Digital literacy is essential in today’s world, whether or not you’re aiming for a tech career — yet too many young people are entering adulthood without the skills to navigate it confidently and recent research shows that many young people finish school without formal digital qualifications.

Whilst this challenge is a global one, we’re exploring solutions in England where computing has been part of the national curriculum for a decade and the option of studying for a qualification (GCSE) in computer science is available to many 14-year-olds.

The SCARI report shows that GCSE computer science isn’t available in every school in England, and even where it is available, only a fraction of students opt to study it. Where GCSE computer science is offered, the focus is not on broader digital skills, but more on programming and theoretical knowledge which, while important, doesn’t support young people with the knowledge they need to succeed in the modern workplace.

How the Manchester Baccalaureate will help tackle the digital divide

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we’re working with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to tackle this challenge head-on. Together, as part of their Manchester Baccalaureate initiative, we’re developing a self-paced course and certification to tackle the digital skills gap directly. 

The Raspberry Pi Foundation Certificate in Applied Computing is designed to be accessed by any pupil, anywhere. It includes a series of flexible modules that students can work through at their own pace. Targeted at young people ages 14 and up, the certificate covers three stages:

• Stage 1 – Students gain essential digital skills, preparing them for a wide range of careers
• Stages 2 and 3 – Students dive into specialisations in key tech areas, building expertise aligned with in-demand roles

What we’ve learnt in Manchester so far

We recently visited Oasis Academy Media City to hold a workshop on digital skills and get input on the certificate. We welcomed educators and industry experts to share their insights, and their feedback has been invaluable.

Teachers pointed out a common challenge: while they see the importance of digital skills, they often lack the time and resources to add new material to an already packed curriculum. By offering the certification as bite-sized modules that focus on specific skills, it makes it easier to slot the content into the timetable, and helps students with limited access to school (due to illness, for example) engage with the course.

Educators were particularly excited about the opportunity for students to specialise in areas tied to in-demand roles that are currently being recruited for and our goal is to make the qualification engaging and relevant, helping students see how their learning applies in the real world.  

Next steps

We are currently piloting this qualification in schools throughout Manchester, gathering invaluable feedback from young people as they embark on this learning experience, which will help us refine the course.
Stages 1 and 2 of the qualification will launch later this year, and we can’t wait to help students approach their futures with curiosity and confidence.

The post Addressing the digital skills gap appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

It’s been a while since we blogged on all things Picademy, so here’s a quick update…

For the uninitiated, Picademy is our free, two-day CPD event series for educators who want to use the Raspberry Pi for projects in the classroom. Over the past three months, we’ve been busy delivering four events in Manchester, creating over a hundred new Raspberry Pi Certified Educators in the process. The whole team was blown away by the passion of the people who attended. In fact, such was the rabid enthusiasm for Raspberry Pi in the area that we added two extra dates in April to cope with the demand – good job, Manchester!

A recent Picademy Manchester cohort

Picademy uses project-based learning to underpin its workshops, so that delegates can immediately see how the projects can be used in a classroom setting. This way of learning might be a little bit daunting for those who haven’t been in the classroom as a student for while, so we love it when people who might initially lack confidence using the Pi undergo a transformation and embrace the role reversal of teacher becoming student.

A willingness to embrace new ideas, being open to failure, and allowing yourself to make mistakes on the road to success are important messages to take away and think about from each event. One recent Picademy Manchester graduate has written a great blog post reflecting on her experiences at Picademy, and another praised the support she received:

“Thank you so much for a brilliant two days in Manchester. It’s one of the most supportive and inspiring events I have ever attended.”
Carol Macintosh, Picademy delegate

The Pi on the Tyne is all mine

With Picademy Manchester finishing in April, we can announce that our next location will be in Newcastle at Newcastle City Library, where we will be holding events in the spring and early summer.

To find out more and make an application, visit our Picademy Newcastle page.

Our condensed version of the Newcastle skyline in all its glory

Code Club Teacher Training

If you want something more compact to fit into your busy schedule, Code Club Teacher Training will also be running in Newcastle alongside Picademy events. The training is only two hours long and provides teachers with practical activities and engaging resources to develop young people’s understanding. The sessions are delivered in school, as INSET or twilight sessions, and are mapped against the new computing curriculum. We offer three modules: Computational Thinking, Programming, and Internet and the Web.

Request a Teacher Training session in your school: www.codeclubpro.org/request_training

The post Picademy: New dates announced! appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Thanks to our partnership with Google, the event is free to attend, with lunch included both days, as well as a group dinner on day one. Accommodation and travel is not covered, and will need to be arranged by you or your workplace.

Location:  Manchester Central Library

Dates

• 15/16 February 2016
• 01/02 March 2016
• 14/15 March 2016
• 21/22 March 2016

Apply for this event

About Picademy

Here’s some video we shot at Picademy Leeds.

https://vimeo.com/136878145

On day one, expect to get stuck in to a range of workshops that introduce you to physical computing by using the General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) pins to control simple electronic components and motors. Explore the camera module attachment, make music with Sonic Pi and terraform the world of Minecraft using the Python programming language.

This is my Traffic Light. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.

However, the real fun begins on day two. It’s now up to you to use your newly learned skills to build your own projects. These typically range from the delightful to the ‘dear-lord-you-made-WHAT-now?’ sort of category. Previous #winning projects have included: killer robots, a ‘weeping angel’ simulator, a mobile phone-controlled car, Christmas jumpers with flashing LEDs, treasure hunts in Minecraft, a speed detector that cheers when you’re running fast enough, and many more. We like our educators to go crazy and flex their creativity muscle. By taking ownership of a project, you reinforce the skills you learned on day one while acquiring new ones such as decomposing problems, testing and debugging, and building resilience.

As a recent Picademy graduate and general Raspberry Pi beginner, I was surprised at how much I picked up on the first day and was able to use in a real project for the final show and tell. Also, you really don’t need to worry about not getting understanding something or making mistakes – everyone is super supportive and will happily go out of their way to help you out. In fact, it’s a really important lesson to learn and pass on: that failing to do something perfectly first time is something to be embraced rather than be afraid of.

By the end of the two days, you leave as a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator, ready to go on and spread your new-found enthusiasm to other educators and, of course, to a whole generation of children. All graduates also get access to post-Picademy support in the form of our exclusive Certified Educator community forums.

A cohort of newly-minted Raspberry Pi Certified Educators.

To apply for this event, visit our Picademy Manchester application page.

The post Join us at Picademy @ Google Manchester and become a Certified Educator appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

I’m a Computing teacher in and I’m always on the look out for resources and strategies to make the teaching of Computing more engaging and inspiring. That’s why I organised the Raspberry Jamboree in March 2013, to help share the educational potential of the Raspberry Pi computer. If you didn’t manage to get there, you may have seen the videos we shared afterwards of Carrie Anne, Rob Bishop, and Amy Mather.

Last year, we sold all 400 tickets well before the Jamboree. People attended the event in Manchester took part in talks, hands-on practical sessions and an opportunity to meet others to share ideas and projects.

This short film gives a flavour of last year’s event.

Well at the end of this month, we’re holding the 2014 OCR Raspberry Jamboree and this year it’s even bigger than last year, running over three days with a whole range of ways that you can discover the educational potential of the Raspberry Pi computer. At the same time there is also the Education Innovation Conference and Exhibition taking place with many CPD sessions on offer. So it’s not all about the Raspberry Pi, but if you’ve got one and you want to make the most of it, we’ll be able to help you.

On Thursday 27th February during the day we have a variety of talks and hands-on sessions as well as a free twilight session from 4-7pm. On Friday 28th February we have even more talks and activities during the day and in the evening from 5-7pm we celebrate the 2nd birthday of the Raspberry Pi with a family friendly event with fun, games & prizes. I realise that it can be tough to get time out of school, hence the evening & weekend activities too. If you can only be released from school for one day, I would recommend the Friday.

Then on Saturday 1st March at Edge Hill University we are holding our Jam Hack Day for up to 300 children, teachers, parents, enthusiasts etc. to come and learn together and problem solve in teams. Please consider bringing either your family or a group of pupils to this event. You might want to bring a handful of interested pupils, or suggest they make their own way there with their families.

The post Raspberry Jamboree, Manchester 27 Feb – 1 Mar 2014 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The first Cambridge Raspberry Jam (you’ll need to apply for a ticket, but these are free) will be held on July 14 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, the Raspberry Pi’s spiritual home. It’s being organised by the excellent James Abela. Although the Foundation doesn’t set these events up, a lot of us will be attending this one: Eben and I will be there, Gert will be bringing a Gertboard and some other hardware for a demo, and JamesH will have some wafers, some chips for you to look at and prototype Raspberry Pis – I’ll see what I can do about getting someone to bring the camera board (still a work in progress) along too. Alex Bradbury (asb on the forums, and our lead software guy) is coming, and we’ll all be making ourselves available to chat as well as doing a Q&A session. We’re looking forward to it; it should be really good fun, and I believe there is also a Pi and Pint session planned for the pub afterwards.

For a flavour of what a Raspberry Jam can be like, we’ve got a guest post today from Dan Hett, a Raspberry Pi owner who was at this weekend’s Manchester Raspberry Jam at MadLab, organised by Ben Nuttall. This post is also available to read on Dan’s own blog; we’re very grateful to him for allowing us to use it. Over to you, Dan!

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Manchester’s first Raspberry Pi event, called (what else?) the Raspberry Jam, hosted by Madlab. It turned out to be a great day, and I’m glad everyone braved the rain to make it.

I’d received my own Raspberry Pi a few days ago, and hadn’t had much chance to really get to grips with it. It attracted a lot of attention in the studio, word spread around that a few of us had received our boards and from that point onward we had a steady stream of nerds coming over to fawn over them for the rest of the day. It’s not hard to see why: they’re strikingly small, to the point where it’s hard to believe these tiny things are usable computers (“where’s the rest of it?” came up a few times).

I got my board home and was expecting a bit of a fight getting it set up: Twitter and the RaspPi forums give the impression at the moment of it being a struggle for some, and being a Linux newbie I wasn’t expecting it to be a smooth process. However, I was up and running in about an hour, after using the RaspPiWrite tool to download and create a Debian SD card image. Rather than doing everything manually, the tool (a python script you run through the terminal) does everything for you. I left it running, and without any hiccups I had a working Pi:

(Eagle-eyed readers will note that it’s running on a bedroom TV rather than a monitor: the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have VGA out (and quite right too), instead using HDMI as the primary output. This does present a problem for me, as I only have an old VGA monitor, so for now I’ve moved the TV out of the bedroom and stuck it on my desk. Sorry, wife!)

So, on to yesterday’s jam. It was a full house, which was great to see. Lots of people already had boards with them, and generally everyone was up and running with them already. The organiser, Ben Nuttall, gave an intro talk, which turned into kind of a roundtable discussion about what people want from the day, which was great to see. There was a good mix of people: a few curious developers like me, some more visual people, a couple of completely none-tech folks who’d seen all the press coverage, and everyone in between.

One of the things I was really pleased about was the fact that there were a few younger members in attendance too: of course one of the big objectives with the whole Raspberry Pi concept is to get it into schools and shake things up, so it was really interesting to speak to some of the kids and find out what they think of the whole thing (general consensus was very enthusiastic, but being a geek meetup this was probably a biased cross-section of people to survey!)

I met one of the youngest Manchester Girl Geeks, 13 year-old Amy, who’d come to the event with her mum Lisa and her little brother Dan. I was helping them get their Pi up and running, and while we were waiting for it to download Amy showed me the work she’d been doing using Scratch: I was absolutely blown away. Amy had created a full Pac Man clone, with collision detection and scoring and everything, using no code. She was explaining that you can import photos into Scratch too, so we challenged her to add her own face into the game in the place of Pac Man. Challenge accepted! Amy took two photos (so she could make it look like she was chomping like Pac Man, of couse), cropped them down in Scratch…

…and then replaced the artwork in-game:

Scratch also comes bundled with the Debian distro we’d installed, so Amy immediately transferred her files over to the Raspberry Pi and carried on making games. Impressive.

Meeting Amy and Dan has really got me thinking: I have a young sister about the same age, and I think she’d absolutely love to get stuck into the Girl Geek thing. I’ll definitely be following their events more closely now, I had no idea that all age ranges were catered for. They’re doing great work, and it would be great to support them, so hopefully I’ll be able to add a Girl Geek to their ranks!

There were a couple of great sessions over the day too, which were small half-hour talks that happened alongside all the general tinkering. The first one I caught was an intro to 3D printing, which was really interesting. 3D printing as a technique doesn’t appeal to me much, as I don’t know what I’d really use it for (although that doesn’t usually stop me messing with stuff), but it was really cool to hear about how it all works. There were some 3D-printed Raspberry Pi cases passed around, which were really neat. I might ask the guys at Hacman really nicely if I can print out my own case (although a Lego option is sounding good too).

The other session I caught was an intro to Python for none-programmers. It was of course really basic, but actually served as a good intro to the language for me too. Python is again something I’m not sure I’ll currently need in any practical sense, but I find it incredibly interesting as a language compared to the kind of strictly-typed code I work with now. Python is also the language that’s being pushed alongside the Raspberry Pi in an education setting, so I’m interesting in picking it up a bit more just out of sheer curiosity. Of course, our intrepid Girl Geek Amy immediately left the Python session and got herself up and running in an IDE (with a little help from organiser Ben):

The final session I caught a bit of was Bob’s talk on coupling the Pi with an Arduino to work in hardware projects, which was another really interesting use for it. At £25, it’s feasible to utilise a board permanently for a project, it’s cheaper than an Arduino Uno and you can do anything with it.

And that was that. The Raspberry Jam turned out to be a really great event, and I think everyone gained a lot from it. I was kind of on the fence about how practical the Pi really is, but actually as a device it’s cheap and small enough to do absolutely anything with it. It’s going to be very interesting to see if this community enthusiasm carries over to the education side, and I sincerely hope it does. In the meantime, this kind of event is exactly what the community needs to be doing: making lots of noise about the cool stuff we’re doing, and increasing the chances of more people picking it up. As a developer with sisters of high school age, it was really amazing to see someone like Amy pick up this technology and run with it. Hopefully this will continue!

Big thanks to Ben for organising the event, and of course Madlab as always for making sure this kind of thing keeps happening in Manchester. High-fives all round!

The post Raspberry Jam appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.