Recently, Tim Richardson and I were lucky enough to be invited into two schools to teach pupils about the Raspberry Pi. Participants for the first one were all year 8s (12-13 year olds) whilst the second school presented us with pupils from years 6-8 (10-13 year olds). During our first outreach session, Tim took half the kids for a CamJam EduKit 3 robotics workshop (with great success) while I took the other half and taught them about the SenseHAT and how to program it with Python. Our second school was more limited and we taught just the SenseHAT part. We used pi-topCEEDs and a selection of the now-unavailable HDMIPi screens for the purpose.

We found that the SenseHAT was a great device to engage the children, particularly with the AstroPi space angle.

In order to carry out the workshops, however, we needed resources and so we turned to the Raspberry Pi Foundation website’s Resources section. There are several resources on there, however… they are not suitable for printing as they have the Trinket SenseHAT emulator embedded in the pages. Fortunately for us, they store everything on GitHub and so I was able to go there and download the resources I wanted in a more ‘raw’ format. A little editing in Microsoft Word and I (eventually) had printable versions without any Trinket detritus.

TL;DR

So! Here are the resources in PDF format:

• Random Sparkles (this is the one we started the kids on)
• Make a Digital 8-ball (this was the ‘stretch activity’)
• Marble Maze (one pair got onto this one). You’ll also need the paper grid to draw out your ‘course’.
• Weather Station (ditto)

I hope these come in useful for somebody – they took a great deal of work to get them ship-shape for printing! 🙂

Sidenote

Printable versions of the Raspberry Pi Foundation resources are, in my opinion, a necessity. In a straw poll of Educators and Jam organisers, we recently found that around 90% of people needed to be able to print the resources out. Fortunately, the Foundation is now working on printable versions of their resources. There’s still a long way to go, however!