The Raspberry Pi Foundation has an online Python editor to help kids learn to code

[thewayne]

First off, I am not an advocate of the position 'everyone needs to learn to code!' That is a bunch of garbage. Programming is a very specific skill set and aptitude, and not everyone has that nor the interest in learning to code! Coding should not remotely be a requirement to graduate from high school! You're just inflicting another form of pain on kids to require it.

What I AM an advocate of is people need basic computer literacy, and this includes some critical thinking training to recognize scams and such. And scams are only going to get harder to see through in the future with AI writing better scripts for scammers! Offering classes for kids who WANT to learn to code, or learn about the internal workings of computers and how to maintain them, is fine and dandy. But aside from basic literacy, this should not be a graduation-dependent topic.

While many jobs, and more growing, require advanced computer skills, those are things that should be developed and refined at the college level. There are lots of jobs that don't require programming skills, and some that have minimal levels of computer use at all! We need more plumbers and electricians, among many other trades that are in short supply.

ANYWAY....

The Raspberry Pi organization is very, very cool. They're sort of a combination of Heathkit and Radio Shack for geeks and electronics experimenters. They manufacture a small computer board known as the Raspberry Pi which has a CPU, memory - solid state/non-volatile (doesn't lose contents when powered off), network connections through Ethernet or WiFi, a video output, and the board has all sorts of pins on it that you can connect "stuff" to. Want to build a robot that has sonar so it can move around your house like a Roomba? RaspPi. Want to build your own home security sensor system? This is the device. It is effectively unlimited in what it can do, only your imagination restricts the possibilities. That is, as long as you're able to work within its limited processing ability.

And you can buy these computer boards for $50-$100, depending on options!!!

And people have built micro-super computers out of these! They build a cage of a dozen or more, link them together through networking, and program some pretty amazing things out of them! They can't crunch huge number sets, but they can demonstrate how massively-parallel computing works and can be used teach the science behind them.

A lot of programming on these things is done through Python, an extremely versatile language. And now the Foundation, an education arm of the organization, has released an online code editor for Python. It's sort of no-frills, but it supports multiple files in a project. Code is saved in Raspberry's cloud and is accessible to you anywhere you have an internet connection. Right now, the editor is strictly Python, but there are plans to allow HTML and other code bases into it.

The best part is it integrates nicely with the Foundation's Python sample code base to use with their products! Need an example of how to process sonar signals for collision avoidance? Probably there. Etcetera.

And, of course, it's free.

I'm going to be playing with it as I like the Python language and am interested in Pi boards, though I don't have one at the moment. They were hammered hard by the pandemic with people stuck at home looking for things to do, their inventory was ate up at a very fast pace.

The article:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-online-code-editor

The editor:
https://editor.raspberrypi.org/

The Slashdot thread:
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/04/08/2247207/raspberry-pi-launches-online-code-editor-to-help-kids-learn

Comments

[disneydream06]

I wish I had gotten a basic computer skill class when I was growing up. :o
Hugs, Jon

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> First off, I am not an advocate of the position 'everyone needs to learn to code!' That is a bunch of garbage. Programming is a very specific skill set and aptitude, and not everyone has that nor the interest in learning to code! <<

Yeah. I can barely manage a bit of HTML for things like making links in a comment. Vision and other issues mean I could never get through thousands of lines of code effectively.

>> Coding should not remotely be a requirement to graduate from high school! You're just inflicting another form of pain on kids to require it.<<

True. It's bad enough that students are considered worthless if they can't read, or do math, or basically whatever else adults demand. People have all different talents, and everyone sucks at something.

The problem is, people can make things which are not true, behave as if they are true, by designing society that way. Anyone who can't read fluently is shut out of most of society. And now, anyone who can't use a computer fluently is also shut out -- but that's a much bigger group than those who can't read, because it's not only harder but also requires reading. Society keeps placing more demands on people to be permitted to function in it, and the results are increasingly bad.

>> What I AM an advocate of is people need basic computer literacy, <<

If they can manage it, sure. But that requires:
* reading literacy
* a computer, which basically requires handing them out free because not everyone can afford one
* internet connection, also neither free nor available everywhere

This is why I feel that internet should be a utility and provided everywhere, because it's now necessary for participation in society. And if you want students to all be computer literate, then adults are responsible for providing computers to all students and ensuring that all students also have internet at home.

>> and this includes some critical thinking training to recognize scams and such. <<

That record will break this society's record player if you turn it on. It's why schools stopped teaching certain types of critical thinking a few decades back. Too much of modern America is built on sheer bullshit, and society cannot afford for people to think critically about that. Like say, how almost every city is broke because they didn't account for the maintenance costs of their infrastructure. Local taxes are a scam; people believe they're paying for that stuff, so they get upset if roads etc. are in poor repair, but there is nowhere near enough budget for it.

>> Offering classes for kids who WANT to learn to code, or learn about the internal workings of computers and how to maintain them, is fine and dandy. But aside from basic literacy, this should not be a graduation-dependent topic.<<

Well reasoned.

>>And, of course, it's free.<<

Awesome. That'll make it more accessible. America has a huge and growing problem where poverty prevents people from accessing what they need to earn a living, and then society blames people for being poor.

[silveradept]

We do not teach the workings of the internal combustion engine past a high level, except for those that want to learn or are thinking about a career in designing, manufacturing, or repairing such things. Same for computers, but, as someone who deals with first-tier tech support on the regular, I do want people to have learned how to operate a computer and how to be able to read and describe an error message to someone. They don't necessarily have to be able to understand the error message, but they do need to be able to describe what they were doing and what error message appeared when they did it, so that someone who does understand what's going on can have all the information they need to be able to help with diagnosis.

And yes to being able to evaluate information effectively and spot bullshit or bullshit-adjacent material when it is presented. Not just for spam and scam, but also to recognize the slant of the editorial, the cable news coverage, or the politican's speech.

The Pi Python editor is good. I think it'll sit neatly in the pocket between block-based programming and people with their specific decks, IDEs, and loadouts for coding, much like how the Raspberry Pi is supposed to be a beginner-intermediate computer that's hard to destroy and can be used for specific purposes (and more and more is getting better at being a general-purpose computer.)

And while the Raspberry Pi is usually out of stock, due to price, there are also plenty of other single-board computers that mimic the form factor, have the same kind of pin access, and run different forms of Linux for those types of machines. Pine64 has Rockchip SBCs in different combinations, and is starting to branch out into RISC-V, Orange Pi has Allwinners, I think, and ODROID and others have a different chipset, but everyone wants Raspberry Pis because they're priced cheaper than all the others, because Broadcom is likely selling them as loss leaders or tax write-offs or similar situations. Which is to say, if you want to get your hands on an SBC and see what you can do, there's a lot of other alternatives. The cheap ones are all ARM and run a Linux by default, some of the more expensive ones are actually x86_64 boards and can have full-fledged Windows stashed on them. (There's work being done to try and adapt Windows for the ARM boards and make it run on them, although I think it's not quite a smooth experience.)