The latest news from the Raspberry Pi Foundation for the educator community
Welcome to the latest edition of our newsletter. This month, we bring you news of two competitions, gear giveaways, event reports, and free magazines chock-full of resources to download.
We hope you have a great November: we've got some cracking things coming up for you.
Happy trails everyone!
The Raspberry Pi Foundation
Picademy hits new benchmark in Glasgow
Since 2014, we've been working with our partners Google to provide free CPD training events in Leeds, Birmingham, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, and Glasgow. We can now confirm that, as of our last Glasgow event on 1-2 November, we have met our agreed targets, training over 500 new Raspberry Pi Certified Educators in the process.
We want to say a big thank you to all the educators who gave up time to come on our courses in the last two years. We hope you found them useful and were inspired to take digital making back to your schools and organisations.
Those lamenting the fact they didn't get onto a course this year can rest assured that there will be plenty of opportunities available around the UK in 2017. Register your interest for next year's events by filling in the form on our website.
Want to do a workshop or talk with us at The Bett Show?
The Bett Show 2017 is just around the corner, and the Raspberry Pi Education team will again be there to showcase projects and free resources, deliver hands-on workshops, and talk about computing education.
We hope to be joined by members of our fabulous community sharing their experiences of computing and digital making in education. We'd love you to be part of what we do and we hope that lots of you visit us and take part. If you're interested in volunteering, presenting a talk, or running a workshop, just click the button below and complete the form. We'll be putting together a schedule and sharing it in early January. Meanwhile here are some event details:
When: 25-28 January 2017 Where: ExCeL Arena, London Description: We will be running a series of hands-on workshops and talks at all four days of this event, and we welcome proposals from external community members to discuss digital making and computing in the classroom.
Please note: you must submit one full application for each individual proposal you wish to put forward. So, for example, if you wanted to do two different talks at Bett, you would need to apply twice using this form.
This year, we’ve been working hard to improve the support we provide to our Raspberry Pi Certified Educators when they take their first steps post-Picademy, and begin to share their new skills with their students or faculty on their own. In the past, we’ve provided printable versions of our resources or handed out copies of The MagPi. Instead of providing these separately, we thought it would be fun to bundle them together for all to access.
Thanks to the support of our colleagues in the MagPi team, we’ve been able to bring you a new and improved special edition of The MagPi: it’s aimed at educators and is packed full of new content, including tutorials and guides, for use in schools and clubs. You can download a free PDF of the second issue of the special Educator’s Edition right now. If you want a printed copy, then you’ll need to seek us out at events or attend a Picademy in the UK and US whilst we have them in stock!
The Jam is flowing in November and December
Raspberry Jams are events organised by the community for people to share knowledge, learn new things, and meet other Pi enthusiasts. They’re a great way to find out more about the Raspberry Pi and what you can do with it, and to find like-minded people.
There are plenty of Jams coming up in the next couple of months! See if there’s something near you.
To book a place, click on your chosen event in the calendar on the Raspberry Jam page.
UK:
26 Nov - Cotswold Raspberry Jam
26 Nov - Huddersfield Raspberry Jam
03 Dec - Cambridge Raspberry Jam
05 Dec - Preston Raspberry Jam
07 Dec - Leeds Raspberry Jam
10 Dec - Manchester Raspberry Jam
10 Dec - Torbay Raspberry Jam
10 Dec - Sittingbourne Jam (Kent)
11 Dec - Horsham Raspberry Jam
13 Dec - Stafford Raspberry Jam
US:
03 Dec - Baltimore Raspberry Jam (MD)
19 Dec - Jackson Library Raspberry Jam (NJ)
If there’s nothing near you, and you want to set something up, contact ben@raspberrypi.org for support.
Could you translate our Code Club resources for us?
At Code Club International, one of our biggest challenges is translating the amazing Code Club curriculum from English into other languages. This is a big task, but an important one! English may be the fourth most spoken language in the world, but in order to make our materials accessible to every child in every community, we are always working to provide more translated materials to our Code Clubs.
Thanks to our brilliant volunteer community we have already translated coding projects into 24 different languages, ranging from French to Japanese. This has allowed us make our projects accessible to children in over 100 countries around the world.
We’re lucky that so many volunteer translators have found supporting us both an enjoyable and rewarding experience. Jeroen Dekker, a Code Club volunteer in Denmark, started helping as a translator so that young people in his country wouldn’t need an additional language to start coding: “I translate Code Club Projects so that all children in the Netherlands can learn code in their native language. And the benefit for me? I’m also learning to code again!”
The end goal is to have our projects translated into as many languages as possible, but for now the ones that would help us reach the most children and make the biggest difference are Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi.
Are you a native speaker of a foreign language, confident in your ability to translate from English? Could your organisation support our translation projects? Then please get in touch! Contact us at hello@codeclubworld.org to register your interest and receive full instructions.
PA Consulting's 5th Annual Raspberry Pi Competition is now open!
PA Consulting first launched this competition in 2012 in response to a decline in programming skills and as a mechanism to tackle the growing talent gap in programming and coding. The Raspberry Pi was selected for its reputation as a revolutionary, low-cost computer, launched with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools and stimulating interest in the IT industry.
This year, PA Consulting is asking students to invent under the theme of ‘Innovation for All’, using a Raspberry Pi. The aim is to produce innovations that will improve the lives of people who have conditions that limit their ability to do the tasks that some people take for granted. Inventions could range from technology that helps athletes win a medal in the 2018 Winter Paralympics, aids those with a visual impairment, or uses music therapy to help improve mental health.
Winning innovations from previous years include a robot to help with the household recycling, an automatic pill dispenser, a forest fire detector, and a device to help people with reduced mobility to answer their front door.
The competition is open to the following categories:
PA’s primary school award: academic years 4-6
PA’s secondary school award: academic years 7-11
PA’s sixth form and college award: academic years 12-13
The first 100 teams to enter get a free Raspberry Pi 3 starter-kit and the winning team in each category will receive £1,000 prize money! This year, school teams will also be offered assistance via a forum on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website where a team of experts will be on hand to answer students’ questions. The closing date for applications is 15 March 2017.
No less than seven team members from the Raspberry Pi Foundation were out in force at Mozfest, Mozilla's annual celebration of computing, this year. The sessions we run included workshops on Physical Computing, Minecraft, and Astro Pi. We also had the pleasure of working with two young Pi community members, Joshua Lowe and Elise, who also ran their own fantastic sessions using Minecraft, Edublocks, and Sonic Pi.
Both have produced excellent write-ups of the event that are worth a read:
