In July 2017, we ran our first Global Code Summer Programme. One of our challenges was finding the right platform for our students. We wanted everyone in the class to have the same opportunity to learn and grow, so it was important that we bring our own hardware, rather than using whatever was available. We also wanted the flexibility to teach what we wanted – meaning an IoT-rich curriculum with plenty of coding time using industry-standard tools.
We chose the Raspberry Pi 3B, and this is why.
The Raspberry Pi allowed us to dive straight into Linux and Python – the bedrock of our course and the balance of most of the teaching in week #1. Josh and I did all the setup ourselves on the Sunday before kick-off – plugging in, testing, installing Raspbian, then unplugging 30 Pis was the work of a couple of hours.
We don’t do holy wars: Linux is a battle-tested, widely-used OS and every Software Engineer should have a firm grounding in the shell, so we needed to spend a couple of days letting our students discover the terminal, filesystem, editors, and Python REPL. The Raspberry Pi allowed us to do all this without either repurposing whatever hardware the students owned, or supporting a bunch of different configurations in-class.
Finally, Raspbian comes pre-installed with a decent Terminal, some Python editors, and a Python 2.7 (remember, no holy wars) REPL – and a whole bunch of other useful stuff is available with a quick “apt-get”.
The Pi is underpowered for any kind of heavy lifting – I run a tab-heavy Chrome which simply doesn’t fly here – but it’s great for the kind of work we do in class – editing and running Python, looking up documentation, and fooling around with the shell.
Two things that really stand out with the Pi, though –
The Raspberry Pi foundation has a truly excellent distribution model, meaning their hardware is available globally, with a short lead time, for a reasonable price.
It was important to us to buy locally, for two reasons:
We were lucky enough to find Isaac Sesi at Invent Electronics, and took a trip up to Kumasi to pick up the 33 Raspberry Pi starter kits and 6 Arduino starter kits we’d ordered from him. Isaac is a mainstay of the local maker community, and he co-founded the Nsesa Foundation, a Ghanaian organisation which aims to inspire students to be innovative using science and technology. He’s top talent and we’re happy to partner with him.
The Pi is tiny – it’s lightweight, comes with a screw-on case so you can throw it in your bag, and it’s low-powered so you can run it from a USB socket on the back of a PC (which is what we did). It’s great for teaching a student – but more importantly, for our purposes – it’s great for teaching 18 students! The Pi made our get-in cheap and easy.
Whilst our decision was easy, there are a couple of practical downsides to the Raspberry Pi:
The Global Code Summer Programme 2017 finished on July 28. We’ll be back in Ghana in 2018 – find out more on Twitter and Instagram, or get in touch and buy a Raspberry pi as a gift to a student.