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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
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
