Google Funds Raspberry Pi And CS Teachers For UK Schools 165
nk497 writes "Last year, Eric Schmidt slammed British computer science teaching, saying the UK was wasting its computing heritage — since then, the Government has agreed to re-examine how the subject is taught. 'Rebooting computer science education is not straightforward,' Schmidt said. 'Scrapping the existing curriculum was a good first step — the equivalent of pulling the plug out of the wall. The question is now how to power up.' To help, Schmidt has now promised funding from Google to train 100 teachers as well as give classrooms Raspberry Pis, via charity Teach First."
Re: to train 100 teachers (Score:4, Interesting)
Loads of older, substandard computers will have their own problems -- they won't be a monoculture, so they'll be harder to administer and maintain, especially at a school where IT is often the typing teacher and his smartest student. They'll be on their way to failure and will need to constantly have parts replaced, probably at great cost because, as a government entity, the school will probably have a preferred vendor where they'll buy $100 250 GB drives and $20 case fans. They'll cost more to ship. The Pi costs $7 to ship. A 30 lb. computer would cost closer to $25 or more.
I understand if you think the Pi is underpowered for Excel, but it's perfectly adequate for its purpose: To teach basic computer science skills. Can it run Python? Yes. Can it compile C? Yes. Can it hook up to a keyboard, mouse and TV? Yes. (Note: It was an informed decision to choose TV over composite or HDMI over VGA. Yes, I own VGA monitors. Yes, they can be found cheap. Everyone with a TV has a composite input though and more people have a TV than have a monitor.)
Just because you don't want some small charity to successfully disseminate cheap computers and just because you're butthurt you can't get one for yourself right now (*wah, I want it /nooowwwwwwwwwww/*) doesn't mean it is of no value.
The OLPC failed because they couldn't hit their price point, not because it's underpowered.
Re: to train 100 teachers (Score:3, Interesting)
The Raspberry Pi as a tool for teaching Computer Science is definitely high up there on value. Teaching it in the closed system of Windows while still completely possible can lead to some things having to be missed, due to closed administration policies and such. If you're using the Windows machines to store important work and run software used by other subjects then you can't simply have a class of Computing students come in and start re-writing the Operating System (not that they could in windows of course).
The Raspberry Pi however you can do what you like to the OS, you can show the actual way the system handles memory and processor cycles in a much more in depth way and if a student breaks it, you simply format and stick a back up on it which takes minutes rather than the hours that a Windows PC might require. A few decades ago the Computing in Schools was taught on BBC Micros, which had almost no abstraction from what was actually going on (there was some obviously but it wasn't hard to remove that as well), you could even write programs to run from the BIOS chip.
The current state of ICT education is a very MS Office dominated course of how to use a word processor and create excel spreadsheets. Something that perhaps might be best taught in other subjects, I'm not sure. I can see an argument for teaching that stuff, but at the moment it overly dominates the curriculum and it's pretty much what ends up being taught when all you have are common office desktops.