I asked my son what he did at school today. In coding he learned how to create a game in Scratch. He's in Year 4. He's looking forward to being in Year 5 because then he can go to their after school programming club.
When I was at university, nevermind at school, they made us do the European Computer Driving Licence and that was little more than being able to do the very basics on Microsoft Office.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is do you think I should buy him a Raspberry Pi? Although I'm known as the techie guy at work (today's task was showing someone how to add a web page to their favourites) my computer knowledge is rather limited so I wouldn't really know what to do with it.
Really, it comes down to whatever sparks his interest - if he's interested in programming a videogame then you could do worse than point him to Unity, if what he really wants is to know what goes on under the bonnet of a computer/OS then yeah a Pi would be a good choice. Picking the right tutorials/learning materials will probably be a bigger issue, to be honest - if you get him a book on x86 assembly he'll probably be put off for life.
Also, if he's really keen, there's no harm in you asking the teacher of that club if he can go along anyway.
That question is rather like 'what can I do with a screwdriver?'
Whatever you like - it's a means, not an end.
If there's nothing you fancy doing with a little cheap computer, I'm not sure how a Pi will bring you much joy. That said, it's rather easier to make a Pi do _stuff_ than it is a PC or an XBox or whatever - if you want to flash lights, control stuff, a Pi (or other board, there are loads of similar, but Pi has a lot of traction, which means it has loads of resources of people saying 'here's how to do <specific thing>'.
Or you could challenge yourself to learn a programming language or several, that's fun and possibly useful in itself, and a Pi isn't a bad machine to learn on - you can't do any great harm, just stick a new SD card in, and you're back where you started, unlike a PC where deleting system32 because some 'helpful' twunt suggested it, means you're in for a tedious reinstall.
It may also be a fun thing to share learning this stuff with your sprog?
>my computer knowledge is rather limited so I wouldn't really know what to do with it
Learn with him, make a father-son project of it. If you want to have a go with the Raspberry Pi, there are loads of projects and ideas on their website. Scratch is piss easy to learn, even if you've never done any programming. Once you've got the hang of it, you can move on to something like Python.
Getting started with a Pi isn't difficult. You just hook it up to an old keyboard, monitor and mouse and plug in a suitable boot SD card. Most of the suppliers will sell you a pre-flashed card, or you can flash one yourself quite easily. Once you've done that, it'll boot up into a familiar-looking desktop environment.
It's a small, cheap computer that runs Linux. A Raspberry Pi Model B costs about £30 and is about as powerful as a cheap laptop. The project was inspired by old home computers like the BBC Micro and the Speccy. The idea is to give kids a simple computer that they can muck about with and use to learn programming. It's fairly easy to hook up a Raspberry Pi to other electronics, so they often get used in robotics projects.
>>25171 >The project was inspired by old home computers like the BBC Micro and the Speccy.
The particular idea of it being cheap was a definite homage to Clive Sinclair, whose brief for the ZX80 specifically included that it should sell for under £100. It eventually went on sale fully-assembled for £99, and the ZX81 followed it at £69. Both were massively cheaper than anything else on the market at the time. The BBC Micro models were subsidised heavily by the government for schools, but were otherwise pretty expensive.
>>25165 I know what you mean mate. Once again I despair at being the generation in between the Spectrum and the one politicians feel the need to train in coding to 'compete with China'. The hell is Scratch anyway.
>>25177 Pretty sure you can. That's what I did to Windows 8.1 when the damn thing wouldn't connect to the WLAN I had just set up. It didn't allow me to remove all the bloody files in there but just enough of them to render the OS unbootable.
You can get it with an 8GB or 16GB SD card and 'essential kit' to get started for about £20 including postage and packaging, probably worth a punt for that price. You'll want to get in quick though as they're selling out fast (already many of the other options without SD cards have sold out).
By the time you've added a USB hub and all the necessary adapters, the Pi Zero isn't much cheaper than the Model B. The Pi Zero is great for integrating into other projects, but it wouldn't be my choice for a general-purpose computer.
I might suggest a Micro:bit (v2 if you can) or two, instead of a pi?
The hassle of VNC and it stopping working in a million ways make a pi a bit annoying in that setup. Or, if you do go the pi route, make sure you also get him a micro-SD card write so he can get back to a useful system when things stop working.
Micro:bit gets all the 'fun' of programming, with easy to see and comprehend IO devices, and no chance of bricking it. Getting him two lets him play radio games - remote control fart machines etc. (if V2) Who wouldn't like that?
Of course, if he's already deep into it, a pi makes more sense. But I reckon Micro:bit is a far better bet if he's starting form scratch.
>>25181 As someone at the very tail end of that, it was frustrating. The year after I finished my A-Levels they started doing computingat both GCSE and A-Level at my school - meanwhile, I'd done IT GCSE/A-Levels. The A-Level was little more than business with a technical skew.
Then again, a poor teacher can completely ruin your interest in a subject, and realistically may cause kids to get out of programming rather than into it. Thankfully I got taught programming properly and in a way that suited me at uni (assembly up), but the way it was taught was very... autistic. Normal people really didn't get it, and I effectively became a programming teacher for a good number of my course mates as it simply wasn't clicking for them that to understand programming you have to think like a computer. Of course, to the uni lecturers, they already did and so it wasn't really something they even thought of. I honestly think that many of the people I went to uni with who would, if taught well, be very competent programmers have sworn off it as the teaching must have been so confusing to them.
I also notice a lot of people want to "learn coding", but realistically unless you have some goal you want to accomplish then it's like learning how to paint but not actually wanting to paint.
