A recent Forbes article reported that over the last four years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in many business sectors has grown by 270%. AI has a history dating back to Alan Turing’s work in the 1940s, and we can define AI as the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.

Four key areas of AI are machine learning, robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing. Other advances in computing technology mean we can now store and efficiently analyse colossal amounts of data (big data); consequently, data science was formed as an interdisciplinary field combining mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Data science is often presented as intertwined with machine learning, as data scientists commonly use machine learning techniques in their analysis.

AI impacts everyone, so we need to teach young people about it

AI and data science have recently received huge amounts of attention in the media, as machine learning systems are now used to make decisions in areas such as healthcare, finance, and employment. These AI technologies cause many ethical issues, for example as explored in the film Coded Bias. This film describes the fallout of researcher Joy Buolamwini’s discovery that facial recognition systems do not identify dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever piece of legislation in the USA to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact our lives. Many other ethical issues concerning AI exist and, as highlighted by UNESCO’s examples of AI’s ethical dilemmas, they impact each and every one of us.

So how do such advances in technology impact the education of young people? In the UK, a recent Royal Society report on machine learning recommended that schools should “ensure that key concepts in machine learning are taught to those who will be users, developers, and citizens” — in other words, every child. The AI Roadmap published by the UK AI Council in 2020 declared that “a comprehensive programme aimed at all teachers and with a clear deadline for completion would enable every teacher confidently to get to grips with AI concepts in ways that are relevant to their own teaching.” As of yet, very few countries have incorporated any study of AI and data science in their school curricula or computing programmes of study.

Partnering with The Alan Turing Institute for a new seminar series

Here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, AI, machine learning, and data science are important topics both in our learning resources for young people and educators, and in our programme of research. So we are delighted to announce that starting this autumn we are hosting six free, online seminars on the topic of AI, machine learning, and data science education, in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute.

The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence and does pioneering work in data science research and education. The Institute conducts many different strands of research in this area and has a special interest group focused on data science education. As such, our partnership around the seminar series enables us to explore our mutual interest in the needs of young people relating to these technologies.

This promises to be an outstanding series drawing from international experts who will share examples of pedagogic best practice […].

Dr Matt Forshaw, The Alan Turing Institute

Dr Matt Forshaw, National Skills Lead at The Alan Turing Institute and Senior Lecturer in Data Science at Newcastle University, says: “We are delighted to partner with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to bring you this seminar series on AI, machine learning, and data science. This promises to be an outstanding series drawing from international experts who will share examples of pedagogic best practice and cover critical topics in education, highlighting ethical, fair, and safe use of these emerging technologies.”

Our free seminar series about AI, machine learning, and data science

At our computing education research seminars, we hear from a range of experts in the field and build an international community of researchers, practitioners, and educators interested in this important area. Our new free series of seminars runs from September 2021 to February 2022, with some excellent and inspirational speakers:

• Tues 7 September: Dr Mhairi Aitken from The Alan Turing Institute will share a talk about AI ethics, setting out key ethical principles and how they apply to AI before discussing the ways in which these relate to children and young people.
• Tues 5 October: Professor Carsten Schulte, Yannik Fleischer, and Lukas Höper from Paderborn University in Germany will use a series of examples from their ProDaBi programme to explore whether and how AI and machine learning should be taught differently from other topics in the computer science curriculum at school. The speakers will suggest that these topics require a paradigm shift for some teachers, and that this shift has to do with the changed role of algorithms and data, and of the societal context.
• Tues 3 November: Professor Matti Tedre and Dr Henriikka Vartiainen from the University of Eastern Finland will focus on machine learning in the school curriculum. Their talk will map the emerging trajectories in educational practice, theory, and technology related to teaching machine learning in K-12 education.
• Tues 7 December: Professor Rose Luckin from University College London will be looking at the breadth of issues impacting the teaching and learning of AI.
• Tues 11 January: We’re delighted that Dr Dave Touretzky and Dr Fred Martin (Carnegie Mellon University and University of Massachusetts Lowell, respectively) from the AI4K12 Initiative in the USA will present some of the key insights into AI that the researchers hope children will acquire, and how they see K-12 AI education evolving over the next few years.
• Tues 1 February: Speaker to be confirmed

How you can join our online seminars

All seminars start at 17:00 UK time (18:00 Central European Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, 9:00 Pacific Time) and take place in an online format, with a presentation, breakout discussion groups, and a whole-group Q&A.

Sign up now and we’ll send you the link to join on the day of each seminar — don’t forget to put the dates in your diary!

In the meantime, you can explore some of our educational resources related to machine learning and data science:

• Try out our Scratch project guides introducing machine learning and data science concepts: Smart classroom assistant, Journey to school, Alien language, Did you like it?, and Electricity generation
• For young people wanting to use Python, we have a five-project learning journey that introduces concepts and practical tools for machine vision
• For educators, we will launch a new, free online course on teaching machine learning this autumn!
• The latest issue of our free computing education magazine Hello World focuses on data science and data literacy — you can download the PDF now

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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! 

Say hi to Laura

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!

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When we saw Alex Glow’s name in the latest issue of HackSpace magazine, we just had to share their project. HackSpace #45 celebrates the best Raspberry Pi builds of all time, and we remembered spotting Alex’s wearable robotic owl familiar back in the day. For those of you yet to have had the pleasure, meet Archimedes…

Back in 2018, Hackster’s Alex Glow built Archimedes, an incredible robot companion using a combination of Raspberry Pi Zero W and Arduino with the Google AIY Vision Kit for its ‘brain’.

An updated model, Archie 2, using Raspberry Pi 3B, ESP32-powered Matrix Voice, and an SG90 micro-servo motor saw the personable owl familiar toughen up – Alex says the 3D-printed case is far more durable – as well as having better voice interaction options using Matrix HAL (for which installer packages are provided for Raspberry Pi and Python), plus Mycroft and Snips.ai voice assistant software.

Other refinements included incorporating compact discs into the owl’s wings to provide an iridescent sheen. Slots in the case allowed Alex to feed through cable ties to attach Archie’s wings, which she says now “provide a lively bounce to the wings, in tune with his active movements (as well as my own).”

HackSpace magazine issue 45 out NOW!

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.

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(Buckle yourselves in: this is a long one.)

I had an email last month from UKScone, a Raspberry Pi user I met ten years ago at a Maker Faire in New York.

“Just had a thought. It’ll be 10 years soon since you setup the blog/forums 🙂 Going to do a blog piece about it?

Damn, I feel old.”

Scone was one of a surprisingly large group of people who’d travelled surprisingly long distances to look at a prototype of this Raspberry Pi thing we’d been writing about. That group of people had coalesced around this blog and the Raspberry Pi forums, which both got set up exactly ten years ago tomorrow.

Back in 2011, we thought that perhaps we might sell a few thousand computers.

As of today, we’ve sold more than 40 million of the things.

We’ve kept every single blog post we’ve ever written up on this site, starting way back in July 2011. Ten years is a long time in internet terms, so you’ll find some dead links in some earlier posts; and this website has undergone a number of total redesigns, so early stuff doesn’t tend to have the pretty thumbnail associated with it to show you what it’s all about. (Our page design didn’t use them back then.) But all the same, for the internet archeologists among you, or those interested in the beginnings of Raspberry Pi, those posts from before we even had hardware are worth flicking through.

When we started doing this, I was a freelance writer and copy-editor, writing for several fragrance industry clients alongside the food and travel businesses I drummed work up for through a blog that worked as a kind of portfolio, alongside a food-trivia Twitter account. Blogs were awfully modern back then – I was one of the top three food bloggers by visitor numbers in the country – and Twitter was not yet a cesspool. Because it was modern. (In short, I was not anything approaching a tech writer, although I was a giant nerd already.) Then, one day in 2011, Eben Upton and David Braben showed Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC a prototype, his YouTube video about it went viral – and Raspberry Pi found itself suddenly in need of somebody to run social media and press. I thought I’d do it for free for a few months, then hand over to someone else and go back to a life of being paid to eat nice things and go on holidays.

I never went back. Ten years on, Eben and I (who met in the 90s and married a few years before the Raspberry Pi project kicked off in 2009) are still here. Raspberry Pi is now two organisations: Raspberry Pi Trading, where I work, which makes the computers, the magazines, the peripherals and all that good stuff; and the Foundation, which is headed up by Philip Colligan, and which runs all our charitable programs. The Foundation trains teachers, gives hardware to deprived kids, advises on the curriculum, offers training programs for free to everybody, allows children to send their code to space, and much more. I’m immensely proud of what Philip’s built over there: it’s more than we could have imagined when we were raising money by selling keyboard stickers from our kitchen table in 2011. (Before you ask, no, we don’t make them any more.) I still remember the envelope-stuffing paper cuts. Let us know in the comments if you’d like us to start making them again. We’re in a position to pay someone who isn’t me to cut them all out this time.

We’re a big team of photographers, videographers, editors, writers and social media people now, producing all the words, videos and pictures that come out of the organisation: Ashley looks after this blog these days, while I look after the team. One thing I’ve always missed about the early days, when I was doing everything (bad photography, social media, press, PR and all the public-facing writing we produced), has been the ability to talk more publicly about hardware development, hiccups in the very early development, and about how the business behind Raspberry Pi was built. Once Raspberry Pi was actually on the market and we started work on follow-up devices, we had to stop talking about that development work in order to avoid getting hit by the Osborne effect – the social phenomenon where people stop or delay buying a product when they know a newer version is in the works. And blogging was so easy right at the start, when every project was new – at a point when there were only 2000 Raspberry Pis in the world, everything somebody did with one felt special! But there’s still a ton of stuff for us to talk about – so many people are doing so many wonderful things with Raspberry Pi that choosing a subject for the day’s blog is one of the hardest parts of Ashley’s job.

We have a big anniversary coming up next year, when it’ll be ten years since we sold the first Raspberry Pi. But we’re having a little, premature celebration here at Pi Towers today, as we congratulate ourselves on having kept this stream of news going for ten whole years.

,

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I am delighted to announce the creation of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

With computers and digital technologies increasingly shaping all of our lives, it’s more important than ever that every young person, whatever their background or circumstances, has meaningful opportunities to learn about how computers work and how to create with them. That’s our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Why research matters

Compared to subjects like mathematics, computing is a relatively new field and, while there are enduring principles and concepts, it’s a subject that’s changing all the time as the pace of innovation accelerates. If we’re honest, we just don’t know enough about what works in computing education, and there isn’t nearly enough investment in high-quality research.

That’s why research and evidence has always been a priority for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, from rigorously evaluating our own programmes and running structured experiments to test what works in areas like gender balance in computing, to providing a platform for the world’s best computing education researchers to share their findings through our seminar series. 

Through our research activities we hope to make a contribution to the field of computing education and, as an operating foundation working with tens of thousands of educators and millions of learners every year, we’re uniquely well-placed to translate that research into practice. You can read more about our research work here.

The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre 

The new Research Centre is a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and builds on our longstanding partnership with the Department of Computer Science and Technology. That partnership goes all the way back to 2008, to the creation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the invention of the Raspberry Pi computer. More recently, we have collaborated on Isaac Computer Science, an online platform that is already being used by 2000 teachers and 18,000 students of A level Computer Science in England, and that we will shortly expand to cover GCSE content.

Through the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we want to increase understanding of what works in teaching and learning computing, with a particular focus on young people who come from backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in the field of computing or who experience educational disadvantage.

The Research Centre will combine expertise from both institutions, undertaking rigorous original research and working directly with teachers and other educators to translate that research into practice and effect positive change in young peoples’ lives.

The scope will be computing education — the teaching and learning of computing, computer science, digital making, and wider digital skills — for school-aged young people in primary and secondary education, colleges, and non-formal settings.

We’re starting with three broad themes: 

• Computing curricula, pedagogy, and assessment, including teacher professional development and the learning and teaching process
• The role of non-formal learning in computing and digital making learning, including self-directed learning and extra-curricular programmes
• Understanding and removing the barriers to computing education, including the factors that stand in the way of young people’s engagement and progression in computing education

While we’re based in the UK and expect to run a number of research projects here, we are eager to establish collaborations with universities and researchers in other countries, including the USA and India. 

Get involved

We’re really excited about this next chapter in our research work, and doubly excited to be working with the brilliant team at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. 

If you’d like to find out more or get involved in supporting the new Computing Education Research Centre, please subscribe to our research newsletter or email research@raspberrypi.org.

You can also join our free monthly research seminars.

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Holy cyberdecks! Redditor Holistech (aka Sören Gebbert) really leaned in to the “more is more” idiom when building this big orange cyberdeck using three Raspberry Pis. Why use just one screen to manipulate enemy cyberware and take down your cyberpunk foes, when you can have six?

From four to six

We first came across Sören’s work on hackster.io and we were impressed with what we found, which was this four‑screen creation running Linux Mint on a dual Raspberry Pi setup:

So imagine our surprise when we clicked through to check out Holistech on reddit, only to be confronted with this six‑screen monstrosity of brilliance:

He’s only gone and levelled up his original creation already. And before we even had the chance to properly swoon over the original.

Under the hood

Originally, Sören wanted to use Raspberry Pi Zero because they’re tiny and easily hidden away inside projects. He needed more power though, so he went with Raspberry Pi 4 instead.

Sören 3D-printed the distinctive orange frame. On the back of the rig are openings for a fan for active cooling and a mini control display that shows the CPU temperature and the fan speed.

Six 5.5″ HD resolution screens are the eyes of the project. And everything is powered by hefty 26,000 mAh battery power banks.

Carry on

And it gets even better: this whole multi-screen thing is portable. Yes, portable. You can fold it up, pack it away in its suitably steampunk metal box, and carry it with you.

There are plenty more photos. Head to Instagram to take a closer look at how Sören’s genius design folds in on itself to enable portability.

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