary school was not like others. Pupils were free to roam about and do what they wanted. It was an interesting educational experiment. I now know what happens when pupils are responsible for their own education: they smear their faces with woad (well, Crayola indigo warmed up on the radiator) and then scuttle up trees. (Student voice, I’m looking at you.)

Next lesson I will independently investigate the physics of boomerang precession

There were no classrooms in this school of the future, just “bays”—quasi-rooms with no walls, opening onto a central area. It was a terrible environment for most subjects: it’s tricky to concentrate on improper fractions or ‘How come the moon doesn’t fly off into space?’ when the bay across the way is thrashing a class set of percussion instruments like a colony of chimps pummelling the corpse of dead hyena.

So I’ve never been a fan of “learning spaces”. Even typing the phrase makes me start rocking gently and keening. And yet learning spaces are exactly what the new English Computing programme of study needs. Walk into a standard ICT suite in any secondary school in the land and you will be stared down by banks of unblinking monitors lining the walls and the central reservations.

This is not a learning room, it’s a teaching room. It’s set out so that teachers can monitor the monitors (and monitor the monitor monitors if they are lucky enough to have them) and control what the students are doing with their hermetically sealed PCs. What they are typically doing, given the closed nature of hardware and software in most of these suites, is usually pretty anodyne. It should come as no surprise that the word “suite” comes from the old French meaning “a group of identically clad followers”.

Even Orwell wouldn’t have gone this far

This new-fangled ICT thing: it’s a slippery slope and no mistake

So what the typical student is doing in the typical ICT suite is … ICT. Which is great! Good teachers are running rich and exciting and useful ICT lessons under the old programme of study (PoS). Outstanding teachers have been including elements of computing into their lessons for years (contrary to the belief of those who had never actually read it, the old PoS was pretty flexible and adaptable). But all too often a school’s ICT policy is that the subject should be safe. Not inspiring or useful or thought provoking. Just safe.

Which would be lovely if this meant ‘safe’ for the kids, but more often than not it means ‘safe’ for the senior management. ICT isn’t to be trusted: kids obviously needed watching because they might do bad things. Like play games. Or watch games on YouTube. Or write games and pretend to be testing them. Students have even been known to flip screens upside down using hot-keys; or draw rude pictures in Paint and set them as the desktop of their neighbour’s machine; or stick a Post-it on the bottom of the teacher’s mouse; or Google “funny gifs of cats with glok’s and a bom lol!”

Hence this urge, especially amongst techno-wary management, to constantly monitor and repress and interfere. Technology that enlightens and frees and encourages experimentation is the same technology that is potentially seditious and disruptive and encourages hacking (hurrah!). So it’s sad but unsurprising that in the current climate schools lock down PCs and stop students from messing about. A more open environment doesn’t require lots of time and money (two big barriers to change in schools) but it does need thoughtful policies and a desire to change.

Would you like a handful of magic beans with that interactive whiteboard sir?

All together now: “Marie France est dans le jardin.” Beeeeeep.

Of course, if all you want to do is to create things on a screen, then a bank of proprietary PCs does the job (though installing some open source software like Inkscape, Audacity, LibreOffice, Firefox and GIMP wouldn’t hurt). But things have changed since the late 90s when IT quietly became ICT and a new curriculum came in: prescribed hardware and proscribed software just aren’t good enough now that Computing is back (in retrospect, they weren’t even fit for purpose then). A generic classroom stifles creativity and if Computing is one thing, it’s creative.

Looking back at my ten years in an ICT classroom it’s clear to me that most ICT suites are the 21st century equivalent of the shiny new language labs that popcorned into secondary schools in the late 70s: shiny and exciting but ultimately a bit rubbish. My old stock cupboard is full of unused smoke-and-mirrors ICT kit that was sold as the next big thing but turned out to be technology for technology’s sake. (We’re very fond of the old magic beans thing in education, but that’s another blog post entirely.) Technology by itself rarely improves learning. Good teachers in stimulating environments always do.

A new classroom for the new programme of study

For the new Computing programme of study let’s give the students the freedom to tinker and to hack and to experiment and to collaborate. And let’s give them the space and the tools to do this. PCs still have a place of course, but ideally there will be a central table(s) full of electronics, robots, sensors, computers, projects kits, stuff you’ve found in skips, printers, bits and bobs, cutters and a runcible spoon. (And, of course, Raspberry Pis!) Let anyone who wants to play come in at break, lunchtime and after school to mess around. Encourage other subjects to use computing as a creative tool, one they can use in their lessons, and to look at Computing and not say “Whatever” but “Hmmm, that’s interesting…” (Because if Computing is not used across the whole curriculum then we are missing both the point and a huge learning opportunity.)

For this we are going to have to change our ICT rooms from teaching rooms to learning spaces. It’s not a trivial thing and it won’t happen overnight. But if you are offered a new room in which to teach Computing this September, or you get the chance to re-purpose an existing ICT suite, please make it the first thing on your agenda. In fact, make a space like this:

Laika school workshop day

In time, ten years perhaps, computing in schools will be a normal tool for problem solving and creativity. Just a tool to do things in the same way that, on a much smaller scale, a calculator is used today in Maths (although the things you can do are very much cooler and more useful than telling your mate to type in ‘5318008’ and hand it, upside down, to your teacher). In the meantime, let’s get the learning spaces right. The rest will drop into place.

How you can help

We’re currently writing materials on how to set up a computing classroom and we’d like your help. What would your ideal computing space look like and why? What would you like to see in there, how would it be set up and how could the Raspberry Pi Foundation help you with this? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this and the final materials will be published in our resources area. Comments below would be lovely, thanks!

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Sonic Pi is a programming environment that allows you to make sounds. Which is a very dull way of saying that it’s a way to build your own synthesiser from scratch. Sonic Pi, and the associated teaching and learning materials, are open and free.

Dr Sam Aaron is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab. He’s also a musician, and he’s one of the most interesting people I know, with a breadth of knowledge and enthusiasms that makes for some very late nights of conversation when he visits Pi Towers. Sam’s been working on Sonic Pi since 2012, and we are delighted to see his work being used so successfully in schools. Sam’s (rather brilliant) realisation is that you can engineer a situation whereby kids accidentally learn fundamental concepts of computing, programming and programmatic thinking, by being asked to do something creative: in this case, making music with a tool they’ve built themselves. The set of lessons will take kids from a starting point of no familiarity at all with computing. Sonic Pi, with the lesson plans and materials provided by Carrie Anne, gives teachers with little or no programming background plenty of support; those lesson plans offer a guided route through using Sonic Pi in the classroom.

Sam gives a seminar

Carrie Anne says:

I get asked by teachers all the time: how can Raspberry Pi be used in the classroom? And how can it help us meet the aims of the new Computing programme of study? These were questions I had, until I met Sam and started to develop lessons using his music Pi synthesizer software. For me, gender neutrality, creativity, imagination and tinker time are the basis for learning computer science in my classroom. When Sam suggested teaching computing concepts with music, I knew he was onto a winner, and that it would tick all the boxes.

After a month or so of planning and preparing in Jan 2013, we started to teach our Sonic Pi lessons to my Year 8 classes, and I was astounded. Firstly, by just how engaged they were by this little computer. Getting students away from the ‘internet boxes’ in the room got them thinking about what a computer really is, wherein lies the power of the Pi. Secondly, by the positive reactions of both genders, and of students with learning difficulties, who in the past had been quite negative about the subject. In fact my most memorable occasion was when a member of the senior leadership team came into the room. He spotted my learning objectives on the board and then asked a normally uninterested 13-year-old girl what she was doing. In a few sentences she explained logic, sequencing, iteration and conditionals in a way that made it all sound so matter-of-fact.

With a little structured creativity and freedom, students in both classes progressed massively with a text-based programming language. Their achievement was not only being able to program and make decisions about their code for themselves, but also in the memorable musical masterpieces they made. I’m very excited to roll this scheme of work out across the whole of Year 8 this academic year to see what more fun we can have in class.

This video is an example of work prepared by a pair of girls in Year 8 (kids in Year 8 in the UK are aged 12 and 13) who are part-way through the Sonic Pi set of lessons.

We’ve been so impressed by what we’ve seen so far from Sam and Carrie Anne; we look forward to seeing what comes next. Kids we’ve spoken to have been really excited and enthused by Sonic Pi, and have been hard to drag away from the class Raspberry Pis at the end of sessions. This is a program of lessons that gives kids the freedom of action to take their own Sonic Pi project in any direction they want to, moving away from the sort of lesson where everybody works on the same piece of software, and giving students the agency to develop their work in an individual way, while almost accidentally becoming familiar with an important set of fundamentals. Carrie Anne and Sam are running trials of the project in a number of different schools with very different demographics, and so far, the results look great.

Sonic Pi lesson in progress

If you’d like to use Sonic Pi and the scheme of work Sam and Carrie Anne have created in your own classroom, you can download everything for free at the Sonic Pi website. You’ll find other teachers in the forums here at Raspberry Pi, especially in the education section. Non-teachers are also encouraged to check out the software and the scheme of work for themselves. Please join in, both there and in the comments here – we, and Sam and Carrie Anne, would love to know what you think.

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We know that a lot of the teachers who read this blog will be there, and we’d love it if you could drop by the stand to meet us: Rob Bishop will be doing whizz-bang demonstrations there and showing you how easy incorporating the Pi into your computing classes can be; he’ll also have some fun physical computing projects to talk about (he’s been muttering about making machines that interface with Twitter, and making dark hints about robots). You can find out about some exciting new resources from OCR, and we’ll also be introducing you to our new Director of Educational Development, whose identity we’re keeping secret until the end of the month; he and Dr Rob Mullins will be presenting at the weekend. We’ll have more details about that closer to the event.

OCR are helping us to run a special prize draw for UK teachers, who can win ten Raspberry Pis for use in their classroom. (Sorry, non-teachers – this one’s for educators only.) We’re running on-stand demos throughout the event plus a ‘Learn Live’ session on Friday 01 February 2013 at 1.15pm.  Don’t miss it!

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The manual is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 unported licence, which is a complicated way of saying that it’s free for you to download, copy, adapt and use – you just can’t sell it.

You’ll find chapters here on Scratch, Python, interfacing, and the command line. There’s a group at Oracle which is currently working with us on a faster Java virtual machine (JVM) for the Pi, and once that work’s done, chapters on Greenfoot and Geogebra will also be made available – we hope that’ll be very soon.

We want to say an enormous thank you to the whole CAS team, especially Andrew Hague, who corralled everything (and everyone) together as well as editing much of the document and writing a couple of the chapters. Thanks also to the team at Publicis Blueprint (beware! This link autoplays some video), who did more copy-editorial, production and typesetting work, all on a volunteer basis. Thank you to Graham Hastings, Michael Kölling, Ben Croston, Adrian Oldknow and Clive Beale, who wrote chapters of the manual; thank you to Bruce Nightingale, Brian Starkey and Alan Holt for the digital content. And thank you to the army of CAS members who worked so hard on reviewing and proofreading everything. Everybody who worked on this manual gave freely of their own time to make it happen, and we’re very, very grateful to you all.

The manual itself? It’s brilliant, and we think you’ll find it really useful. Head over to the Pi Store from your Raspberry Pi’s desktop to download a copy directly to your Pi, or, if you don’t have a Raspberry Pi, download the manual here. We’ll be hosting the manual on this site too, once I’m in front of the right computer – I’ll update again this evening!

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