Google Gives 15,000 Raspberry Pis To UK Schools 159
Grench writes "Search giant Google is providing funding to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to give 15,000 new Raspberry Pi Model B computers to schools all around the United Kingdom. Google Giving's partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a significant investment in UK IT education; it is hoped this will help turn around the decline in UK schoolkids going on to study IT in colleges or universities. The Foundation said, 'CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR will each be helping us identify those kids, and will also be helping us work with them. ... Grants like this show us that companies like Google aren’t prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems we’re all discussing, but want to help tackle them themselves.' 15,000 Model B units at $35 each would run $525,000."
Re:Kudos to Google for their geeky naivete (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in highschool, schools were filled with Macs. Worthless in the realworld, in the buisness world... you know, where you could actually get a job. My senior year physics teacher brought the first PC into the school. Then, those of us that knew PCs came out of the woodwork. The entire school was converted to PC's in less than 2 years.
If even 5% of these make it into the hands of students that give a shit, it's going to make a world of difference in their lives. In my graduating class of 400, I'd guess than 3 or 4 of us knew shit about a computer. That's less than 1% and my generation created what we now call the internet. All of us with our own small parts. That's was going on here... giving people the opportunity to be a small part of something much bigger. What will come after the internet? I don't know... but it wont get created by people with iPhones and Windows Metro. You've got to give them the tools, and let them loose.