Five ways the Raspberry Pi Foundation is supporting education in the UK

Launched at the BETT Show in London today, Hello World is a free resource designed for teachers educating children in computer science.

Hello World includes a research section called Insights, which explores the research surrounding computing education, classroom resources, new projects, lessons plans and a review section of new products and books.

“We're launching a magazine called Hello World. For a long time we had a magazine called the Magpie, which is the community magazine for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. We have done a couple of versions for Magpie before focused on educators, and we had such a great response that we've decided to make it its own magazine,” says Colligan.

“Hello World is going to come out three times a year in the first year, probably more in the second year if it's successful,” he explains.

“The best part is that educators in the UK can subscribe and for free, have it delivered to their home ad it'll be free forever as a PDF online,” adds Colligan.

As schools bring tablets into the classroom, the cost for learning resources and hardware is at an all time high. The Raspberry Pi Foundation aims to remove this barrier with its £5-£25 Raspberry Pi single-board PCs.

“One of our goals is to remove price as a barrier for people learning about computers and I think we're nailing that actually.

“The Raspberry Pi's designed so that you can stick a mouse and a keyboard into it and everyone can rustle up some mice and keyboards at relatively low cost. You can even plug it into your TV at home,” says Colligan.

“It's designed to remove price as a barrier. Our goal really then is to make sure that the resources and the support are also available free of charge,” he adds.

Improving computer science in the classroom will be crucial to improve tech skills in the UK, via the science and digital curriculum.

“We run educational programmes to get kids excited about computing. We now run one of the world's largest networks of volunteer led coding clubs. There are more than 5,000 [Code Clubs] in the UK. They're for nine to 11 year olds, and we have them all over the world and it's growing incredibly quickly,” explains Colligan.

“And although Code Club's don’t have to use Raspberry Pis, it’s an important point about the foundation is we're not only about Raspberry Pi computers,” he adds.

School projects in all subject areas aim to engage with children and teachers and show the practical benefits of coding and computer science. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched numerous projects highlighting the potential of Raspberry Pi.

“One of the things that's really important, is making computing feel relevant. These terrible stereotypes that it's only for geeky kids and all that sort of stuff, is just wrong.

“The weather-station project which we did with Oracle was just fantastic. We put [Raspberry Pi] weather stations in over 800 schools all over the world,  enabling teachers to talk about climate change, the environment, geography and use that as as a way into learning about computing,” says Colligan.

Teacher training is one of the major barriers to embedding computer science in schools. The main issues are the shortage of science and digital teachers, plus restrictions put on teachers and the curriculum.

The Raspberry Pi foundation offers free and intensive teacher training to try and combat this.

“We have been running for two years now, a teacher training programme called Picademy,” says Colligan.

“Picademy is face to face, so that's a two day, pretty intensive teacher training programme. Of course we can only reach modest numbers of teachers with a programme like that, so we have partnered with the Open University, and we have our teacher training going online from February. We've had over 10,000 teachers sign up so far,” he adds.