We are really excited that our two upgraded Astro Pi units have arrived on the International Space Station. Each unit contains the latest model of the Raspberry Pi computer, plus a Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera and a host of sensors on a custom Sense HAT, all housed inside a special flight case designed to keep everything cool and protected. Here is the story of how the Astro Pi units were built:
The upgraded Astro Pi units have been designed and built in collaboration with ESA Education, the European Space Agency’s education programme. The Astro Pis’ purpose is for young people to use them in the European Astro Pi Challenge. The film highlights the units’ exciting new features, such as a machine learning accelerator and new camera, which can capture high-quality images of Earth from space using both visible light and near-infrared light.
The new Astro Pi unit, with its camera and machine learning accelerator.
There’s an extended team behind the new hardware and software, not just us working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the European Space Agency.
“Thanks to our friends at ESA, and all the people who have shared their unique expertise and knowledge with us, […] we’ve managed to take two ordinary Raspberry Pi computers from the production line in Wales and see them end up on the International Space Station. It’s been a real privilege to get to work with such an amazing group of space professionals.”
– Richard Hayler, Senior Programme Manager and lead engineer of the Astro Pi units
The new Astro Pis are all ready to run young peoples’ computer programs as part of the European Astro Pi Challenge. The young people who successfully proposed experiments for the 2021/22 round of Astro Pi Mission Space Lab have just submitted their programs to us for testing. These programs will run the teams’ experiments on the new Astro Pis in May.
Your young people’s code in space
There is still time until 18 March to take part in the 2021/22 round of Astro Pi Mission Zero. Mission Zero is a beginners’ coding activity for all young people up to age 19 in ESA member and associate states. Mission Zero is free, can be completed online in an hour, and lets young people send their unique message to the astronauts on board the ISS.
To take part, participants follow our step-by-step guide to write a simple Python program. Their program will display their message to the astronautsvia the Astro Pi’s LED display (complete with ‘sunglasses’). Parents or educators support the participants by signing up for a mentor code to submit the young people’s programs.
All Mission Zero participants receive a certificate showing the exact time and location of the ISS when their program was run — their moment of space history to keep. And this year only, Mission Zero is extra special: participants can also help name the two new Astro Pi units!
You can watch ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer unpack and assemble the Astro Pi units in microgravity on board the ISS. It’s so exciting to work with the European Space Agency in order to send young people’s code into space. We hope you and your young people will take part in this year’s Astro Pi Challenge.
PS If you want to build your own replica of the Astro Pi units, we’ve got a treat for you soon. Next week, we’ll share a step-by-step how-to guide, including 3D printing files.
Ten years ago, Raspberry Pi started shipping its first computers in order to inspire young people to reimagine the role of technology in their lives. What started with a low-cost, high-performance computer has grown into a movement of millions of people of all ages and backgrounds.
Today, Raspberry Pi is the UK’s best-selling computer, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is one of the world’s leading educational non-profits. Raspberry Pi computers make technology accessible to people and businesses all over the world. They are used everywhere from homes and schools to factories, offices, and shops.
Visit the history of Raspberry Pi
To help celebrate this 10-year milestone, we’ve partnered with The National Museum of Computing, located at the historic Bletchley Park, to open a new temporary exhibit dedicated to telling the story of the Raspberry Pi computer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the global community of innovators, learners, and educators we’re a part of.
In the exhibit, you’ll be able to get hands-on with Raspberry Pi computers, hear the story of how Raspberry Pi came to be, and see a few of the many ways that Raspberry Pi has made an impact on the world.
Join us for the exhibition opening
We know that not everyone will be able to experience the exhibit in person, and so we’ll live-stream the grand opening this Saturday 5 March 2022 at 11:15am GMT. Keep an eye on our social media channels for the link to watch the video feed. If you’re able to make it to the National Museum of Computing on Saturday, tickets are available to purchase.
As we’re coming to the end of Black History Month in the USA this year, we’ve been amazed by the variety of work the computing education community is doing to address inequities in their classrooms. For our part, we have learned a huge amount about equitable STEM and computer science (CS) education from the community, and through our own research.
In this post, we want to highlight two particular pieces of work that have influenced our work over the last year, shared by Dr Tia C. Madkins (University of Texas at Austin), Dr Nicol R. Howard (University of Redlands), and Dr Jakita O. Thomas (Auburn University, blackcomputeHER.org) at our research seminars.
Prof Tia C. MadkinsDr Nicol R. HowardDr Jakita O. Thomas
Moving beyond access and achievement, towards equity and justice
Tia C. Madkins and Nicol R. Howard described that educators in schools (and associated professionals) need to build an awareness of how the learning in their classrooms might be affected by:
Personal beliefs, ways of knowing or thinking, stereotypes, and the cultural lens of the educator and the learners
Power dynamics and intersectional identities
They say: “Instead of viewing learners as deficient individuals who we need to ‘fix’ in our classrooms, we use strengths-based approaches where we as educators learn to recognise, draw on, and build upon learners’ strengths and lived experiences.”
The researchers encourage educators to connect with learners’ cultural practices and lived experiences, and to foster and maintain relationships with learners’ families and communities, in order to work together to facilitate equitable, social justice–oriented CS learning
To hear from Tia, Nicol, and their collaborator Shomari Jones, watch their seminar. You can also read Tia and Nicol’s article in our seminar proceedings, where you’ll find a list of their recommended resources to explore this thinking further.
Valuing existing knowledge and lived experience as expertise
Jakita O. Thomas described findings from her research project based on a free enrichment programme exploring how Black middle-school girls develop computational algorithmic thinking skills in the context of game design.
The programme was intentionally designed to position Black girls as knowledge holders with valuable experiences, and to offer them opportunities to shape their identities as producers, innovators, and people who challenge deficit perspectives. These are perspectives that include implicit assumptions that privilege the values, beliefs, and practices of one group over another, especially where the groups are racially, ethnically, or culturally different.
Jakita emphasised that it’s very important for educators to ask the questions “STEM learning for what?”, “For whom?”, “How?”, and “To what ends?” when they consider how to bring STEM learning experiences to Black girls (or other young people with multiple marginal identities). Educators need an awareness that the economic reasons of STEM learning, which are commonly spotlighted, may not be sufficient to convince young people who are marginalised to engage in these subjects.
To hear more about this from Jakita directly, watch her seminar:
Empowering learners to be agents of change
One thing these researchers’ work makes clear is that the reasons for why learners choose to engage in CS education are many, and that gaining CS skills to prepare for the job market is only one of them.
In both seminars, the speakers emphasised how important it is for educators to contribute to their learners’ self-view as agents of change, not only by demonstrating how CS can be used to solve problems, but also by being open and direct about existing technological inequities. This teaches learners to use CS as a tool, and to also examine the social context in which CS is being applied, and the positive and negative consequences of these applications. Learning CS can empower young people to address challenges their communities face, and educators, learners, and families can work together through CS on social justice issues.
Putting the power of computing into the hands of young people is the core of our mission, and we have a research project underway right now that looks at equitable computing education in UK schools. Find out more about it here, and download our practical guide for teachers.
India’s rapidly digitising economy needs people with IT and programming skills, as well as skills such as creativity, unstructured problem solving, teamwork, and communication. Unfortunately, too many children in India currently do not have access to digital technologies, or to opportunities to learn these technical skills.
Roadblocks to accessing digital skills
Before children and young people in India can even get a chance to learn digital skills, many of them have to overcome numerous roadblocks. India’s digital divide is entrenched due to a lack of access to electricity, to the internet, and to digital devices. In 2017–18, only 47% of Indian households received electricity for more than 12 hours a day. Moreover, only 24% of households have internet access, with the figure dropping as low as 15% in rural regions.
During the coronavirus pandemic, when children in India had to plunge head-first into adapting to restrictions, 29 million students around the country did not have access to a digital device. In addition, only 38% of households in India are digitally literate. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we define digital literacy as the skills and knowledge required to be an effective, safe, and discerning user of various computer systems. Digital literacy in rural regions stands far lower at 25%.
We partner with organisations in India
We are conscious that we cannot solve these massive access issues. Regardless, we are committed to moving the needle for those young people that need access to digital skills and digital literacy the most.
We partner with organisations around the country that are committed to bringing access to coding and digital skills to the most disadvantaged and digitally excluded young people. Our partnership model includes:
Co-designing learning experiences
Providing free, open-source learning resources
Designing bespoke training programmes
Supporting with technology solutions
The Pratham–Code Club programme for digital skills
Pratham means ‘first’ in Hindi, and rightly so: Pratham Education Foundation, a non-profit established in 1994, has been at the forefront of addressing gaps in the education system in India. In 2018, we joined hands with Pratham Education Foundation to introduce coding to children in hard-to-reach, disadvantaged communities around the country. We co-designed a Pratham–Code Club programme to provide youth in underserved communities with training and access to devices and learning resources. The goal of the training was to build the youth’s programming confidence so that they could go on to teach children in their communities.
To be effective, it was crucial that the programme be localised. We made adaptations to our learning resources and training content to make them more relevant to the context of the learners, and we worked with volunteer translators to translate the material into Hindi, Kannada, and Marathi.
We also provided the youth with training to use the PraDigi kit — an innovative, lightweight device, developed by Pratham Education Foundation and based on the Raspberry Pi computer — for teaching children to code.
Adapting the programme during the pandemic
In 2020, when we could no longer implement the programme the same way due to the pandemic and the ensuing disruptions, we made several adaptations:
Firstly, instead of the three-hour in-person training we had previously conducted, we hosted multiple 30-minute online sessions over a week, using cloud-based platforms like Zoom. Secondly, we used familiar apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Workplace to share the training content.
Finally, since the Pratham staff in the communities could not bring the PraDigi kits to the remote locations during lockdowns, we adapted the training content for smartphones and tablets, using the online Scratch editor and a phone-friendly online code editor called Repl.it.
Over the course of the pandemic, we trained 300 youth from Pratham’s communities in the basics of programming and digital skills. The impact was:
62% of youth said they were now interested in jobs that included coding skills
We also surveyed the youth for what non-technical skills they had learned during the training:
66% of youth reported that they had improved their problem-solving skills
60% of youth reported that they improved their communication skills
Where we are taking the programme next
Using a train-the-trainer model, we are now scaling our programme with Pratham Education Foundation to train 3000 youth from underserved communities. Once they have completed the training, we will help these 3000 youth pave the way to programming and digital skills for 15,000 young learners around the country.
We look forward to continuing our partnership with Pratham Education Foundation to make digital skills and coding education accessible to children all over India.
Our seminars in this series on AI and data science education, co-hosted with The Alan Turing Institute, have been covering a range of different topics and perspectives. This month was no exception. We were delighted to be able to host Tara Chklovski, CEO of Technovation, whose presentation was called ‘Teaching youth to use AI to tackle the Sustainable Development Goals’.
Tara Chklovski
The Technovation Challenge
Tara started Technovation, formerly called Iridescent, in 2007 with a family science programme in one school in Los Angeles. The nonprofit has grown hugely, and Technovation now runs computing education activities across the world. We heard from Tara that over 350,000 girls from more than 100 countries take part in their programmes, and that the nonprofit focuses particularly on empowering girls to become tech entrepreneurs. The girls, with support from industry volunteers, parents, and the Technovation curriculum, work in teams to solve real-world problems through an annual event called the Technovation Challenge. Working at scale with young people has given the Technovation team the opportunity to investigate the impact of their programmes as well as more generally learn what works in computing education.
Click to enlarge
Tara’s talk was extremely engaging (you’ll find the recording below), with videos of young people who had participated in recent years. Technovation works with volunteers and organisations to reach young people in communities where opportunities may be lacking, focussing on low- and middle-income countries. Tara spoke about the 900 million teenage girls in the world, a substantial number of whom live in countries where there is considerable inequality.
To illustrate the impact of the programme, Tara gave a number of examples of projects that students had developed, including:
An air quality sensor linked to messaging about climate change
A support circle for girls living in domestic violence situation
A project helping mothers communicate with their daughters
Support for water collection in Kenya
Early on, the Technovation Challenge had involved the creation of mobile apps, but in recent years, the projects have focused on using AI technologies to solve problems. An key message that Tara wanted to get across was that the focus on real-world problems and teamwork was as important, if not more, than the technical skills the young people were developing.
Developing AI-related projects in teams
Technovation has designed an online curriculum to support teams, who may have no prior computing experience, to learn how to design an AI project. Students work through units on topics such as data analysis and building datasets. As well as the technical activities, young people also work through activities on problem-solving approaches, design, and system thinking to help them tackle a real-world problem that is relevant to them. The curriculum supports teams to identify problems in their community and find a path to prototype and share an invention to tackle that problem.
Click to enlarge
While working through the curriculum, teams develop AI models to address the problem that they have chosen. They then submit them to a global competition for beginners, juniors, and seniors. Many of the girls enjoy the Technovation Challenge so much that they come back year on year to further develop their team skills.
AI Families: Children and parents using AI to solve problems
Technovation runs another programme, AI Families, that focuses on families working together to learn AI concepts and skills and use them to develop projects together. Families worked together with the help of educators to identify meaningful problems in their communities, and developed AI prototypes to address them.
There were 20,000 participants from under-resourced communities in 17 countries through 2018 and 2019. 70% of them were women (mothers and grandmothers) who wanted their children to participate; in this way the programme encouraged parents to be role models for their daughters, as well as enabling families to understand that AI is a tool that could be used to think about what problems in their community can be solved with the help of AI skills and principles. Tara was keen to emphasise that, given the importance of AI in the world, the more people know about it, the more impact they can make on their local communities.
The results of the AI Families project as investigated over 2018 and 2019 are reported in this paper. The findings of the programme included:
Learning needs to focus on more than just content; interviews showed that the learners needed to see the application to real-world applications
Engaging parents and other family members can support retention and a sense of community, and support a culture of lifelong learning
It takes around 3 to 5 years to iteratively develop fun, engaging, effective curriculum, training, and scalable programme delivery methods. This level of patience and commitment is needed from all community and industry partners and funders.
The research describes how the programme worked pre-pandemic. Tara highlighted that although the pandemic has prevented so much face-to-face team work, it has allowed some young people to access education online that they would not have otherwise had access to.
Many perspectives on AI education
Our goal is to listen to a variety of perspectives through this seminar series, and I felt that Tara really offered something fresh and engaging to our seminar audience, many of them (many of you!) regular attendees who we’ve got to know since we’ve been running the seminars. The seminar combined real-life stories with videos, as well as links to the curriculum used by Technovation to support learners of AI. The ‘question and answer’ session after the seminar focused on ways in which people could engage with the programme. On Twitter, one of the seminar participants declared this seminar “my favourite thus far in the series”. It was indeed very inspirational.
As we near the end of this series, we can start to reflect on what we’ve been learning from all the various speakers, and I intend to do this more formally in a month or two as we prepare Volume 3 of our seminar proceedings. While Tara’s emphasis is on motivating children to want to learn the latest technologies because they can see what they can achieve with them, some of our other speakers have considered the actual concepts we should be teaching, whether we have to change our approach to teaching computer science if we include AI, and how we should engage young learners in the ethics of AI.
Join us for our next seminar
I’m really looking forward to our final seminar in the series, with Stefania Druga, on Tuesday 1 March at 17:00–18:30 GMT. Stefania, PhD candidate at the University of Washington Information School, will also focus on families. In her talk ‘Democratising AI education with and for families’, she will consider the ways that children engage with smart, AI-enabled devices that they are becoming part of their everyday lives. It’s a perfect way to finish this series, and we hope you’ll join us.
Thanks to our seminars series, we are developing a list of AI education resources that seminar speakers and attendees share with us, plus the free resources we are developing at the Foundation. Please do take a look.
You can find all blog posts relating to our previous seminars on this page.
It’s time for young tech creators to share with the world what they’ve made! Coolest Projects Global 2022 registration is NOW OPEN. Starting today, young people can register their technology creation on the Coolest Projects Global website, where it will be featured in the online showcase gallery for the whole world to see.
By registering a tech project, you’ll represent your community, and you’ll get the coolest, limited-edition swag. You may even win a prize and earn the recognition of the special project judges.
What you need to know about Coolest Projects Global
Now in its 10th year, Coolest Projects is all about celebrating young people and what they create with code. Here’s what you need to know:
Coolest Projects Global is completely free for all participants around the world, and it’s entirely online.
Coolest Projects Global is open to tech creators up to 18 years old, working independently or in teams of up to 5.
We welcome creators of all skill levels: this world-leading technology showcase is for young people who are coding their very first project, or who are already experienced, or anything in between.
You’re invited to a live online celebration, which we will live-stream in early June — more details to follow.
Opening today, project registration stays open until 11 May.
Projects can be registered in the following categories: Scratch, games, web, mobile apps, hardware, and advanced programming.
Judges will evaluate projects based on their coolness, complexity, design, usability, and presentation.
Here are just a few of the reasons why young tech creators should register their project for the Coolest Projects Global showcase:
Share your project with the world. Coolest Projects Global is the world’s leading technology showcase for young people, and it’s your chance to shine on the global stage.
Get feedback on your project. A great team of judges will check out your project and give you feedback, which will land in your inbox after registration closes.
Earn some swag. Every creator who registers a project will be eligible to receive some limited-edition digital or physical swag. Pssst… Check out the sneak peek below.
Win a prize. Creators of projects that are selected as the judges’ favourites in the six showcase categories will receive a Coolest Projects medal to commemorate their accomplishment. The judges’ favourites will be announced at our live online celebration in June.
If you don’t have a tech project or an idea for one yet, you’ve got plenty of time to imagine and create, and we’re here to support you. Check out our guides to designing and building a tech creation — one that you’ll be proud to share with the Coolest Projects community in the online showcase gallery. And there’s no shortage of inspiration among the projects that young tech creators shared in last year’s showcase gallery.
We have a lot more exciting stuff to share about Coolest Projects Global in the coming months, so be sure to subscribe for email updates. Until next time… be cool, creators!
A hint at the swag Coolest Projects Global participants will receive 👀
Python is a programming language that’s popular with learners and educators in clubs and schools. It also is widely used by professional programmers, particularly in the data science field. Many educators and young people like how similar the Python syntax is to the English language.
That’s why Python is often the first text-based language that young people learn to program in. The familiar syntax can lower the barrier to taking the first steps away from a block-based programming environment, such as Scratch.
In 2021, Python ranked in first place in an industry-standard popularity index of a major software quality assessment company, confirming its favoured position in software engineering. Python is, for example, championed by Google and used in many of its applications.
Coding for kids in Python
Python’s popularity means there are many excellent resources for learning this language. These resources often focus on creating programs that produce text outputs. We wanted to do something different.
Our new ‘Introduction to Python’ project path focuses on creating digital visuals using the Python p5 library. This library is like a set of tools that allows you to get creative by using Python code to draw shapes, edit images, and create frame-by-frame animations. That makes it the perfect choice for young learners: they can develop their knowledge and skills in Python programming while creating cool visuals that they’ll be proud of.
What is in the ‘Introduction to Python’ path?
The ‘Introduction to Python’ project path is designed according to our Digital Making Framework, encouraging learners to become independent coders and digital makers by gently removing scaffolding as they progress along the projects in a path. Paths begin with three Explore projects, in which learners are guided through tasks that introduce them to new coding skills. Next, learners complete two Design projects. Here, they are encouraged to practise their skills and bring in their own interests to personalise their coding creations. Finally, learners complete one Invent project. This is where they put everything that they have learned together and create something unique that matters to them.
Emoji, archery, rockets, art, and movement are all part of this Python path.
The structure of our Digital Making Framework means that learners experience the structured development process of a coding project and learn how to turn their ideas into reality. The Framework also supports with finding errors in their code (debugging), showing them that errors are a part of computer programming and just temporary setbacks that you can overcome.
What coding skills and knowledge will young people learn?
The Explore projects are where the initial learning takes place. The key programming concepts covered in this path are:
Variables
Performing calculations with variables
Using functions
Using selection (if, elif and else)
Using repetition (for loops)
Using randomisation
Importing from libraries
Learners also explore aspects of digital visual media concepts:
Coordinates
RGB colours
Screen size
Layers
Frames and animation
Learners then develop these skills and knowledge by putting them into practice in the Design and Invent projects, where they add in their own ideas and creativity.
Explore project 1: Hello world emoji
In the first Explore project of this path, learners create an interactive program that uses emoji characters as the visual element.
This is the first step into Python and gets learners used to the syntax for printing text, using variables, and defining functions.
Explore project 2: Target practice
In this Explore project, learners create an archery game. They are introduced to the p5 library, which they use to draw an archery board and create the arrows.
The new programming concept covered in this project is selection, where learners use if, elif and else to allocate points for the game.
Explore project 3: Rocket launch
The final Explore project gets learners to animate a rocket launching into space. They create an interactive animation where the user is asked to enter an amount of fuel for the rocket launch. The animation then shows if the fuel is enough to get the rocket into orbit.
The new programming concept covered here is repetition. Learners use for loops to animate smoke coming from the exhaust of the rocket.
Design project 1: Make a face
The first Design project allows learners to unleash their creativity by drawing a face using the Python coding skills that they have built in the Explore projects. They have full control of the design for their face and can explore three examples for inspiration.
Learners are also encouraged to share their drawings in the community library, where there are lots of fun projects to discover already. In this project, learners apply all of the coding skills and knowledge covered in the Explore projects, including selection, repetition, and variables.
Design project 2: Don’t collide!
In the second Design project, learners code a scrolling game called ‘Don’t collide’, where a character or vehicle moves down the screen while having to avoid obstacles.
Learners can choose their own theme for the game, and decide what will move down the screen and what the obstacles will look like. In this project, they also get to practice everything they learned in the Explore projects.
Invent project: Powerful patterns
This project is the ultimate chance for learners to put all of their skills and knowledge into practice and get creative. They design their own unique patterns and create frame-by-frame animations.
The Invent project offers ingredients, which are short reminders of all the key skills that learners have gained while completing the previous projects in the path. The ingredients encourage them to be independent whilst also supporting them with code snippets to help them along.
We have written the projects in the path with young people around the age of 9 to 13 in mind. To code in a text-based language, a young person needs to be familiar with using a keyboard, due to the typing involved. A learner may have completed one of our Scratch paths prior to this one, but this isn’t essential. and we encourage beginner coders to take this path first if that is their choice.
What software do learners need to code these projects?
A web browser. In every project, starter code is provided in a free web-based development environment called Trinket, where learners add their own code. The starter Trinkets include everything that learners need to use Python and access the p5 library.
If preferred, the projects also include instructions for using a desktop-based programming environment, such as Thonny.
How long will the path take to complete?
We’ve designed the path to be completed in around six one-hour sessions, with one hour per project. However, the project instructions encourage learners to upgrade their projects and go further if they wish. This means that young people might want to spend a little more time getting their projects exactly as they imagine them.
What can young people do next after completing this path?
Taking part in Coolest Projects Global
At the end of the path, learners are encouraged to register a project they’re making with their new coding skills for Coolest Projects Global, our world-leading online technology showcase for young people.
Taking part is free, all online, and beginners as well as more experienced young tech creators are welcome and invited. This is their unique opportunity to share their ingenuity in an online gallery for the world and the Coolest Projects community to celebrate.
Coding more Python projects with us
Coming very soon is our ‘More Python’ path. In this path, learners will move beyond the basics they learned in Introduction to Python. They will learn how to use lists, dictionaries, and files to create charts, models, and artwork. Keep your eye on our blog and social media for the release of ‘More Python’.
Are you curious about coding and computer programming but don’t know how to begin? Do you want to help your children at home, or learners in your school, with their digital skills, but you’re not very confident yet? Then our new, free, and on-demand online course Introduction to Programming with Scratch course is a fun, creative, and colourful starting point for you.
On this on-demand course, Mark and Vasu from our team will help you take your very first steps on your programming journey.
You can code — we’ll show you how
On the course, you’ll use the programming language Scratch, a beginner-friendly, visual programming language particularly suitable for creating animations and games. All you need is our course and a computer or tablet with a web browser and internet connection that can access the online Scratch editor.
You can code in Scratch without having to memorise and type in commands. Instead, by snapping blocks together, you’ll take control of ‘sprites’, which are characters and objects on the screen that you can move around with the code you create.
This is how you build Scratch programs.
As well as learning what you can do with Scratch, you’ll be learning basic programming concepts that are the same for all programming languages. You’ll see how the order of commands is important (sequencing), you’ll make the computer repeat actions (repetition), and you’ll write programs that do different things in different circumstances, for example responding to your user’s actions (selection). Later on, you’ll also make your own reusable code blocks (abstraction).
You can create your own programs and share them
Throughout the course you’ll learn to make your own programs step by step. In the final week, Mark and Vasu will show you how you can create musical projects and interact with your program using a webcam.
By the end of the course, you will create a program to control a Scratch character using your live webcam video.
Vasu and Mark will encourage you to share your programs and join the Scratch online community. You will discover how you can explore other people’s Scratch programs for inspiration and support, and how to build on the code they’ve created.
Thousands of people share their projects in the Scratch online community — you could be one of them.
Sign up for the course now!
The course starts for the first time on Monday 14 February, but it is available on demand, so you can join it at any time. You’ll get four weeks’ access to the course no matter when you sign up.
For the first four weeks that the course is available, and every three months after that, people from our team will join in to support you and help answer your questions in the comments sections.
You can find more free resources here! These are the newest Scratch pathways on our project site, which you can also share with the young people in your life:
Back in October, I wrote about a report that the Brookings Institution, a US think tank, had published about the provision of computer science in schools around the world. Brookings conducted a huge amount of research on computer science curricula in a range of countries, and the report gives a very varied picture. However, we believe that, to see a more complete picture, it’s also important to gather teachers’ own perspectives on their teaching.
Complete our survey for computing teachers
Experiences shared by teachers on the ground can give important insights to educators and researchers as well as to policymakers, and can be used to understand both gaps in provision and what is working well.
Today we launch a survey for computing teachers across Ireland and the UK. The purpose of this survey is to find out about the experiences of computing teachers across the UK and Ireland, including what you teach, your approaches to teaching, and professional development opportunities that you have found useful. You can access it by clicking one of these buttons:
Open to all early years, primary, secondary, sixth-form, and further education teachers in Ireland, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales who have taught any computing or computer science (even a tiny bit) in the last year
Available in English, Welsh, Gaelic, and Irish/Gaeilge
Anonymous, and we aim to make the data openly available, in line with our commitment to open-source data; the survey collects no personal data
Designed to take you 20 to 25 minutes to complete
The survey will be open for four weeks, until 7 March. When you complete the survey, you’ll have the opportunity to enter a prize draw for a £50 book token per week, so if you complete the survey in the first week, you automatically get four chances to win a token!
We’re aiming for 1000 teachers to complete the survey, so please do fill it in and share it with your colleagues. If you can help us now, we’ll be able to share the survey findings on this website and other channels in the summer.
“Computing education in Ireland — as in many other countries — has changed so much in the last decade, and perhaps even more so in the last few years. Understanding teachers’ views is vital for so many reasons: to help develop, inform, and steer much-needed professional development; to inform policymakers on actions that will have positive effects for teachers working in the classroom; and to help researchers identify and conduct research in areas that will have real impact on and for teachers.”
– Keith Quille (Technological University Dublin), member of the research project team
What computing is taught in the UK and Ireland?
There are key differences in the provision of computer science and computing education across the UK and Ireland, not least what we all call the subject.
In England, the mandatory national curriculum subject is called Computing, but for learners electing to take qualifications such as GCSE and A level, the subject is called computer science. Computing is taught in all schools from age 5, and is a broad subject covering digital literacy as well as elements of computer science, such as algorithms and programming; networking; and computer architecture.
In Northern Ireland, the teaching curriculum involves developing Cross-Curricular Skills (CCS) and Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities. This means that from the Early Years Foundation Stage to the end of key stage 3, “using ICT” is one of the three statutory CCS, alongside “communication” and “using mathematics”, which must be included in lessons. At GCSE and A level, the subject (for those who select it) is called Digital Technology, with GCSE students being able to choose between GCSE Digital Technology (Multimedia) and GCSE Digital Technology (Programming).
In Scotland, the Curriculum for Excellence is divided into two phases: the broad general education (BGE) and the senior phase. In the BGE, from age 3 to 15 (the end of the third year of secondary school), all children and young people are entitled to a computing science curriculum as part of the Technologies framework. In S4 to S6, young people may choose to extend and deepen their learning in computing science through National and Higher qualification courses.
In Wales, computer science will be part of a new Science & Technology area of learning and experience for all learners aged 3-16. Digital competence is also a statutory cross-curricular skill alongside literacy and numeracy; this includes Citizenship; Interacting and collaborating; Producing; and Data and computational thinking. Wales offers a new GCSE and A level Digital Technology, as well as GCSE and A level Computer Science.
Ireland has introduced the Computer Science for Leaving Certificate as an optional subject (age ranges typically from 15 to 18), after a pilot phase which began in 2018. The Leaving Certificate subject includes three strands: practices and principles; core concepts; and computer science in practice. At junior cycle level (age ranges typically from 12 to 15), an optional short course in coding is now available. The short course has three strands: Computer science introduction; Let’s get connected; and Coding at the next level.
What is the survey?
The survey is a localised and slightly adapted version of METRECC, which is a comprehensive and validated survey tool developed in 2019 to benchmark and measure developments of the teaching and learning of computing in formal education systems around the world. METRECC stands for ‘MEasuring TeacheR Enacted Computing Curriculum’. The METRECC survey has ten categories of questions and is designed to be completed by practising computing teachers.
Using existing standardised survey instruments is good research practice, as it increases the reliability and validity of the results. In 2019, METRECC was used to survey teachers in England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Australia, and the USA. It was subsequently revised and has been used more recently to survey computing teachers in South Asia and in four countries in Africa.
With sufficient responses, we hope to be able to report on the resources and classroom practices of computing teachers, as well as on their access to professional development opportunities. This will enable us to not only compare the UK’s four devolved nations and Ireland, but also to report on aspects of the teaching of computing in general, and on how teachers perceive the teaching of the subject. As computing is a relatively new subject whatever country you are in, it’s crucial to gather and analyse this information so that we can develop our understanding of the teaching of computing.
The research team
For this project, we are working as a team of researchers across the UK and Ireland. Together we have a breadth of experience around the development of computing as a school subject (using this broad term to also cover digital competencies and digital technology) in our respective countries. We also have experience of quantitative research and reporting, and we are aiming to publish the results in an academic journal as well as disseminate them to a wider audience.
In alphabetical order, on the team are:
Elizabeth Cole, who researches early years and primary programming education at the Centre for Computing Science Education (CCSE), University of Glasgow
Tom Crick, who is Professor of Digital Education & Policy at Swansea University and has been involved in policy development around computing in Wales for many years
Diana Kirby, who is a Programme Coordinator at the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Nicola Looker, who is a Lecturer in Secondary Education at Edgehill University, and a PhD student at CCSE, University of Glasgow, researching programming pedagogy
Keith Quille, who is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at Technological University Dublin
In addition, Dr Irene Bell, Stranmillis University College, Belfast, has been assisting the team to ensure that the survey is applicable for teachers in Northern Ireland. Keith, Sue, and Elizabeth were part of the original team that designed the survey in 2019.
We set out last year to gather more stories, ideas, and inspiration from and for the computing education community in between Hello World magazine issues: we launched the Hello World podcast. On the podcast, we dive deeper into articles from Hello World, and we speak with people from all over the world who work as teachers, educators, and other computing education professionals.
Season 3 of the Hello World podcast starts on Monday
The Hello World podcast helps connect the global community of computing educators and Hello World readers, and lets them share their experiences. After two seasons and a short pause during the autumn, we are finally back with a brand-new Hello World podcast season. Regular listeners will also notice a new theme music!
Each episode, we explore computing, coding, and digital making education by delving into an exciting topic together with our guests: experts, practitioners, and other members of the Hello World community.
In season 3, we’re exploring:
The role of makerspaces, both within schools and the wider community
The relevance of imagination and storytelling to computing
Computing in the context of science and ecology
How learners can promote and support computing as digital leaders
And much more…
Meet our guests for episode 1 of the new season
In our first episode, which will be available from 7 February, your hosts Carrie Anne and James ask the question “What role do makerspaces play in the classroom?”. We talk to two fantastic guests, each with a wealth of experience in designing and developing makerspaces:
Nick Provenzano
Nick Provenzano, who is a Teacher and Makerspace Director at University Liggett School in Michigan. He is also an author, makerspace builder, international keynote speaker and Raspberry Pi Certified Educator.
Chris Hillidge
Chris Hillidge, who established FabLab Warrington in 2016 and manages the STEM strategy for students aged 4 to 19 across The Challenge Academy Trust. Chris is a Specialist Leader of Education, consultant, and Raspberry Pi Certified Educator.
Dive in with our three most popular episodes so far
If you’ve not tried out the Hello World podcast yet, why not get started by diving into one of our most popular episodes?
You’ll find the upcoming season and past episodes on your favourite podcast platform, where you can also subscribe to never miss an episode. Alternatively, you can listen via your browser at helloworld.cc/podcast.
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For those of us living in the USA, February is Black History Month, our month-long celebration of Black history. This is an occasion to highlight the amazing accomplishments of Black Americans through time. Simply put, the possibilities are endless! Black history touches every area of our lives, and it is so important that we seize the opportunity to honor Black freedom fighters who fought for the equality and freedom of ALL people.
That’s why we encourage you to join us in celebrating Black History Month with the help of free, specially chosen coding and computing education resources. We’ve got something for everyone: whether you’re a learner, an educator, a volunteer, or any lover of tech, everyone can participate.
For learners: Celebrate Black History Month with free coding resources
This month, we want to empower young people to think about how they can use code as a tool to celebrate Black history with innovation and creativity. We’ve designed a project card listing the perfect projects to jumpstart young learners’ imagination:
Take some time this month to explore the following resources to make sure we’re growing into a more diverse and inclusive community:
Culturally relevant pedagogy guide: We’ve worked with a group of teachers and researchers to co-create a guide sharing the key elements of a culturally relevant and responsive teaching approach to curriculum design and teaching in the classroom. Download the guide to see how to teach computing and computer science in a way that values all your learners’ knowledge, ways of learning, and heritage.
Uplifting Black voices is one of the best things we can all do this February in observance of Black History Month. We’ve had the privilege of hearing from members in our community about their experiences in tech, and their stories are incredibly insightful and inspiring.
Meet Yolanda Payne, a highly regarded community member from Atlanta, Georgia who is passionate about connecting young people in her community to opportunities to create with technology.
Since last year, we have been investigating culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching in computing education. This is an important part of our research to understand how to make computing accessible to all young people. We are now continuing our work in this area with a new project called Roots, bridging our research team here at the Foundation and the team at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, which we jointly created with the University of Cambridge in its Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Across both organisations, we’ve got great ambitions for the Centre, and I’m delighted to have been appointed as its Director. It’s a great privilege to lead this work.
What do we mean by culturally relevant pedagogy?
Culturally relevant pedagogy is a framework for teaching that emphasises the importance of incorporating and valuing all learners’ knowledge, ways of learning, and heritage. It promotes the development of learners’ critical consciousness of the world and encourages them to ask questions about ethics, power, privilege, and social justice. Culturally relevant pedagogy emphasises opportunities to address issues that are important to learners and their communities.
Culturally responsive teaching builds on the framework above to identify a range of teaching practices that can be implemented in the classroom. These include:
Drawing on learners’ cultural knowledge and experiences to inform the curriculum
Providing opportunities for learners to choose personally meaningful projects and express their own cultural identities
The video below is an introduction for teachers who may not be familiar with the topic, showing the perspectives of three members of the working group and their students. You can also find other resources that resulted from this first phase of the work, and read our Special Projects Report.
We’re really excited that, having developed the guidelines, we can now focus on how culturally responsive computing teaching can be implemented in English schools through the Roots project, a new, related project supported by funding from Google. This funding continues Google’s commitment to grow the impact of computer science education in schools, which included a £1 million donation to support us and other organisations to develop online courses for teachers.
The next phase of work: Roots
In our new Roots project, we want to learn from practitioners how culturally responsive computing teaching can be implemented in classrooms in England, by supporting teachers to plan activities, and listening carefully to their experiences in school. Our approach is similar to the Research-Practice-Partnership (RPP) approach used extensively in the USA to develop research in computing education; this approach hasn’t yet been used in the UK. In this way, we hope to further develop and improve the guidelines with exemplars and case studies, and to increase our understanding of teachers’ motivations and beliefs with respect to culturally responsive computing teaching.
The pilot phase of the Roots project starts this month and will run until December 2022. During this phase, we will work with a small group of schools around London, Essex, and Cambridgeshire. Longer-term, we aim to scale up this work across the UK.
The project will be centred around two workshops held in participating teachers’ schools during the first half of the year. In the first workshop, teachers will work together with facilitators from the Foundation and the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre to discuss culturally responsive computing teaching and how to make use of the guidelines in adapting existing lessons and programmes of study. The second workshop will take place after the teachers have implemented the guidelines in their classroom, and it will be structured around a discussion of the teachers’ experiences and suggestions for iteration of the guidelines. We will also be using a visual research methodology to create a number of videos representing the new knowledge gleaned from all participants’ experiences of the project. We’re looking forward to sharing the results of the project later on in the year.
Polly Card
Saman Rizvi
Katie Vanderpere-Brown
We’re delighted that Dr Polly Card will be leading the work on this project at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, University of Cambridge, together with Saman Rizvi in the Foundation’s research team and Katie Vanderpere-Brown, Assistant Headteacher, Saffron Walden County High School, Essex and Computing Lead of the NCCE London, Hertfordshire and Essex Computing Hub.
More about equity, diversity, and inclusion in computing education
We hold monthly research seminars here at the Foundation, and in the first half of 2021, we invited speakers who focus on a range of topics relating to equity, diversity, and inclusion in computing education.
As well as holding seminars and building a community of interested people around them, we share the insights from speakers and attendees through video recordings of the sessions, blog posts, and the speakers’ presentation slides. We also publish a series of seminar proceedings with referenced chapters written by the speakers.
In this blog post we explore good practices around creating online computing questions, specifically multiple choice questions (MCQs). Multiple choice questions are a popular way to help teachers and learners work out the next steps in learning, and to assess learning in examinations. As a case study, we look at some data related to learner responses to computing questions on the Oak National Academy platform.
The case study illustrates the many things MCQ authors have to think about while designing questions, and that there is much more research needed to understand how to get an MCQ “just right”.
Uses of multiple choice questions
Online auto-marked MCQs are now being integrated into classroom activities, set as homework, and used in self-led learning at home. Software products involving MCQs, such as Kahoot and Socratic, are easy to use for many, and have become popular in some learning contexts. MCQ may have become more prevalent due to increased online teaching and the availability of whole curricula through platforms such as the Oak National Academy.
Think about the thinking processes the learner will use when answering the question, and make sure the processes are productive for their learning
Don’t make the question super easy or too difficult, but make it challenging — the difficulty needs to be “just right”
Keep the phrasing of the question simple
Ensure that all answers are plausible; providing three or four answers is usually a good idea
Be aware that if learners pick the wrong answer, this can reinforce the wrong thinking
Provide corrective feedback to learners who pick the wrong answer
What I find particularly interesting about Andrew’s advice is the need to make the difficulty of the MCQ “just right” for learners. But what does “just right” look like in practice? More research is needed to work this out.
The anatomy of a multiple choice question
When talking about MCQs, there are technical terms to describe question features, e.g.:
Incorrect answers are called distractors (or lures)
A distractor is defined as plausible if it’s an answer a layperson would see as a reasonable answer
Plausible distractors are called working distractors
Over this period of four months, learners on the platform made more than 29,000 question attempts on the thirty-five questions across the nine lessons that make up this data representation unit. Here is a breakdown of the questions by topic area:
Responses to MCQs in the GCSE Computer Science data representation unit on Oak National Academy, data from February 2021 to end of May 2021 (click to enlarge)
As shown in the table, more questions relate to binary arithmetic than to any other topic area. This was a specific design decision, as it is well-known that learners need lots of practice of the processes involved in answering binary arithmetic questions.
Let’s look at an example question from the binary arithmetic topic area, with one correct answer and two distractors. The learning objective being addressed with this question is ‘Perform addition in binary on two binary numbers’.
One of the MCQs in the GCSE Computer Science data representation unit on the Oak National Academy, as displayed on the online platform
As shown in the table below, in four months, 1170 attempts were made to answer the example question. 65% of the attempts were correct responses, and 35% were not, with 21% of responses being distractor b, and 14% distractor c. These distractors appear to be working distractors, as they were chosen by more than 5% of learners, which has been suggested as a rule-of-thumb threshold that distractors have to clear to be classed as working.
Example MCQ in the GCSE Computer Science data representation unit on the Oak National Academy, plus response data from February 2021 to end of May 2021 (click to enlarge)
However, because of the lack of research into MCQs, we cannot say for certain that this question is “just right” — it may be too hard. We need to do further research to find this out.
Creating multiple choice questions is not easy
The process of creating good MCQs is not an easy task, because question authors need to think about many things, including:
What learning objectives are to be addressed
What plausible distractors can be used
What level of difficulty is right for learners
What type of thinking the questions are encouraging, and how this is useful for learners
In order for MCQs to be useful for learners and teachers, much more research is needed in this area to show how to reliably produce MCQs that are “just right” and encourage productive thinking processes. We are very much looking forward to looking at this topic in our research work.
To find out more about the computing education research we are doing, you can browse our website, take part in our monthly seminars, and read our publications.
What is AI thinking? What concepts should we introduce to young people related to AI, including machine learning (ML), and data science? Should we teach with a glass-box or an opaque-box approach? These are the questions we’ve been grappling with since we started our online research seminar series on AI education at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, co-hosted with The Alan Turing Institute.
Dave Touretzky
Fred G. Martin
Over the past few months, we’d already heard from researchers from the UK, Germany, and Finland. This month we virtually travelled to the USA, to hear from Prof. Dave Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon University) and Prof. Fred G. Martin (University of Massachusetts Lowell), who have pioneered the influential AI4K12 project together with their colleagues Deborah Seehorn and Christina Gardner-McLure.
The AI4K12 project
The AI4K12 project focuses on teaching AI in K-12 in the US. The AI4K12 team have aligned their vision for AI education to the CSTA standards for computer science education. These Standards, published in 2017, describe what should be taught in US schools across the discipline of computer science, but they say very little about AI. This was the stimulus for starting the AI4K12 initiative in 2018. A number of members of the AI4K12 working group are practitioners in the classroom who’ve made a huge contribution in taking this project from ideas into the classroom.
Dave gave us an overview of the AI4K12 project (click to enlarge)
The project has a number of goals. One is to develop a curated resource directory for K-12 teachers, and another to create a community of K-12 resource developers. On the AI4K12.org website, you can find links to many resources and sign up for their mailing list. I’ve been subscribed to this list for a while now, and fascinating discussions and resources have been shared.
Five Big Ideas of AI4K12
If you’ve heard of AI4K12 before, it’s probably because of the Five Big Ideas the team has set out to encompass the AI field from the perspective of school-aged children. These ideas are:
Perception — the idea that computers perceive the world through sensing
Representation and reasoning — the idea that agents maintain representations of the world and use them for reasoning
Learning — the idea that computers can learn from data
Natural interaction — the idea that intelligent agents require many types of knowledge to interact naturally with humans
Societal impact — the idea that artificial intelligence can impact society in both positive and negative ways
Sometimes we hear concerns that resources being developed to teach AI concepts to young people are narrowly focused on machine learning, particularly supervised learning for classification. It’s clear from the AI4K12 Five Big Ideas that the team’s definition of the AI field encompasses much more than one area of ML. Despite being developed for a US audience, I believe the description laid out in these five ideas is immensely useful to all educators, researchers, and policymakers around the world who are interested in AI education.
Fred explained how ‘representation and reasoning’ is a big idea in the AI field (click to enlarge)
During the seminar, Dave and Fred shared some great practical examples. Fred explained how the big ideas translate into learning outcomes at each of the four age groups (ages 5–8, 9–11, 12–14, 15–18). You can find out more about their examples in their presentation slides or the seminar recording (see below).
I was struck by how much the AI4K12 team has thought about progression — what you learn when, and in which sequence — which we do really need to understand well before we can start to teach AI in any formal way. For example, looking at how we might teach visual perceptionto young people, children might start when very young by using a tool such as Teachable Machine to understand that they can teach a computer to recognise what they want it to see, then move on to building an application using Scratch plugins or Calypso, and then to learning the different levels of visual structure and understanding the abstraction pipeline — the hierarchy of increasingly abstract things. Talking about visual perception, Fred used the example of self-driving cars and how they represent images.
Fred used this slide to describe how young people might learn abstracted elements of visual structure
AI education with an age-appropriate, glass-box approach
Dave and Fred support teaching AI to children using a glass-box approach. By ‘glass-box approach’ we mean that we should give students information about how AI systems work, and show the inner workings, so to speak. The opposite would be a ‘opaque-box approach’, by which we mean showing students an AI system’s inputs and the outputs only to demonstrate what AI is capable of, without trying to teach any technical detail.
AI4K12 teacher guidelines for AI education
Our speakers are keen for learners to understand, at an age-appropriate level, what is going on “inside” an AI system, not just what the system can do. They believe it’s important for young people to build mental models of how AI systems work, and that when the young people get older, they should be able to use their increasing knowledge and skills to develop their own AI applications. This aligns with the views of some of our previous seminar speakers, including Finnish researchers Matti Tedre and Henriikka Vartiainen, who presented at our seminar series in November.
What is AI thinking?
Dave addressed the question of what AI thinking looks like in school. His approach was to start with computational thinking (he used the example of the Barefoot project’s description of computational thinking as a starting point) and describe AI thinking as an extension that includes the following skills:
Perception
Reasoning
Representation
Machine learning
Language understanding
Autonomous robots
Dave described AI thinking as furthering the ideas of abstraction and algorithmic thinking commonly associated with computational thinking, stating that in the case of AI, computation actually is thinking. My own view is that to fully define AI thinking, we need to dig a bit deeper into, for example, what is involved in developing an understanding of perception and representation.
Thinking back to Matti Tedre and Henriikka Vartainen’s description of CT 2.0, which focuses only on the ‘Learning’ aspect of the AI4K12 Five Big Ideas, and on the distinct ways of thinking underlying data-driven programming and traditional programming, we can see some differences between how the two groups of researchers describe the thinking skills young people need in order to understand and develop AI systems. Tedre and Vartainen are working on a more finely granular description of ML thinking, which has the potential to impact the way we teach ML in school.
What I take from this is that there is much still to research and discuss in this area! It’s a real privilege to be able to hear from experts in the field and compare and contrast different standpoints and views.
Resources for AI education
The AI4K12 project has already made a massive contribution to the field of AI education, and we were delighted to hear that Dave, Fred, and their colleagues have just been awarded the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award for 2022 for AI4K12.org. An amazing achievement! Particularly useful about this website is that it links to many resources, and that the Five Big Ideas give a framework for these resources.
Through our seminars series, we are developing our own list of AI education resources shared by seminar speakers or attendees, or developed by us. Please do take a look.
Join our next seminar
Through these seminars, we’re learning a lot about AI education and what it might look like in school, and we’re having great discussions during the Q&A section.
It’s time to start your countdown! Young people from all over the world will soon be invited to share their digital creations at Coolest Projects Global 2022, our world-leading online technology showcase event for young creators. In mid-February, project registration opens for a new and improved, online-only experience.
Through Coolest Projects Global, young creators can register their digital projects to share them with the world, represent their country, get some free swag, and maybe even win recognition from our special judges. And the best thing: Coolest Projects participants join a global community of awesome young tech creators who celebrate each other’s accomplishments.
Here’s what you should know about Coolest Projects Global
Coolest Projects Global is free and open to young creators up to 18 years old, working independently or in teams of up to 5 creators.
Creators of all skill levels are encouraged to participate. Coolest Projects is for young people who are beginners, or advanced, or anything in between.
Project registration opens on 14 February and stays open until 11 May.
Projects can be registered in the following categories: Scratch, games, web, mobile apps, hardware, and advanced programming.
Judges will evaluate projects based on their coolness, complexity, design, usability, and presentation.
Coolest Projects Global is a completely free event for all participants, and it’s entirely online.
What’s new in 2022?
Coolest Projects is celebrating its TENTH YEAR of shining a light on young creators, so we have an extra special showcase lined up in 2022. All of these enhancements are the result of incredibly helpful feedback that past creators have shared. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can look forward to:
Creators will receive project feedback from the judges after the celebration event in June. The celebration will be streamed live online in early June. Stay tuned for more details as the event gets closer.
Creators will be eligible to receive limited-edition digital and physical swag.
Creators will be able to categorise their project into topics such as health, environment, community, art, and more.
Creators who have projects selected as favourites by the special judges will receive a commemorative medal.
What do young people say is so cool about Coolest Projects?
We asked past creators what they think makes Coolest Projects so cool, and here’s what they had to say:
“The freedom we had to create whatever we want!”
“We can get inspiration from sharing our ideas about real-life situations.”
“Seeing all the different ideas people had and how they went about doing their projects.”
“The opportunity to let the creativity flow and participate at a global level.”
Project registration opens on 14 February, but creators can start making their projects now. For inspiration, check out last year’s project gallery and then sign up to receive email updates so that you don’t miss a thing about Coolest Projects. We have many more exciting details coming in the next weeks and months, so stay tuned.
Today we’re releasing an exciting new path of projects for young people who want to create 3D worlds, stories, and games. We’ve partnered with Unity to offer any young person, anywhere, the opportunity to take their first steps in creating virtual worlds using real-time 3D.
The Unity Charitable Fund, a fund of the Tides Foundation, has awarded us a generous grant for $50,000 to help underrepresented youth learn to use Unity, upleveling their skills for future career success.
Create a world, don’t just explore it
Our new path of six projects for Unity is a learning journey for young people who have some experience of text-based programming and now want to try out building digital 3D creations.
Unity is the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D and is hugely popular for creating 3D video games and virtual, interactive worlds and stories. The best thing about it for young people? While professional developers use Unity to create well-known games such as Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl and Among Us, it is also free for anyone to use.
Young people who learn to use Unity can do more and more complex things with it as they gain experience. Many successful indie games have been made in Unity — maybe a young person you know will create the next indie game sensation!
For young people, our new project path is the ideal introduction to Unity.The new project path:
Is for learners who have already coded some projects in Python or another text-based language.
Introduces the Unity software and how to write code for it in the programming language C# (pronounced ‘cee sharp’).
Guides learners to create a 3D role playing game or interactive story that they can tailor to suit their imaginations. Learners gain more and more independence with each project in the path.
Covers common elements such as non-playable characters, mini games, and bonuses.
After young people have completed the path, they’ll have:
Created their very own 3D video game or interactive story they can share with their friends and family.
Gained familiarity with key functions of Unity.
Built the independence and confidence to explore Unity further and create more advanced games and 3D worlds.
Young people gain real-world skills while creating worlds in Unity
Since Unity is a platform used by professional digital creators, young people who follow our new Unity path gain real-world skills that are sought after in the tech sector. While they learn to express their creativity with Unity, young people improve their coding and problem-solving skills and feel empowered because they get to use their imagination to bring their ideas to life.
“Providing opportunities for underrepresented youth to learn critical tech skills is essential to Unity Social Impact’s mission,” said Jessica Lindl, Vice President, Social Impact at Unity. “We’re thrilled that the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Unity path will allow thousands of student learners to take part in game design in an accessible way, setting them up for future career success.”
What you need to support young people with Unity Real-Time 3D
Have downloaded and installed Unity Hub, from where they need to install Unity Editor and Visual Studio Community Edition
For club volunteers who support young people attending Code Clubs and CoderDojos with the new path, we are going to run two free online workshops in February. During the workshops, volunteers will be introduced to the path and the software setup, and we’ll try out Unity together. Keep your eyes on the CoderDojo and Code Club blogs for details!
Club volunteers, if your participants are creating Blender projects, they can import these into Unity too.
Young people can share their Unity creations with the world through Coolest Projects
It’s really exciting for us that we can bring this new project path to young people who dream about creating interactive 3D worlds. We hope to see many of their creations in this year’s Coolest Projects Global, our free online tech showcase for young creators all over the world!
We are hosting a series of free research seminars about how to teach artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to young people, in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute.
In the fifth seminar of this series, we heard from Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner Centred Design at the University College London (UCL) Knowledge Lab. Rose is Founder of EDUCATE Ventures Research Ltd., a London consultancy service working with start-ups, researchers, and educators to develop evidence-based educational technology.
Rose Luckin, UCL
Based on her experience at EDUCATE, Rose spoke about how AI-based analysis can help educators gain a deeper understanding of their students, and how educators can work with AI systems to provide better learning resources to their students. This provided us with a different angle to the first four seminars in our current series, where we’ve been thinking about how young peoplelearn to understand AI systems.
Rose’s definition of artificial intelligence for this presentation.
Education and AI systems
AI systems have the potential to impact education in a number of different ways, which Rose distilled into three areas:
Using AI in education to tackle some of the big educational challenges
Educating teachers about AI so that they can use it safely and effectively
Changing education so that we focus on human intelligence and prepare people for an AI world
It is clear that the three areas are interconnected, meaning developments in one area will affect the others. Rose’s focus during the seminar was the second area: educating people about AI.
What can AI systems do in education?
Through giving examples of existing AI-based systems used for education, Rose described what in particular it is about AI systems that can be useful in an education setting. The first point she raised was that AI systems can adapt based on learning from data. Her main example was the AI-based platform ENSKILLS, which detects the user’s level of competency with spoken English through the user’s interactions with a virtual character, and gradually adapts the character to the user’s level. Other examples of adaptive AI systems for education include Carnegie Learning and Century Intelligent Learning.
We know that AI systems can respond to different forms of data. Rose introduced the example of OyaLabs to demonstrate how AI systems can gather and process real-time sensory data. This is an app that parents can use in a young child’s room to monitor the child’s interactions with others. The app analyses the data it gathers and produces advice for parents on how they can support their child’s language development.
AI system creators can also combine adaptivity and real-time sensory data processing in their systems. One example Rosa gave of this was SimSensei from the University of Southern California. This is a simulated coach, which a student can interact with and which gathers real-time data about how the student is speaking, including their tone, speed of speech, and facial expressions. The system adapts its coaching advice based on these interactions and on what it learns from interactions with other students.
Getting ready for AI systems in education
For the remainder of her presentation, Rose focused on the framework she is involved in developing, as part of the EDUCATE service, to support organisations to prepare for implementing AI systems, including educators within these organisations. The aim of this ETHICAI framework is to enable organisations and educators to understand:
What AI systems are capable of doing
The strengths and weaknesses of AI systems
How data is used by AI systems to learn
Rose described the seven steps of the framework as:
Educate, enthuse, excite – about building an AI mindset within your community
Tailor and Hone – the particular challenges you want to focus on
Identify – identify (wisely), collate and …
Collect – new data relevant to your focus
Apply – AI techniques to the relevant data you have brought together
Learn – understand what the data is telling you about your focus and return to step 5 until you are AI ready
Iterate
She then went on to demonstrate how the framework is applied using the example of online teaching. Online teaching has been a key part of education throughout the coronavirus pandemic; AI systems could be used to analyse datasets generated during online teaching sessions, in order to make decisions for and recommendations to educators.
The first step of the ETHICAI framework is educate, enthuse, excite. In Rose’s example, this step consisted of choosing online teaching as a scenario, because it is very pertinent to a teacher’s practice. The second step is to tailor and hone in on particular challenges that are to be the focus, capitalising on what AI systems can do. In Rose’s example, the challenge is assessing the quality of online lessons in a way that would be useful to educators. The third step of the framework is to identify what data is required to perform this quality assessment.
The fourth step is the collection of new data relevant to the focus of the project. The aim is to gain an increased understanding of what happens in online learning across thousands of schools. Walking through the online learning example, Rose suggested we might be able to collect the following types of data:
Log data
Audio data
Performance data
Video data, which includes eye-movement data
Historical data from tests and interviews
Behavioural data from surveying teachers and parents about how they felt about online learning
It is important to consider the ethical implications of gathering all this data about students, something that was a recurrent theme in both Rose’s presentation and the Q&A at the end.
Step five of the ETHICAI framework focuses on applying AI techniques to the relevant data to combine and process it. The figure below shows that in preparation, the various data sets need to be collated, cleaned, organised, and transformed.
From the correctly prepared data, interaction profiles can be produced in order to put characteristics from different lessons into groups/profiles. Rose described how cluster analysis using a combination of both AI and human intelligence could be used to sort lessons into groups based on common features.
Thesixth step in Rose’s example focused on what may be learned from analysing collected data linked to the particular challenge of online teaching and learning. Rose said that applying an AI system to students’ behavioural data could, for example, give indications about students’ focus and confidence, and make or recommend interventions to educators accordingly.
Where might we take applications of AI systems in education in the future?
Rose described that AI systems can possess some types of intelligence humans have or can develop: interdisciplinary academic intelligence, meta-knowing intelligence, and potentially social intelligence. However, there are types such as meta-contextual intelligence and perceived self-efficacy that AI systems are not able to demonstrate in the way humans can.
The use of AI systems in education can cause ethical issues. As an example, Rose pointed out the use of virtual glasses to identify when students need help, even if they do not realise it themselves. A system like this could help educators with assessing who in their class needs more help, and could link this back to student performance. However, using such a system like this has obvious ethical implications, and some of these were the focus of the Q&A that followed Rose’s presentation.
It’s clear that, in the education domain as in all other domains, both positive and negative outcomes of integrating AI are possible. In a recent paper written by Wayne Holmes (also from the UCL Knowledge Lab) and co-authors, ‘Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community Wide Framework’ [1], the authors suggest that the interpretation of data, consent and privacy, data management, surveillance, and power relations are all ethical issues that should be taken into consideration. Finding consensus for a practical ethical framework or set of principles, with all stakeholders, at the very start of an AI-related project is the only way to ensure ethics are built into the project and the AI system itself from the ground up.
Ethical issues of AI systems more broadly, and how to involve young people in discussions of AI ethics, were the focus of our seminar with Dr Mhairi Aitken back in September. You can revisit the seminar recording, presentation slides, and summary blog post.
I really enjoyed both the focus and content of Rose’s talk: educators understanding how AI systems may be applied to education in order to help them make more informed decisions about how to best support their students. This is an important factor to consider in the context of the bigger picture of what young people should be learning about AI. The work that Rose and her colleagues are doing also makes an important contribution to translating research into practical models that teachers can use.
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You may still have time to sign up for our Tuesday 11 January seminar, today at 17:00–18:30 GMT, where we will welcome Dave Touretzky and Fred Martin, founders of the influential AI4K12 framework, which identifies the five big ideas of AI and how they can be integrated into education.
If you want to join any of our seminars, click the button below to sign up and we will send you information on how to join. We look forward to seeing you there!
This morning, our two new Astro Pi units launched into space. Actual, real-life space. The new Astro Pi units each consist of a Raspberry Pi computer with a Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera and a host of sensors, all housed inside a special space-ready case that makes the hardware suitable for the International Space Station (ISS).
The journey to space for two special Raspberry Pi computers
Today’s launch is the culmination of a huge piece of work we’ve done for the European Space Agency to get the new Astro Pi units ready to become part of the European Astro Pi Challenge.
After lift-off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the new Astro Pi units are currently travelling on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon 2 spacecraft, the module atop the rocket. You can watch the launch again here.
Also travelling with our Astro Pi units are food and some Christmas presents for the astronauts on board the ISS, materials for a study of the delivery of cancer drugs; a bioprinter for experiments investigating wound healing; and materials for a study of how detergents work in microgravity.
The Dragon 2 spacecraft will berth with the ISS tomorrow, with NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn monitoring its arrival. ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and another colleague will be there to unpack its cargo. You can watch the process of unpacking tomorrow, Wed 22 December, at 8.30am GMT / 9.30am CET. In the new year, Matthias will be switching our Astro Pi units on and getting them ready to run the code written by young people participating in the European Astro Pi Challenge. The new Astro Pi units will replace Astro Pi units Ed and Izzy, which have been on the ISS for 6 years — ever since the very first Astro Pi Challenge with British ESA astronaut Tim Peake in 2015.
None of us on the team working on the Astro Pi Challenge here at the Foundation are aerospace engineers. While building the new Astro Pi units, we’ve learned so much.
To get the Astro Pis ready to be loaded onto the rocket has been a project of more than three years. That’s because, in addition to manufacturing the Astro Pi units, we also had to ensure they pass the necessary safety and certification process. The official name for this is the Safety Gate process. It’s been set up by ESA and NASA to ensure that any items sent to the ISS are safe to operate on board the station.
For the three separate safety panels the Astro Pi units needed to get through, we put the units through different tests and completed various safety reports. The tests included:
A vibration test: To make sure the Astro Pi units survive the rigours of the launch, we tested them using the sophisticated rigs at Airbus in Portsmouth. These rigs are capable of simulating the vibrations produced by various different launch vehicles. We needed to test all possible options, because the Astro Pi units didn’t have a confirmed vehicle to travel to the ISS yet.
A thermal test: To make sure no harm can possibly come to the crew from the Astro Pi units, we needed to check that the touch temperature of the Astro Pi units’ surface is never above 45°C.
A test for sharp edges: Each Astro Pi unit also needed to be manually inspected by someone wearing a latex glove who carefully feels the case for sharp edges.
Stringent, military-grade electromagnetic emissions and susceptibility tests: These are required to guarantee that the Astro Pi units won’t interfere with any ISS systems, and that the units themselves are not affected by other equipment on board.
We built two additional Astro Pi units and sent them to NASA so that they could test that plugging the units into the ISS power grid wouldn’t cause a power overload.
For almost all of these tests, we created custom software to do things like stress the Astro Pi units’ processors, saturate the network links, and generally make the units work as hard as possible.
To accompany these safety and test reports, we also had to create the Flight Safety Data Package (FSDP), which contains exact technical information about every component of the Astro Pi hardware, and about all the necessary safety controls to qualify the use of certain materials and safely manage operation of the units. The current FSDP paperwork stands at over 700 pages, which thankfully we haven’t had to actually print out!
Young people’s code will run on the new Astro Pi units next year — is yours on board?
All of this work culminated today in the Astro Pis being launched up into space from Cape Canaveral. And we’re doing all this so that more young people can take part in the European Astro Pi Challenge and send messages to the ISS astronauts using code as part of Mission Zero, or write code for new, ambitious experiments to run on the ISS as part of Mission Space Lab.
Young people can take part in Astro Pi Mission Zero right now! Mission Zero is a beginners’ coding activity for all young people under the age of 19 in ESA member and associate states. It gives them the chance to write code to show their own message to the astronauts on board the ISS using the Astro Pi units. And this time, Mission Zero participants can also vote to name the new Astro Pi units!
To participate, young people follow our step-by-step instructions to write their Mission Zero code. As an adult supporting a young person on Mission Zero, all you need to do is sign up as a mentor to get them a registration code for their Mission Zero entry. Once your young person’s code has run in space, we’ll send you a special certificate for them showing where the ISS, and the Astro Pi computers, were when their code ran.
Inspire a young person to learn about coding and space science today with Astro Pi Mission Zero!
The global IT industry generates as much CO2 as the aviation industry. In Hello World issue 17, we learn about the hidden impact of our IT use and the changes we can make from Beverly Clarke, national community manager for Computing at School and author of Computer Science Teacher: Insight Into the Computing Classroom.
Beverly Clarke
Hello World issue 17
With the onset of the pandemic, the world seemed to shut down. Flights were grounded, fewer people were commuting, and companies and individuals increased their use of technology for work and communication. On the surface, this seemed like a positive time for the environment. However, I soon found myself wondering about the impact that this increased use of technology would have on our planet, in particular the increases in energy consumption and e-waste. This is a major social, moral, and ethical issue that is hiding in plain sight — green IT is big news.
This is a major social, moral, and ethical issue that is hiding in plain sight — green IT is big news.
Energy and data centres
Thinking that online is always better for the planet is not always as straightforward as it seems. If we choose to meet via conference call rather than travelling to a meeting, there are hidden environmental impacts to consider. If there are 50 people on a call from across the globe, all of the data generated is being routed around the world through data centres, and a lot of energy is being used. If all of those people are also using video, that is even more energy than audio only.
Data centres consume a lot of energy — and how is that energy generated?
Not only is the amount of energy being used a concern, but we must also ask ourselves how these data centres are being powered. Is the energy they are using coming from a renewable source? If not, we may be replacing one environmental problem with another.
What about other areas of our lives, such as taking photos or filming videos? These two activities have probably increased as we have been separated from family and friends. They use energy, especially when the image or video is then shared with others around the world and consequently routed through data centres. A large amount of energy is being used, and more is used the further the image travels.
Not only is the amount of energy being used a concern, but we must also ask ourselves how these data centres are being powered.
Similarly, consider social media and the number of posts individuals and companies make on a daily basis. All of these are travelling through data centres and using energy, yet for the most part this is not visible to the user.
E-waste
E-waste is another green IT issue, and one that will only get worse as we rely on electronic devices more. As well as the potential eyesore of mountains of e-waste, there is also the impact upon the planet of mining the precious metals used in these electronics, such as gold, copper, aluminium, and steel.
In their marketing, device manufacturers and mobile network carriers make us see the phones we currently own in a negative light so that we feel the need to upgrade to the newest model.
The processes used to mine these metals lead to pollution, and we should also consider that some of the precious metals used in our devices could run out, as there is not an endless supply in the Earth’s surface.
It is also problematic that a lot of e-waste is sent to developing countries with limited recycling plants […].
It is also problematic that a lot of e-waste is sent to developing countries with limited recycling plants, and so much of the e-waste ends up in landfill. This can lead to toxic substances being leaked into the Earth’s surface.
First steps towards action
With my reflective hat on, I started to think about discussions we as teachers could have with pupils around this topic, and came up with the following:
Help learners to talk about the cloud and where it is located. We can remind them that the cloud is a physical entity. Show them images of data centres to help make this real, and allow them to appreciate where the data we generate every day goes.
Ask learners how many photos and videos they have on their devices, and where they think those items are stored. This can be extended to a year group or whole-school exercise so they can really appreciate the sheer amount of data being used and sent across the cloud, and how data centres fit with that energy consumption. I did this activity and found that I had 7163 photos and 304 videos on my phone — that’s using a lot of energy!
Helping young people gain an understanding of the impact of our use of electronic devices is an important action you can take.
Ask learners to research any local data centres and find out how many data centres there are in the world. You could then develop this into a discussion, including language related to data centres such as sensors, storage devices, cabling, and infrastructure. This helps learners to connect the theory to real-world examples.
Ask learners to reflect upon how many devices they use that are connected to the Internet of Things.
Consider for ourselves and ask parents, family, and friends how our online usage has changed since before the pandemic.
Consider what happens to electronic devices when they are thrown away and become e-waste. Where does it all go? What is the effect of e-waste on communities and countries?
Tips for greener IT
UK-based educators can watch a recent episode of TV programme Dispatchesthat investigates the carbon footprint of the IT industry. You can add the following tips from the programme to your discussions:
Turn off electronic devices when not in use
Use audio only when on online calls
Dispose of your old devices responsibly
Look at company websites and see what their commitment is to green IT, and consider whether we should support companies whose commitment to the planet is poor
Use WiFi instead of 3G/4G/5G, as it uses less energy
These lists are not exhaustive, but provide a good starting point for discussions with learners. We should all play our small part in ensuring that we #RestoreOurEarth — this year’s Earth Day theme — and having an awareness and understanding of the impact of our use of electronic devices is part of the way forward.
Some resources on green IT — do you have others?
BCS (British Computer Society, The Charted Institute of IT) has a Green IT specialist group, a community of IT professionals and enthusiasts who are passionate about green IT
What about you? In the comments below, share your thoughts, tips, and resources on green IT and how we can bring awareness of it to our learners and young people at home.
We’re feeling nostalgic because six years ago, two special Raspberry Pi computers named Ed and Izzy were travelling to the International Space Station (ISS) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA. These two Astro Pi units joined British ESA astronaut Tim Peake as part of his six-month Principia space mission. Tim and Astro Pis Ed and Izzy helped hundreds of young people run their own computer programs in space as part of the first Astro Pi Challenge.
We are also feeling excited, because Tim and our Head of Youth Partnerships, Olympia Brown, are talking to British TV and radio shows today about all things space and Astro Pi, including the exciting new developments and how families can get involved! You might catch Tim on your favourite channel.
Tim Peake being interviewed about the Astro Pi Challenge and how parents getting their children involved will benefit the whole family.
Tim Peake has been our Astro Pi champion from the start
Tim says: “I had the privilege to take the first Astro Pi computers to the International Space Station in 2015. Since then, more than 50,000 children have run experiments and sent messages into orbit. The Astro Pi Challenge is a great activity for children and their parents to discover more about coding and to use digital tools to be creative.”
During his space mission, Tim Peake deployed Astro Pi units Ed and Izzy in a number of different locations on board the ISS. He was responsible for loading the Astro Pi participants’ programs onto Ed and Izzy, collecting the data they generated, and making sure it was downlinked back to Earth for the participants.
Tim Peake with one of the first two Astro Pis unit during his Principia mission on the ISS
Fast forward six years, and we’re retiring Astro Pis Ed and Izzy and sending two upgraded Astro Pi units to space – in just over a week’s time, to be precise. This year, Italian ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will be taking the helm for the Challenge on board the ISS, while Tim continues to champion the Astro Pi Challenge down here on Earth.
Thank you Tim, for inspiring so many families to get involved with STEM and coding.
Your family’s very own space mission with Astro Pi
To get involved in the Astro Pi Challenge, you and your young people don’t even have to wait until the new Raspberry Pi computers arrive on the ISS. You can do Astro Pi Mission Zero — the beginners’ coding activity of the European Astro Pi Challenge — today!
Mission Zero participant Liz with her 2020-2021 certificate
In Mission Zero, young people, by themselves or in a team of up to four, follow our step-by-step instructions to write the code for a simple program, which we will send up to ISS to run on the new Astro Pi units. With their program, young people take a humidity reading on board the ISS and show it to the astronauts stationed there, together with a personal message or colourful design. This beginner-friendly coding activity takes about an hour and can be done on any computer in a web browser. It’s completely free too.
As a parent (or educator), you support young people on Mission Zero by:
Registering as a Mission Zero mentor on astro-pi.org so we can send you a unique code for submitting your child’s program once it’s written
Helping them follow the step-by-step instructions so you can learn about coding together
Motivating them to keep going if their program doesn’t work right away, and helping to spot mistakes
Celebrating with them when they’ve finished writing the code for their Mission Zero program
After a young person’s Mission Zero code has run and their message has been shown in the ISS, we’ll send you a special certificate for them so you can commemorate their space mission.
And this year, Astro Pi Mission Zero is extra special: we are asking all participants to help us name the upgraded Raspberry Pi computers that will go to live on board the ISS. We’ve created a list of renowned European scientists whose names participants can vote for, in case you need inspiration.
Parents have lots of enthusiasm for learning about science and technology
It’s not just young people that benefit from getting involved with the Astro Pi Challenge – it’s something the whole family will enjoy doing together. And as findings from our recent UK survey showed, parents are rediscovering their passion for science, technology, and coding through helping their kids with homework. The survey found that parents of children in primary and secondary school are far more likely than any other group of adults to enjoy learning about science, with 3 in 5 parents (62%) revealing their enthusiasm for the subject. Nearly as many parents (58%) wished they had greater knowledge of STEM from school, and 62% said they are interested in learning how to code.
“It’s wonderful to find out that parents of schoolchildren are discovering a passion for science and technology, especially after a year of home-schooling where they have been able to see first-hand what their children are learning.” says Olympia Brown, our Head of Youth Partnerships. “The Astro Pi Challenge is a fun, free, and creative way to learn about coding and carry out science experiments on board the International Space Station that both children and parents can get involved in.”
Young people love Astro Pi Mission Zero
If Tim Peake and we have not convinced you how fun and inspiring the Astro Pi Challenge will be for your family, then here are some young people to tell you about their experiences. We asked learners at Linton-on-Ouse Primary School how they found taking part in this year’s Mission Zero.
Learners at Linton-on-Ouse Primary School taking part in Mission Zero
This is what some of the young learners shared with us:
“I learned a bit about how to code. Everyone was very helpful. This was very fun, and I wish we can do this again. It was tricky when we tried to make the colours change.”
– A learner in Year 4
“I worked as a team by helping check all the time. Next time I want to do it on my own, because I am feeling confident.”
Head over to astro-pi.org to register as a Mission Zero mentor today and start coding with your children. There you’ll find all the details you need for your family space mission.
