A whole lot of super free hands-on activities are happening at the Raspberry Pi Store this summer.

We have teamed up with the Centre for Computing History to create an interactive learning space that’s accessible to all ages and abilities. Best of all, everything is free. It’s all happening in a big space new space we’ve borrowed a few doors down from the Raspberry Pi Store in the Grand Arcade in Cambridge, UK.

What is Raspberry Pi doing?

Everyone aged seven to 107 can get hands-on and creative with our free beginner-friendly workshops. You can make games with Scratch on Raspberry Pi, learn simple electronics for beginners, or get hands-on with the Raspberry Pi camera and Python programming.

If you don’t know anything about coding, don’t worry: there are friendly people on hand to help you learn.

The workshops take place every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until 3 September. Pre-booking is highly advisable. If the one you want is fully booked, it’s well worth dropping by if you’re in the neighbourhood, because spaces often become available at the last minute. And if you book and find you can no longer come along, please do make sure you cancel, because there will be lots of people who would love to take your space!

Book your place at one of our workshops.

What is the Centre for Computing History doing?

Come and celebrate thirty years of the World Wide Web and see how things have changed over the last three decades.

This interactive exhibition celebrates the years since Tim Berners-Lee changed the world forever by publishing the very first website at CERN in 1991. You can trace the footsteps of the early web, and have a go on some original hardware.

Here are some of the things you can do:

• Browse the very first website from 1991
• Search the web with Archie, the first search engine
• Enjoy the very first web comic
• Order a pizza on the first transactional website
• See the first webcam site
• See a recreation of the trailblazing Trojan Room Coffee Cam

But I don’t live near the Raspberry Pi Store!

While we would love to have a Raspberry Pi store in every town in every country all over the world (cackles maniacally), we are sticking with just the one in our hometown for now. But we make lots of cool stuff you can access online to relieve the FOMO.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s livestreamed Digital Making at Home videos are all still available for young people to watch and learn along with. You can chat, code together, hear from cool people, and see amazing digital making projects from kids who love making with technology.

There are also more than thirty Raspberry Pi courses available for free on FutureLearn. There’s something for every type of user and level of learner, from coders looking to move from Scratch to Python programming, to people looking to start up their own CoderDojo. Plus tons of materials for teachers sharing practical resources for the classroom.

Raspberry Pi books

If you like to tinker away in your own time, there are loads of books for all abilities available from the Raspberry Pi Press online store. The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide comes in five languages. Game designers can Code the Classics. And fashion-forward makers can create Wearable Tech Projects.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Summer at the Raspberry Pi Store

I joined Raspberry Pi eighteen months ago and spent my first year here keeping secrets and writing about Raspberry Silicon, and the chip that would eventually be known as RP2040. This is all (largely) completed work: Raspberry Pi Pico made its way out into the world back in January, and our own Raspberry Silicon followed last month.

The question is then, what have I done for you lately?

The Documentation

Until today our documentation for the “big” boards — as opposed to Raspberry Pi Pico — lived in a Github repository and was written in Github-flavoured Markdown. From there our documentation site was built from the Markdown source, which was pulled periodically from the repository, run through a script written many years ago which turned it into HTML, and then deployed onto our website.

This all worked really rather well in the early days of Raspberry Pi.

The documentation repository itself has been left to grow organically. When I arrived here, it needed to be restructured, and a great deal of non-Raspberry Pi specific documentation needed to be removed, while other areas were underserved and needed to be expanded. The documentation was created when there was a lot less third-party content around to support the Raspberry Pi, so a fair bit of it really isn’t that relevant anymore, and is better dealt with elsewhere on the web. And the structure was a spider’s web that, in places, made very little sense.

Frankly, it was all in a bit of a mess.

Enter the same team of folks that built the excellent PDF-based documentation for Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040. The PDF documentation was built off an Asciidoc-based toolchain, and we knew from the outset that we’d want to migrate the Markdown-based documentation to Asciidoc. It’d offer us more powerful tools going forwards, and a lot more flexibility.

After working through the backlog of community pull requests, we took a snapshot of the current Markdown-based repository and built out a toolchain. A lot of which we intended to, and did, throw away after converting the Markdown to Asciidoc as our “source of truth.” This didn’t happen without a bit of a wrench; nobody throws working code away lightly. But it did mean we’d reached the point of no return.

The next generation of documentation

The result of our new documentation project launches today.

The new documentation site is built and deployed directly from the documentation repository using Github Actions when someone pushes to the master branch. However we’ll mostly be working on the develop branch in the repository, which is the default branch you’ll now get when you take a fresh checkout, and also the branch you should target for your pull requests.

We’ve always taken pull requests against the Markdown-based source behind our documentation site. Over the years as the documentation set has grown there have been hundreds of community contributors, who have made over 1,200 individual pull requests, ranging from fixing small typos, to contributing whole new sections.

With the introduction of the new site, we’re going to continue to take pull requests against the new Asciidoc-based documentation. However, we’re going to be a bit more targeted around what we’ll to accept into the documentation, and will be looking to keep the repository focussed on Raspberry Pi-specific things, rather than having generic Linux tutorial content.

The documentation itself will remain under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

Product Information Portal

Supporting our customers in the best way we can when they build products around Raspberry Pi computers is important to us. A big part of this is being able to get customers access to the right documents easily. So alongside the new-look documentation, we have revamped how our customers (that’s you) get access to the documents you need for commercial applications of Raspberry Pi.

The Product Information Portal, or PIP as we’ve come to refer to it here at Pi Towers, is where documents such as regulatory paperwork, product change notices, and white papers will be stored and accessed from now on.

PIP has three tiers of document type: those which are publicly available; restricted documents that require a customer to sign up for a free account; and confidential documents which require a customer’s company to enter into a confidentiality agreement with Raspberry Pi.

PIP will also be a way for customers to get updates on products, allowing customers with a user account to subscribe to products, and receive email updates should there be a product change, regulatory update, or white paper release.

The portal can be found at pip.raspberrypi.org and will be constantly updated as new documents become available.

Where next?

I’m hoping that everyone that has contributed to the documentation over the years will see the new site as a big step towards making our documentation more accessible – and, as ever, we accept pull requests. However, if you’re already a contributor, the easiest thing to do is to take a fresh checkout of the repository, because things have changed a lot today.

This isn’t the end. Instead, it’s the beginning of a journey to try and pull together our documentation into something that feels a bit more cohesive. While the documentation set now looks, and feels, a lot better and is (I think) a lot easier to navigate if you don’t know it well, there is still a lot of pruning and re-writing ahead of me. But we’ve reached the stage where I’m happy, and want to, work on that in public so the community can see how things are changing and can help out.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Bring on the documentation

Get flappers flapping and balls bouncing off bumpers. Mark Vanstone has the code in the new issue of Wireframe magazine, available now.

There are so many pinball video games that it’s become a genre in its own right. For the few of you who haven’t encountered pinball for some reason, it originated as an analogue arcade machine where a metal ball would be fired onto a sloping play area and bounce between obstacles. The player operates a pair of flippers by pressing buttons on each side of the machine, which will in turn ping the ball back up the play area to hit obstacles and earn points. The game ends when the ball falls through the exit at the bottom of the play area.

Recreating pinball machines for video games

Video game developers soon started trying to recreate pinball, first with fairly rudimentary graphics and physics, but with increasingly greater realism over time – if you look at Nintendo’s Pinball from 1984, then, say, Devil’s Crush on the Sega Mega Drive in 1990, and then 1992’s Pinball Dreams on PC, you can see how radically the genre evolved in just a few years. In this month’s Source Code, we’re going to put together a very simple rendition of pinball in Pygame Zero. We’re not going to use any complicated maths or physics systems, just a little algebra and trigonometry.

Let’s start with our background. We need an image which has barriers around the outside for the ball to bounce off, and a gap at the bottom for the ball to fall through. We also want some obstacles in the play area and an entrance at the side for the ball to enter when it’s first fired. In this case, we’re going to use our background as a collision map, too, so we need to design it so that all the areas that the ball can move in are black.

Next, we need some flippers. These are defined as Actors with a pivot anchor position set near the larger end, and are positioned near the bottom of the play area. We detect left and right key presses and rotate the angle of the flippers by 20 degrees within a range of -30 to +30 degrees. If no key is pressed, then the flipper drops back down. With these elements in place, we have our play area and an ability for the player to defend the exit.

All we need now is a ball to go bouncing around the obstacles we’ve made. Defining the ball as an Actor, we can add a direction and a speed parameter to it. With these values set, the ball can be moved using a bit of trigonometry. Our new x-coordinate will move by the sin of the ball direction multiplied by the speed, and the new y-coordinate will move by the cos of the ball direction multiplied by speed. We need to detect collisions with objects and obstacles, so we sample four pixels around the ball to see if it’s hit anything solid. If it has, we need to make the ball bounce.

Get the code

If you wanted more realistic physics, you’d calculate the reflection angle from the surface which has been hit, but in this case, we’re going to use a shortcut which will produce a rough approximation. We work out what direction the ball is travelling in and then rotate either left or right by a quarter of a turn until the ball no longer collides with a wall. We could finesse this calculation further to create a more accurate effect, but we’ll keep it simple for this sample. Finally, we need to add some gravity. As the play area is tilted downwards, we need to increase the ball speed as it travels down and decrease it as it travels up.

All of this should give you the bare bones of a pinball game. There’s lots more you could add to increase the realism, but we’ll leave you to discover the joys of normal vectors and dot products…

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 53

You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 53, available directly from Raspberry Pi Press — we deliver worldwide.

And if you’d like a handy digital version of the magazine, you can also download issue 53 for free in PDF format.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Code your own pinball game | Wireframe #53

In computing education, designing equitable and authentic learning experiences requires a conscious effort to take into account the characteristics of all learners and their social environments. Doing this allows teachers to address topics that are relevant to a diverse range of learners. To support computing and computer science teachers with this work, we’re now sharing a practical guide document for culturally responsive teaching in schools.

Why we need to make computing culturally relevant

Making computing culturally relevant means that learners with a range of cultural identities will be able to identify with the examples chosen to illustrate computing concepts, to engage effectively with the teaching methods, and to feel empowered to use computing to address problems that are meaningful to them and their communities. This will enable a more diverse group of learners to feel that they belong in computing and encourage them to choose to continue with it as a discipline in qualifications and careers.

Such an approach can empower all our students and support their skills and understanding of the integral role that computing can play in promoting social justice.

Yota Dimitriadi, Associate Professor at the University of Reading, member of the project working group

We introduced our work on this new document to you previously here on the blog. Check out the prblog post to find out more about the project’s funding and background, and the external working group of teachers and academics we convened to develop the guide.

Some shared definitions

To get the project off to the best start possible once we had assembled the working group, we first spent time drawing on research from the USA and discussing within the working group to come to a shared understanding of key terms:

• Culture: A person’s knowledge, beliefs, and understanding of the world, which are affected by multiple personal characteristics, as well as social and economic factors.
• Culturally relevant pedagogy: A framework for teaching that emphasises the importance of incorporating and valuing all learners’ knowledge, ways of learning, and heritage, and that promotes critical consciousness in teachers and learners.
• Culturally responsive teaching: A range of teaching practices that draw on learners’ personal experiences and cultural identities to make learning more relevant to them, and that support the development of critical consciousness.
• Social justice: The extent to which all members of society have a fair and equal chance to participate in all aspects of social life, develop to their full potential, contribute to society, and be treated as equals.
• Equity: The extent to which different groups in society have access to particular activities or resources. To ensure that opportunities for access and participation are equal across different groups.

To bring in the voices of young people into the project, we asked teachers in the working group to consult with their learners to understand their perspectives on computing and how schools can engage more diverse groups of learners in elective computer science courses. The main reason that learners reported for being put off computing: complex or boring lessons of coding activities with a focus on theory rather than on practical outcomes. Many said that they were inspired by tasks such as producing their own games and suggested that early experiences in primary school and KS3 had been very important for their engagement in computing.

Curriculum, teaching approaches, and learning materials

The guide shows you that a culturally relevant pedagogy applies in three aspects of education, which we liken to a tree to indicate how these aspects connect to each other: the tree’s root system, the basis of culturally relevant pedagogy, is the focus of the curriculum; the tree’s trunk and branches are the teaching approaches taken to deliver the curriculum; the learning materials, represented by the tree’s crown of leaves, are the most widely visible aspect of computing lessons.

Each aspect plays an important role in culturally relevant pedagogy:

• Within the curriculum, it is important to think about the contexts in which computing concepts are taught, and about you make connections with issues that are meaningful to your learners
• Equitable teaching approaches, such as open-ended, inquiry-led activities and discussion-based collaborative tasks, are key if you want to provide opportunities for all your learners to express their ideas and their identities through computing
• Finally, inclusive representations of a range of cultures, and making learning materials accessible, are both of great importance to ensure that all your learners feel that computing is relevant to them

You can download the guide on culturally relevant pedagogy for computing teachers now to explore the resources provided:

• You’ll find a lot more information, practical tips, and links to resources to support you to implement culturally relevant pedagogy in all these aspects of your teaching
• The document links to different available curricula, and we have highlighted materials we’ve created for the Teach Computing Curriculum that promote key aspects of the approach
• We’ve also included links to academic papers and books if you want to learn more, as well as to videos and courses that you can use for professional development

What was being part of the working group like?

One of the teachers who was part of the working group is Joe Arday from Woodbridge High School in Essex, UK. Joe originally worked in the technology sector and has been teaching computing for ten years. We asked him about his experience of being part of the project and how he plans to use the guide in his own classroom practice:

“It has been an absolute privilege to play a part in working towards producing the guide that my own children will be beneficiaries of when they are studying the computing curriculum throughout their education. I have been able to reflect on how to further improve my teaching practice and pedagogy to ensure that the curriculum taught is culturally diverse and caters for all learners that I teach. (Also, having the opportunity to work with academics from both the UK and US has made me think about becoming an academic in the field of computing at some point in the future!)”

Joe also says: “I plan to review the computing curriculum taught in my computing department and sit down with my colleagues to work on how we can implement the guide in our units of work for Key Stages 3 to 5. The guide will also help my department to work towards one of my school’s aims to encourage an anti-racism community and curriculum in my school.“

Continuing the work

We hope you find this resource useful for your own practice, and for conversations within your school and network of fellow educators! Please spread the word about the guide to anyone in your circles who you think might benefit.

We plan to keep working with learners on their perspectives on culturally relevant teaching, and to develop professional development opportunities for teachers, initially in conjunction with a small number of schools. As always with our research projects, we will investigate what works well and share all our findings widely and promptly.

Many thanks to the teachers and academics in the working group for being wonderful collaborators, to the learners who contributed their time and ideas, and to Hayley Leonard and Diana Kirby from our team for all the time and energy they devoted to this project!

Working group

Joseph Arday, FCCT, Woodbridge High School, Essex, UK

Lynda Chinaka, University of Roehampton, UK

Mike Deutsch, Kids Code Jeunesse, Canada

Dr Yota Dimitriadi, University of Reading, UK

Amir Fakhoury, St Anne’s Catholic School and Sixth Form College, Hampshire, UK

Dr Samuel George, Ark St Alban’s Academy, West Midlands, UK

Professor Joanna Goode, University of Oregon, USA

Alain Ndabala, St George Catholic College, Hampshire, UK

Vanessa Olsen-Dry, North Cambridge Academy, Cambridgeshire, UK

Rohini Shah, Queens Park Community School, London, UK

Neelu Vasishth, Hampton Court House, Surrey, UK

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Delivering a culturally relevant computing curriculum: new guide for teachers

It can be easy to think of science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) as fields that develop in a linear way, always progressing towards ever better solutions and approaches. Of course, alternative solutions are posed to all sorts of problems, but in western culture, those solutions that did not take hold are sometimes seen as the approaches that were ‘wrong’ or mistaken, and that eventually gave way to the ‘right’ approaches. A culture that includes the belief that there is only one ‘right’ way can be alienating to anyone who sees the world in a different way.

Dr Ron Eglash from the University of Michigan explored the intersections of diverse cultural ideas and computing in his talk at the final research seminar in our series about diversity and inclusion (see below for the recorded video). His work and insights show us how we might think about diversity in computing as being dependent on the diversity of cultural concepts and beliefs that can underpin the subject. Ron also shared free resources for educators who want to help their students learn about STEM while exploring cultural ideas.

Where do our ideas about computing and STEM come from?

Ron’s talk explored the overlaps of technology, culture, and society. In his research work, Ron has facilitated collaborations across the world between STEM students and people from indigenous cultures, opening up computing to people who have different backgrounds and different ways of seeing the world and, in the process, revealing many complex assumptions that different cultures have about computing and technology.

Ron’s work challenges some of the assumptions in western culture about technological knowledge. He started his talk by showing the evolution of knowledge as a branching set of possibilities and ideas that societies choose to move forward with or leave behind. To illustrate, he gave examples of different concepts of mathematics that western society has taken on board, refined, or discarded throughout its history, demonstrating that there are different versions of mathematics we could have had but chose not to.

These different choices in adoption and exploration of ideas, Ron continued, are more evident when one looks at the knowledge systems of different cultures side by side: different knowledge systems represent different paths that groups of people have chosen — not in totality but as the result of smaller decisions that select which ideas will be influential and which will be eliminated.

What ideas pattern our cultures?

One idea that western society has chosen, and that Ron highlighted for us, is the extraction of value. This is something we can see across this society, and it’s a powerful idea that fundamentally shapes how many of us think about the world. We extract value from the natural world in the way we exploit raw materials. We extract value from labour through the organisation of working arrangements that we have made the norm. And we extract value from social relationships through the online social media platforms, online games, and other digital tools that have so quickly become a central part of billions of people’s lives.

But western culture, with its particular knowledge system and core tenet of value extraction, represents just one possible way of social and technical development. In nature, systems do not extract value, they circulate it: value moves in a recursive loop as organisms grow, die, and are subsumed back into the ecosystem. Many indigenous cultures have developed within this framework of circulating value. The possible benefits of a circular economy are becoming a topic of discussion in western society, and we would do well to remember that this concept is not western in origin: other cultures have been practicing it for a long time, a point Ron made clear in his talk. And as Ron showed us through his research, the framework of circulating value permeates various indigenous cultures in ways that go beyond approaches such as sustainable agriculture, and thereby creates repeating, fractal patterns in cultural artefacts at different scales, from artworks, to the way settlements are organised, to philosophical ideas.

In nature, there are many examples of fractal geometry because of biological and chemical phenomena of bottom-up growth and replication. Ron shared images gathered during his research that highlight that fractal patterns are also clearly visible in, for example, traditional African art: by using visual patterns of recursive and non-linear scaling, artists intentionally symbolised the bottom-up and circular ideas permeating their culture. African cultural concepts of recursion and non-linearity, which were also brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, can be seen today in, for example, cornrow hair braiding, quilting, growing traditions, and spiritual practices.

Computing activities based on circulation of value

The links between indigenous cultural concepts and computing algorithms are many. To explore these in the context of education, Ron and his team have worked in collaboration with members of indigenous communities to develop Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDT), a suite of computing and STEM activities and learning resources that allow young people of a range of ages to discover the relationship between computing and programming concepts and cultural ideas that trace back to indigenous cultures. The CSDT development process Ron described involved genuine collaboration: seeking ‘cultural permission’ from communities; deeply understanding the cultural concepts behind the artefacts that were being developed; and creating tools that not only allow students to explore traditional designs and artefacts but also give them the scope to design their own original artefacts and to actively contribute to communities’ cultural practices.

Ron underlined in his talk how important it is not to see activities like CSDT as a lure to ‘trick’ young people into engaging with STEM classes; the intention is not using them as a veneer to interest more young people in industries underpinned by an extractive world view. Instead, circular and bottom-up concepts are an alternative way of seeing how technology can be used to influence and construct the world.

Returning creative contributions

As such, an important aspect of the pedagogy of Culturally Situated Design Tools is returning creative contributions to the community whose concepts or artefacts are being explored in each activity. The aim is to create a generative cycle of STEM engagement, and Ron demonstrated how this can work by sharing more about a project he conducted with STEM students in Albany, NY. Students began the project by exploring cornrow design simulations. They brought these out of the computer, out of their schools, and into local braiding shops by producing 3D-printed mannequins featuring their cornrow designs. Through engaging with the braiding shop owners, the students learned that the owners had challenges to do with the pH level of hair products, and this led to the students producing pH testing kits for them. The practical applications benefitted the communities connected to the braiding shops and inspired more student interest in the project — thus, a circular, mutually beneficial process of engagement emerged.

Importantly, the STEM activities that Ron and his collaborators have developed cannot be separated from their cultural context. This way of teaching STEM is not about recruiting young people to become software developers or other tech professionals, but instead about giving them the skills to be creative contributors and problem solvers within communities so that they can help promote the circulation of value.

Rethinking diversity

I have long been enthusiastic about the potential of computing and digital making as a tool for many disciplines, and Ron’s talk made me consider what this might mean at a much deeper level than providing different routes into computing. There is a lot of discussion about how we need to increase diversity in the STEM field to make the field more equitable and able to positively contribute to society, but Ron’s presentation challenged me to think about the cultural assumptions that shape the nature of STEM, and how these influence who engages with the field. Increasing diversity and inclusion in computing and STEM is not just a case of making opportunities open to everyone, but about actually re-shaping the nature of the field so it can be equitable in its interactions with ecological systems, cultures, and human experiences.

Do watch the video of Ron’s presentation and the following Q&A for more on these concepts, examples of the computing activities and how to use them, and discussion of these fundamental ideas. You’ll find his presentation slides on our ‘previous seminars’ page.

You can find the resources Ron shared at csdt.org and generativejustice.org/projects.

Join us at our next online seminar

We are taking a break from our monthly research seminars in August! In the meantime, you can revisit our previous seminars about diversity and inclusion. On 7 September, we’ll be back to start our new seminar series focusing on AI, machine learning, and data science education, in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute. At these seminars, you’ll hear from a range of international speakers about current best practices in teaching young people the technical concepts and ethical considerations involved in these technologies. Do sign up and put the dates in your calendar!

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Exploring how culture and computing intersect

Meet Eli’s WeatherClock, a digital–analogue timepiece that displays the weather at each hour of the day as well as the time. Here’s an example: every day at 3pm, instead of the hour hand just pointing to a number three on the clock’s face, it also points to a visual representation of what the weather is doing. Obviously, Eli’s WeatherClock still tells the time using the standard positions of the hour and minute hands, but it does two jobs in one, and it looks much more interesting than a regular clock.

Detailed forecast

You can also press on every hour position of the watch’s touchscreen display to see more detailed meteorological information, such as temperature and the likelihood of rain. Then once you’ve gotten all the detail you need, you return to the simple analogue resting face to by pressing the centre of the touchscreen.

Under the hood

The device uses the openWeatherMap API to fetch weather data for your location. It’s a simple build powered by Raspberry Pi Zero W with a Pimoroni 4″ HyperPixel Hi-Res Display providing the user interface. And its slim, pocket-sized design means you can take it with you on your travels.

We found this creation on The Digital Vagrant‘s YouTube channel. A friend named Eli gave them the idea so the maker named the project after him. The Digital Vagrant liked the idea of being able to quickly check the weather before leaving the house — no need to check a computer or get your phone out of your bag.

Want to make your own WeatherClock? The lovely maker has deposited everything you need on GitHub.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi ‘WeatherClock’ shows you the hour’s forecast

Safely catching mice is a better way of fixing a problem, and using Raspberry Pi means it needs less supervision. In the new issue of The MagPi magazine, Rob Zwetsloot takes a look with the maker, Andrew Taylor.

With some IoT projects, it’s the little things that help. For example, take Andrew Taylor, who did the good thing of setting up a humane mousetrap. However, checking it to see if any mice had been caught in it, while necessary, was getting a little boring.

“If a mouse had gone in and I did not check it, the mouse would quickly run out of food and water!” Andrew tells us. “Having been interested in Raspberry Pi for a couple of years and having recently begun learning Python using the Enviro+ environment sensors, I figured a Raspberry Pi with a motion sensor would be an ideal way to check.”

It’s a fairly simple setup, one commonly used in CCTV builds and some fun ‘parent detectors’ on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s projects site.

Mouse motion

“I came across a couple of automated mousetraps that people had made from scratch, but wanting to keep it simple and cheap,” Andrew explains. “I wanted to use off-the-shelf parts where possible and keep costs down. The Pi Hut had a tutorial for a DIY burglar alarm utilising a PIR sensor, IFTTT, and Pushbullet, which seemed like an ideal starting point.”

IFTTT – If This Then That – is an online service popular with IoT folks. It’s great for small things like cross-posting images on social media services, or sending a push notification when motion is detected in a mousetrap.

“I have only had one mouse since, but it worked!” Andrew says. “I was averaging about 800 detections a day and suddenly got well over a 1000. Sure enough, there was a mouse in the trap which I released shortly afterwards. I do tend to notice that the values fluctuate a bit, so it is always worth checking over the previous day’s results to see if it is notably higher.”

You might think that 800 push notifications a day is far worse than just occasionally checking your garage, and you’d be right, so Andrew tweaked the code a bit: “The code examples I found sent a notification for each movement detection – which I knew would be rather annoying, considering how randomly PIR sensors sometimes seem to trigger. My script instead logs any hits at a max of 1 per 30 seconds and then triggers a notification once every 24 hours, meaning I just get one notification a day.”

Beat a path

There’s always room for improvement, as Andrew explains: “I intend to improve the code so that it can record running averages and give an indication as to whether it believes there has been a significant spike that might necessitate me checking it out.”

Whilst the aim of the project was to keep costs down, Andrew is tempted to experiment by adding a camera, and possibly a light, so he can have a peek remotely when there has been a spike in the readings and to see if it is a false alarm. Which, as he admits, is “a new height in laziness!”

The MagPi #108 out NOW!

You can grab the brand-new issue right now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, or via our app on Android or iOS. You can also pick it up from supermarkets and newsagents. There’s also a free PDF you can download.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Humane mouse trap | The MagPi #108

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

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

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

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

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

Partnering with The Alan Turing Institute for a new seminar series

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

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

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

Dr Matt Forshaw, The Alan Turing Institute

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

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

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

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

How you can join our online seminars

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

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

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

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

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We love seeing all the wonderful things people are doing in the community — that’s why we’re sharing our new series of short films documenting some of the incredible journeys of community members in all corners of the globe!

Today we bring you the third wonderful film in this series of community stories. For the series, we’ve been super lucky to collaborate with digital makers all over the world, and today’s story exemplifies how truly global the community is.

Watch our video to find out how this ambitious young digital maker’s passion for creating with technology has propelled her around the world! 

Say hi to Laura

Laura’s journey began in her hometown of Timișoara, Romania. In Laura’s words: “I joined my local CoderDojo, and it changed my life.”

Laura (17) started attending her CoderDojo coding club four years ago because she loves problem-solving and wanted to learn more about how digital technology works. Her biggest discovery at CoderDojo, however, was the other young people there, who were just as passionate about technology as she was. Laura says, “I had the opportunity to meet people with the same interests. Everybody was working, exchanging ideas, having fun!”

Laura and the new friends she made worked together to solve problems in their local community: they built an autonomous waste-collecting robot and a drone-mounted air pollution monitor. 

“I want to bring a change to the world.”

Laura

But Laura’s tech journey did not stop there. In 2017, she travelled to Dublin to present her latest project — a Raspberry Pi-powered, mind-controlled robot! — at Coolest Projects International, which introduced her to a global community of digital makers. And since then she’s even taken part in a robotics competition at MIT!

Working alongside like-minded peers and connecting with a global community of young tech creators has had a profound impact on Laura. She says, “I never imagined that I would have so many opportunities to travel, expand my horizons, and meet so many people. It’s thanks to CoderDojo and Coolest Projects that I’ve been able to build an amazing network of friends, and together we’re ready to take on the world.” 

We are so excited to see what Laura will do next. Help us celebrate Laura by liking and sharing her story on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook!

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

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

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

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

HackSpace magazine issue 45 out NOW!

Each month, HackSpace magazine brings you the best projects, tips, tricks and tutorials from the makersphere. You can get it from the Raspberry Pi Press online store or your local newsagents.

As always, every issue is free to download from the HackSpace magazine website.

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

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

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

Damn, I feel old.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

,

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

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

Why research matters

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

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

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

The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre 

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

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

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

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

We’re starting with three broad themes: 

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

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

Get involved

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

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

You can also join our free monthly research seminars.

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

From four to six

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

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

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

Under the hood

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

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

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

Carry on

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

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

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation and ESA Education are excited to announce the winners and highly commended Mission Space Lab teams of the 2020/21 European Astro Pi Challenge!

In Mission Space Lab, teams of young people aged up to 19 create scientific experiments that run on the International Space Station’s two Astro Pi computers — space-hardened Raspberry Pis with cameras and an array of sensors.

In the final phase of Mission Space Lab, teams analyse the data captured during their experiment’s three-hour runtime on the ISS and write a short report describing their experiment’s hypothesis, methods, results, and conclusions.

You can read the best reports below! From 154 final reports, the Astro Pi team has now chosen 10 winners and 5 highly commended teams that have each demonstrated great scientific merit and innovative use of the Astro Pi hardware.

Our winning teams are…

Zeus from Tudor Vianu National College of Computer Science in Romania, who used photos of Earth captured by the Astro Pi’s camera, historical data sets, and machine learning to develop a weather forecast system that predicts meteorological phenomena on Earth.

Mag-AZ from Escola Secundária Domingos Rebelo in Portugal, who attempted to create an algorithm that could calculate the location of the magnetic poles of any planet or star by using the Astro Pi’s sensors to map Earth’s magnetic fields.

Atlantes from Niubit Coding Club in Spain, who used a sonification process to convert data captured by the Astro Pi’s sensors into music, inspired by Commander Chris Hadfield’s performance of Space Oddity on the ISS in 2013. You can see more about their experiment here.

Mateii from Saint Sava National College in Romania, who investigated the potential growth of Aspergillus and Penicillium mold on the ISS in comparison to on Earth using a simulation model and Astro Pi sensor readings taken inside the Columbus module.

Juno from Institut d’Altafulla in Spain, who attempted to determine how much heat the astronauts aboard the ISS experience by using temperature, pressure, and humidity data captured by the Astro Pi’s sensors together with psychrometric calculations.

Albedo from Lycée Albert Camus in France, who investigated albedo on Earth, using photos captured by the Astro Pi’s camera to classify cloud, land, and sea coverage, and analysing their corresponding albedo values.

SpaceRad from Centrum Nauki Keplera – Planetarium Wenus in Poland, who also investigated albedo (the proportion of light or radiation that is reflected by a surface) on Earth to evaluate the efficacy of using solar farms to combat climate change.

Magtrix from The Leys School in the United Kingdom, who analysed whether geographical features of Earth such as mountains affect the planet’s magnetic field using the Astro Pi’s magnetometer, GPS data, and photos of Earth captured by the Astro Pi’s camera.

Mechabot from Robone Robotics Club in Germany, who investigated how the Earth’s magnetic field correlates with its climate, and how this affects near-Earth objects’ behaviour in low-Earth orbit.

Spacepi2 from Zanneio Model High School in Greece, who investigated urbanisation on Earth by comparing photos captured by the Astro Pi’s camera with historical data using an automated photo classification program they created and NDVI analysis.

Highly commended teams

Bergson from Lycée Henri-Bergson Paris in France, who built an AI model predicting nitrogen dioxide pollution levels on Earth using NDVI analysis of photos taken by the Astro Pi’s camera.

LionTech from Mihai Eminescu National College, Oradea in Romania, who attempted to measure the velocity of the ISS in orbit, and also created an algorithm to detect smoke, pollution, and types of cloud coverage in the images they captured using the Astro Pi’s camera.

RosSpace from Ceo Boecillo in Spain, who are the third team in our list to have investigated Earth’s albedo levels in relation to global warming using photo analysis. A popular theme this year!

Jupiter from Institut d’Altafulla in Spain, who looked at variations in the current surface area of water bodies on Earth compared to historical records as an indicator of climate change.

And a special mention for:

Ultrafly from Ultrafly Coding Club in Canada, who were the youngest team to make the highly commended list this year, with an average age of 8! Their experiment explored whether the environmental variables on the ISS created allergy-friendly living conditions for the astronauts on board.

The prize? A special webinar with ESA Astronaut Luca Parmitano

Every Astro Pi team that reached Phase 2 of Mission Space Lab by having their experiment idea accepted this year will receive participation certificates recognising their achievement, and the winners and highly commended teams will receive special certificates and an additional prize.

The prize for this year’s winners and highly commended teams is the chance to pose their questions to ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano during a webinar in September! We’ll shortly email the teams’ mentors the instructions for submitting their teams’ questions to Luca.

This Q&A event for the finalists will conclude this year’s European Astro Pi Challenge. It’s been an incredible year for the Challenge, with 15756 young people from 23 countries participating in Mission Zero or Mission Space Lab.

Everyone on the Raspberry Pi and ESA Education teams congratulates this year’s participants for their efforts, especially given the obstacles many teams had to overcome due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Thank you and congratulations to everyone who has taken part — we hope you found it as fun and inspiring as we did!

We can’t wait to welcome you back for the next European Astro Pi Challenge!

While this year’s Challenge is coming to an end, the European Astro Pi Challenge will return with both Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab in September!

We invite all teachers, educators, club leaders, and young people who love coding and space science to follow our updates on astro-pi.org and the Astro Pi Twitter account to make sure you don’t miss any announcements.

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In game design, freedom can lead to paralysis. But in the latest issue of Wireframe magazine, Stuart Maine explains how game pillars and the iron triangle will help you focus on what’s important.

This article will cover two game development tools that are designed to help decide what’s important in the game you’re making. The iron triangle revolves around the practical realities of making a game, while game pillars cover the creative side, but both relate to the importance of focus. Let’s begin with pillars.

Game pillars

Every game media has its strengths, such as wargaming’s communities, the shared experiences of board games, or the collaboration of RPGs. One of the advantages of video games is their sheer flexibility – we can race across alien worlds, explore Egyptian tombs, or keep fit while going on magical quests. But that infinite flexibility can be a real problem for game creators, because if the game you’re making can include literally anything, then how do you know what to focus on?

Let’s assume you have an idea for a game based on a particular world or character, or a certain type of gameplay. Alternatively, you might have used player types (see Wireframe issue 39) to decide on a particular audience and the features they like, or if you’re working with someone else’s IP, then that brand’s owners might have a type of gameplay in mind. Game pillars help move beyond those starting points and guide you through development.

The basics

A game’s pillars are a list of around three ‘core statements’ created early in that game’s development. You could come up with your pillars before you’ve started development to help narrow down the possible game you might make, or you might do this after prototyping has given you an idea you want to pursue. You can even retroactively create pillars to help rescue a game that’s been in development for a while and has lost its way.

• Each statement should be short – no more than a sentence – and each should be phrased as a rule you will follow throughout development.
• Use active language. We will, we like, this game is, our audience wants, and so on. Don’t use negative language if you can rephrase the same statement as a positive.
• Importantly, make your pillars focus on how your players will feel over the things they will do. This is probably the most important concept here, so let’s explore it further.

Dig deeper into the ‘why’

It’s easy to write ‘our game will feature 2D puzzles and platforming’, and technically that is a pillar because you can refer back to it later. But it doesn’t really say anything about what that platforming is for. By that, I mean why are you making a game about platforming? To dig deeper into the ‘why’ behind your pillar, you could rewrite that sentence to one of these:

• Explore evocative alien worlds, telling a story through atmosphere and details
• It’s satisfying to master deep systems and figure out hidden rules
• Our players will achieve a state of flow through challenging, precision gameplay

Those are my example guesses at a pillar each for the platform games Flashback, Spelunky, and Celeste. All are 2D platformers, but they’re ‘about’ very different things.

What to do with your pillars

Note that none of the above examples specifically talk about the gameplay being platforming, because pillars should focus on the feelings and emotions you want your game to evoke, rather than how you’re going to do it. That’s because pillars aren’t a feature list to check off, more a tool to help remember the things that are important when you’re submerged in the day-to-day realities of game development. Pillars are the why of your game, and the actual development process is coming up with the what to match those initial goals.

Print your chosen pillars as large as you can and put them up somewhere you’ll see them every day. That way they’ll become ingrained in your thoughts and you’ll easily be able to refer to them when someone suggests a new feature or change to the game. Will that change help bring your game closer to your pillars (great), not really affect them (neutral), or work against them (bad)?

I’ve seen studios use pillars on struggling games to discard any areas which don’t match them. You particularly see this if a game is taking too long to release (because most professional studios have to get a game out to some sort of deadline – more on this below), with people looking back to their pillars to help work out what to cut. If feature A is cool, but feature B aligns with the pillars, it’ll take a strong argument to keep A.

Establishing pillars

There are a couple of approaches for coming up with a game’s pillars, each with advantages, but also potential problems to look out for. Both of these approaches assume you already know to some degree what the game will be. Your pillars will help guide the eventual game’s details, but they’re a tool for staying on track as you forge ahead, not for coming up with ideas in the first place. If you haven’t agreed on a concept for your game yet, then run game jams, conduct audience and market research, or paper prototype ideas first.

Second, both approaches assume any business, audience, IP, or technology factors are already agreed and set in stone. For example, you might already know that this will be a multiplayer game, that it must be released within this time frame, or that it must be built on the technology created for your previous game. We’ll talk more about this with the iron triangle, but basically, any real-world issues that are beyond your control must be acknowledged or you risk coming up with pillars that set you up for difficulties later.

Two approaches

The two approaches are to have the entire team brainstorm potential pillars, or have vision holders dictate them:

ONE: If the entire team is involved, then you run brainstorming sessions where everyone’s potential pillar ideas are stuck up on a wall. Then the group chooses the best pillars or combines a couple of ideas into pillars (remember the point about keeping them short – mashing many ideas into a long pillar is cheating). 

The advantage of this approach is that everyone understands and buys into the chosen pillars because they had a say in creating them. The downside is that this process can take time, with potentially conflicting ideas needing to be whittled down until an agreement is reached.

TWO: The other approach is for ‘creative vision holders’ to come up with the game’s pillars and then present them to the rest of the team. Obviously, this is much less collaborative and more about saying, ‘I have a vision for this game which I think could be incredible, will you help me make it?’ The advantage of this is that everyone can rally behind a singular vision that someone is passionate about bringing to the world. As a result, the game’s pillars are likely to be extremely focused and all pointing in the same direction. The downside is that it requires everyone else to get on board with the game’s pillars even though they didn’t help come up with them.

Either way, once the pillars have been created, everyone on the team has to work with them in mind – there’s an implied contract that these rules must be enforced to ensure the game keeps moving in the right direction. Even though it can be unpopular to say no to someone’s idea, that’s what pillars are there to help with (and of course, pillars don’t say ‘that idea is bad’, simply that it doesn’t fit this particular game. Write the idea down and maybe build your next game around it).

Examples

Here are some actual pillars from games I’ve worked on:

• Live through the apocalypse by any means necessary.
  This pillar from a military-themed game establishes that any action is acceptable in order to survive, implying a gritty, survival-of-the-fittest tone. 
• Does it make me feel loved?
  A pillar from a game that was designed to appeal to an audience that liked romances and was looking for escapism. This guided our characters, environments, and art style.
• Make me feel powerful, and make me say, ‘That was awesome!’
  It’s always worth considering a pillar covering who the player is in this game. If you’re making a game about being a giant robot, then ensure players feel big and powerful.
• Small actions = epic reactions.
  From a puzzle game themed around combat. Because the player is making very small actions (tap, drag) we wanted to ensure the game responded with weighty reactions.
• Express your own style in a safe way.
  If you’re working on a game for kids, it’s worth thinking about the challenges and worries in their lives, and whether your game can help them safely explore those areas.
• Trust the player – it’s their game, let them play how they like.
  We used this for a procedurally created game, reminding the team not to create puzzles but to focus on systems that players could use and abuse any way they wanted.

The value of pillars

I realise that game pillars are quite an abstract topic, but in my experience across many games and studios, they have proven their worth. At the start of a project, they help avoid the ‘blank page’ problem of being able to make anything you can imagine, and later they help you say ‘this, but not that’ and avoid wandering in the development wilderness. So however you choose to structure or word your game pillars, I wholeheartedly recommend spending a little time thinking about the why before you launch into the what.

Speaking of which, let’s take a look at the iron triangle and how it will impact your game, because no matter what you do in the games industry, the triangle will impact you. As a result, it’s important to have an idea of how it works and what it means to your projects. A quick disclaimer: I’m going to simplify a complex area for space reasons, so if it interests you, check out online resources on this and other project management topics.

Art versus business

Have you ever played a game and clearly seen that it was unfinished? Missing features, obvious bugs, and a lack of polish show that you’re playing a game that needed more development time. The iron triangle is the reason games are released in an unfinished state, but it isn’t some malevolent force – it’s simply where reality butts up against creativity in game development.

Coined by Dr. Martin Barnes, the triangle applies to premium games as much as free ones, and to indie games as equally as blockbusters. It relates to…

Three areas of game development

• Quality: How ‘good’ is your game? Good could mean it has many features, levels, NPCs, and weapons, or that what you have is highly polished and balanced. It also dictates how many bugs you let through into the finished game (no one ever fixes all their bugs, you just choose which are most important).
• Time: Implementing all of the above takes time, so this point of the triangle relates to how long your game will take to be released. Most game developers have to release their games to some sort of deadline; see ‘Time = money’ for more on this.
• Money: The longer a game’s in development, the more money it costs, with most coming from the wages or living expenses of the team working on it. Money is the most complicated of the three factors because there’s a limit to how much you can throw at a game. A feature that’s going to take a lone developer ten months can’t be done in one simply by paying to put ten developers on it – people get in each other’s way and you have to pay even more because that many people need a lot of management.

Choose your priorities

Now we know the three points of the iron triangle – where things get interesting is that those points are all interrelated, and the rule is you can only control two of the three points. You can select which two points you want to control, but you have no say on what happens to the third. That’s why it’s called an iron triangle – the outcome of the third point is decided by what you do with the two you’ve chosen to control.

These are the outcomes you can expect based on the two points of the triangle you choose to control:

• Controlling time and money is where you see licensed tie-in games. Because they need to release alongside (say) a movie, they must come out on a certain date, and they can’t cost more than a certain amount otherwise it isn’t worth making the game in the first place. The point of the triangle not controlled here is quality, meaning the game will be as big and polished as it happens to be when the time and money run out.
• The second choice is to control time and quality, meaning the game must come out on a certain date and be at least ‘this’ good (e.g. large, polished, and bug-free). This option means you relinquish control over the game’s cost – it will simply cost as much as it needs to, to ensure it hits your quality bar and is released on time.
• Finally, you can control money and quality, meaning the game will be big and polished, but the team is kept small to limit development costs. This means you have no control over how long the game will take to release because a small team making a polished product can only work so fast.

Business realities

You might be wondering why any of this matters – after all, you could be making a game in your spare time or working at a studio where other people make these decisions. But if you understand which of the points of the triangle your project is trying to control, then you can work more effectively, making choices that work towards those needs rather than against them.

As a side note, if you’re working at a studio and whoever’s in charge insists they can control all three points of the iron triangle, consider that a Big Red Warning. That sort of denial of the fundamentals of project management means overtime – and a game that’s likely to go off the rails.

The iron triangle isn’t about hateful business realities quashing your creative dreams, it’s about choosing and understanding your priorities so that you control your game, not the other way around.

Recap

To recap: choosing your game’s pillars helps you focus on what’s important, and choosing which two points of the iron triangle you want to control helps you focus on the reality of making a game. Both of these are important, because not deciding on a game’s pillars can lead to the end result being a mess of conflicting ideas pulling in multiple directions, and ignoring the iron triangle leads to games spiralling into overtime, delays, and impossible demands. Yes, making games should be fun, but a little focus early in a project’s life can pay off big time later on.

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 52

You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 52, available directly from Raspberry Pi Press — we deliver worldwide.

And if you’d like a handy digital version of the magazine, you can also download issue 52 for free in PDF format.

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Want to dabble in the Internet of Things but don’t know where to start? Well, our friends at Microsoft have developed something fun and free just for you. Here’s Senior Cloud Advocate Jim Bennett to tell you all about their brand new online curriculum for IoT beginners.

IoT — the Internet of Things — is one of the biggest growth areas in technology, and one that, to me, is very exciting. You start with a device like a Raspberry Pi, sprinkle some sensors, dust with code, mix in some cloud services and poof! You have smart cities, self-driving cars, automated farming, robotic supermarkets, or devices that can clean your toilet after you shout at Alexa for the third time.

It feels like every week there is another survey out on what tech skills will be in demand in the next five years, and IoT always appears somewhere near the top. This is why loads of folks are interested in learning all about it.

In my day job at Microsoft, I work a lot with students and lecturers, and I’m often asked for help with content to get started with IoT. Not just how to use whatever cool-named IoT services come from your cloud provider of choice to enable digital whatnots to add customer value via thingamabobs, but real beginner content that goes back to the basics.

This is why a few of us have spent the last few months locked away building IoT for Beginners. It’s a free, open source, 24-lesson university-level IoT curriculum designed for teachers and students, and built by IoT experts, education experts and students.

What will you learn?

The lessons are grouped into projects that you can build with a Raspberry Pi so that you can deep-dive into use cases of IoT, following the journey of food from farm to table.

You’ll build projects as you learn the concepts of IoT devices, sensors, actuators, and the cloud, including:

• An automated watering system, controlling a relay via a soil moisture sensor. This starts off running just on your device, then moves to a free MQTT broker to add cloud control. It then moves on again to cloud-based IoT services to add features like security to stop Farmer Giles from hacking your watering system.
• A GPS-based vehicle tracker plotting the route taken on a map. You get alerts when a vehicle full of food arrives at a location by using cloud-based mapping services and serverless code.
• AI-based fruit quality checking using a camera on your device. You train AI models that can detect if fruit is ripe or not. These start off running in the cloud, then you move them to the edge running directly on your Raspberry Pi.
• Smart stock checking so you can see when you need to restack the shelves, again powered by AI services.
• A voice-controlled smart timer so you have more devices to shout at when cooking your food! This one uses AI services to understand what you say into your IoT device. It gives spoken feedback and even works in many different languages, translating on the fly.

Grab your Raspberry Pi and some sensors from our friends at Seeed Studio and get building. Without further ado, please meet IoT For Beginners: A Curriculum!

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We’re excited to share another incredible story from the community — the second in our new series of inspirational short films that celebrate young tech creators across the world.

These stories showcase some of the wonderful things that young people are empowered to do when they learn how to create with technology. We hope that they will inspire many more young people to get creative with technology too!

Meet Avye

This time, you will meet an accomplished, young community member who is on a quest to encourage more girls to join her and get into digital making.

For as long as she can remember, Avye (13) has enjoyed creating things. It was at her local CoderDojo that seven-year-old Avye was introduced to the world of robotics. Avye’s second-ever robot, the Raspberry Pi–powered Voice O’Tronik Bot, went on to win the Hardware category at our Coolest Projects UK event in 2018.

Coding and digital making have become an integral part of Avye’s life, and she wants to help other girls discover these skills too. She says, “I believe that it’s important for girls and women to see and be aware of ordinary girls and women doing cool things in the STEM world.” Avye started running her own workshops for girls in their community and in 2018 founded Girls Into Coding. She has now teamed up with her mum Helene, who is committed to helping to drive the Girls Into Coding mission forwards.

I want to get other girls like me interested in tech.

Avye

Avye has received multiple awards to celebrate her achievements, including the Princess Diana Award and Legacy Award in 2019. Most recently, in 2020, Avye won the TechWomen100 Award, the Women in Tech’s Aspiring Teen Award, and the FDM Everywoman in Tech Award!

We cannot wait to see what the future has in store for her. Help us celebrate Avye and inspire others by liking and sharing her story on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook!

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