Category Archives: Linux

[$] 2025 Maintainers Summit development process discussions

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The final part of the 2025 Maintainers Summit was devoted to the kernel’s
development process itself. There were two sessions, one on continuity and
succession planning, and the traditional discussion, led by Linus Torvalds,
on any pain points that the community is experiencing. There was not a lot
that developers were unhappy about, and there are now more explicit plans in
the works to provide a process should Torvalds abruptly become unable to
fill his role.

2025 highlights from the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre

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It’s been over a year since I last wrote an update on this blog about our research and as we’ve just published our 2025 Annual Report, this is an ideal opportunity to share what we’ve been working on at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre.

At our AI education workshop in early 2025.

We are a research centre based in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, with a team that spans the university and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We conduct research into many aspects of the teaching and learning of computing and AI and we work closely with schools, teachers and young people to ensure our research is applicable to practice.

Below I highlight some of the projects we’ve worked on in the academic year 2024-2025:

  • Computing Around the World
  • AI education
  • Programming education
  • Physical computing (EPICS project)
  • Teacher action research (TICE project)

Computing Around the World

As I’ve written on this blog before, computing education is a global challenge. In one of the Research Centre’s projects, we are looking at how computing education is spreading around the world.

Computing education in countries around the world
Computing education in countries around the world.

We found that between 2019 and 2024 the number of countries offering computing education had doubled, and that two thirds of all countries now offer, or have concrete plans to offer, computing education. This research has already been highlighted in the Stanford AI Index, and we are considering repeating the analysis in future years in order to have the most accurate and up-to-date information displayed in our map.

AI education

We have a number of projects in the area of AI education.

Teaching about AI

We are very interested in how to teach about AI, and held a workshop with teachers who were interested in the teaching of AI in February. Following on from the workshop results, we are interviewing more stakeholders, including UK-based experts, teachers and students, about their perspectives on concepts and skills that should be taught as part of an AI curriculum.

Notes at our teacher workshop about AI
Notes at our workshop about AI education.

We’re also researching data science and data ethics education, which are foundational aspects of AI literacy. Most of the current AI systems are data-driven, having been trained on vast amounts of data. Therefore students need to understand about data and data science if they are to learn about AI systems. Therefore we’ve conducted two detailed literature reviews on data science and on data ethics this year. The first of these will be published in March at the WiPSCE conference.

Unplugged AI in Ghana

One of our PhD students, Salomey Addo, has been examining how AI is taught in Ghana, where it is part of the curriculum for young people between ages 12 and 15. This year Salomey published a paper reporting that Ghanaian teachers have positive attitudes towards teaching AI but feel unprepared for it. She’s also developed unplugged resources to teach about artificial neural networks (ANNs).

PhD student Salomey explaining how the unplugged resources worked in a teacher PD session in Ghana
PhD student Salomey explaining how the unplugged resources worked in a teacher PD session in Ghana.

ANNs are a fundamental technology used in a variety of AI systems, including image recognition and language translation systems. While ANNs are included in the Ghanaian AI curriculum, Salomey observed that teachers had difficulty with this particular topic The resources she developed are directly inspired by this, and involved teaching through role play and a board game.

Using AI in learning and teaching computing

This is an area we’ve also done some research in in the past year.

Carrie Anne Philbin published a paper in September showing that — at least in higher education — much of the use of generative AI in computing education is just duplicating the way teachers might already teach, and is primarily passive from a students’ perspective.

Meanwhile Katharine Childs and Veronica Cucuiat have been looking at how large language models (LLMs) can support secondary school programming education by helping students understand programming error messages. 

Programming education: Learning to debug

Text-based programming is a topic featured in many computing curricula around the world. Teachers and researchers know that younger learners, for example at the lower secondary school level, can find debugging text-based programs very challenging. Although we’ve seen decades of research around programming and debugging focusing on learners who are in higher education, very little research has been done with school-age students.

The interface of the PRIMMDebug tool
The interface of the PRIMMDebug tool.

In his research, Laurie Gale, a final-year PhD student at the Research Centre, found that learners were impatient to fix programs by trial and error, without figuring out what the real problemwas with their code or the underlying algorithm. He subsequently developed a tool called PRIMM Debug, which supports a more reflective and systematic approach to debugging. This tool enables learners to slow down when they are programming and to be more reflective. You can read more about it on the Research Centre website, and also catch up on the Foundation research seminar where he presented his work.

EPICS: Physical computing in school

As part of a 5-year longitudinal project, running across the whole UK and the first project of its kind, we are looking at how physical computing impacts primary and secondary school learners. We’re investigating the effect of physical computing on learners’ creativity, agency and confidence, over time and at particular points known to be important for their subject choices. We are working with a wonderful set of partner primary schools who we visit each year.

Young learners coding a microbit project.
Young people using a micro:bit.

This year we reported some of our first results, which point to teachers’ perceptions of physical computing being engaging and inclusive for primary-aged children. Starting next spring, we will be carrying out our third year of data collection with our pupil cohort, who have reached the age of 10 to 11.

We’ll also be running a survey next summer for upper primary-aged children and their teachers. Please sign up for our Teacher Research Network newsletter to be the first to hear about taking part in this survey.

Teacher Inquiry in Computing Education (TICE)

As part of our TICE project we support teachers to conduct their own action research projects. This is a collaborative project, involving academics across the UK who volunteer to support teachers. The goal is to enable teachers to take a deep dive into a curriculum topic, a pedagogical approach, or a new resource, or to address a wider issue such as gender diversity or accessibility, to inform a change in their practice.

This year 16 teachers published their reports in our Teacher Research Booklet, and many also presented their findings online at CAS events or at the KCL-CAS London conference and the CAS National Conference. We’re very proud of them!

TICE participant Will Grey presenting at the KCL-CAS Conference in July 2025
TICE participant Will Grey presenting at the KCL-CAS Conference in July 2025.

Two of our TICE teachers will be also presenting their research at an academic conference to be held in January. Congratulations to Will Grey and Joanne Hodge!

Get involved

There are many other projects you can find out about on our website and in our annual report, so I hope that you will keep reading. It goes without saying that I’m incredibly proud of the team who’ve worked on all of these projects! 

To summarise, here’s how you can stay up to date with our work and maybe even get involved in studies:

Finally, I am pleased to announce that we will be hosting the UKICER 2026 conference for researchers and teachers in Cambridge on 3 and 4 2026 September. More details will follow on the UKICER website and on the Research Centre website in due course.

The post 2025 highlights from the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Toradex Luna SL1680 SBC Features Synaptics SL1680 SoC with 8 TOPS NPU, Starts at $105

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Toradex has announced the Luna SL1680, a SBC that introduces the company’s new “Pro Consumer” product tier. Positioned between consumer development boards and fully industrial hardware, the platform targets applications such as smart kiosks, light industrial systems, and advanced maker projects. The Luna SL1680 is built around the Synaptics SL1680 system-on-chip, which integrates a quad-core […]

Fedora Games Lab Looks To Be Revitalized As Modern Linux Gaming Showcase

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One of the lesser known Fedora spins under the “Fedora Labs” initiative is the Fedora Games Lab that showcases some open-source games and can serve as an easy demonstrator for Linux gaming. Looking forward to 2026 with Fedora 44, there is a proposal to revitalize Fedora Games Lab to become a better showcase for the modern potential of Linux gaming…

Torvalds On Linux Security Modules: “I Already Think We Have Too Many Of Those Pointless Things”

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Stemming from a security researcher and his team proposing a new Linux Security Module (LSM) three years ago and it not being accepted to the mainline kernel, he raised issue over the lack of review/action to Linus Torvalds and the mailing lists. In particular, seeking more guidance for how new LSMs should be introduced and raised the possibility of taking the issue to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB)…