Today we set up our Raspberry Pi computer, it will be a permanent feature of our Code Club going forward and hopefully will be used inside the school curriculum too. A Raspberry Pi is a computer you can buy for only £25 and it is the best selling UK computer ever! Apart from the amazing price, a Raspberry Pi lets you do lots of cool programming including coding of external devices which is something we’ll be getting to grips with in the next few weeks.
Ours is a Raspberry Pi 2 and looks something like this:
To set it up we put our micro SD card in the slot and connected it to power via the micro USB. We used a HDMI lead to connect it to a monitor and added a wireless USB adapter to detect our keyboard and mouse. After that we were good to go.
Today was all about sampling some of the things we’ll be doing over the next few weeks. To start with we used Scratch (as it’s something we’re familiar with) but this time we did things a little bit differently by creating a circuit using the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. We needed a breadboard, two wires, an LED and a resistor, with that lot set up we were able to code Scratch to make an LED blink.
By this point a whisper was going round amongst the children, “it has minecraft”, and indeed it does so we launched Minecraft Pi and wrote a quick program in Python which continuously placed a block of our choice under our feet as we walked, below is Daisy’s glowstone path.
During all this Raspberry Pi activity the children also managed to each make a Scratch times table quiz – we can’t believe they packed so much into just one hour!
Next week we’ll continue our Raspberry Pi journey with a pair of children carrying out some challenges, we’ll also run our usual Scratch activities at the same time so that in the next few months everyone gets to have a go on the Raspberry Pi & we’ll have some amazing Scratch projects too.
Code Club Blog 