Eben Upton’s wanted to create a low-cost device that would improve programming skills and hardware understanding for students at the pre-university level.
It’s a computer sized of your credit card which you can get for $25. It is designed to plug into your television. It has a limited version of all the features that you would imagine a
computer would have.
It is designed to plug into things you already have like television, mouse, keyboard, network. Can act as a storage device add to SD card and power it using phone charger.
The very idea of rasberry pi came out when academics at University of Cambridge saw a huge dip in no of applicants for computer science course. this huge dip along with the reduced knowledge of students enrolling for these courses prompted Eben to introduce it which is affordable and can be used around in
the dorm rooms, hence increasing tinkering process.
The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games.
What’s more, the Raspberry Pi has the ability to interact with the outside world, and has been used in a wide array of digital maker projects, from music machines and parent detectors to weather stations and tweeting birdhouses with infra-red cameras. We want to see the Raspberry Pi being used by kids all over the world to learn to program and understand how computers work.
Why you should get one?
It has a great use case for kids, specially one’ with an inclination towards computers. It’s a miniature computer which the anyone can use to learn coding and building things.
As simple as a crossword game can be developed using this as its engine. Can be used to build your own garden water system, small fan etc. List can be endless.
Idea is to put these devices into hands of our youth so that many things whcih are costly roght now can be made availble for cheap. Perfect use case is a pacemaker.
1.5 million rasberry pis have been sold already. they have been used for crazy things like a miniature space program, where a camera is retrofitted with pi and the images are trasmitted real time to earth, to be used for various purposes.
As the possiblities are endless if this is in hands of a the right person, it is imperative to have a special course for the students to doa DIY project and quickly learn the basics of running this.
School teachers have been roped in to learn this course so that more and more students have educated access to pi.
Happy Building!