Pimoroni have today launched some educational project cards for their RainbowHAT add-on board. Rather than try and re-word their excellent prose, here’s what they have to say about the new product on their site:

This beautifully-designed set of activity cards are split into learning cards, project cards, and a booklet for teachers/adults with solutions and more detailed information. They’ve been designed by Dan Aldred, a secondary teacher and Raspberry Pi certified educator, and Lydia Lapinski, our shockingly-talented head of design.

The set of cards and the booklet fit into Key Stages 2 to 4 of the curriculum, and cover a range of areas and concepts in computer science as well as creative tasks. The aim is for these cards to encourage self-guided learning, and they’d be ideal for code clubs, or summer holiday projects for your children!

The ten learning cards will guide you through how to install and fit your Rainbow HAT, use the various functions (RGB LEDs, alphanumeric displays, touch buttons, temperature and pressure sensor, buzzer), and they build in difficulty from easy to more difficult concepts.

The two project cards bring together all of the concepts on the ten learning cards, challenging you to build a weather station display, and a beautiful animated rainbow!

The teachers booklet gives more detail on the exact curriculum areas covered, installing the Rainbow HAT software, and code solutions for the tasks and projects.

The cards are available for £5 plus postage, making them definitely “worth a punt”.

Opinion

I think this is a terrific idea from Pimoroni and I hope they have a lot of success with it. With an educator on board to write them, and a professional designer to make sure they look good as well, there’s a lot to recommend the cards, based on the photos on their site. This will obviously help them to sell more of the RainbowHAT, which is good as it’s a very capable board. I wonder whether we’ll see more project cards for other add-on boards if the idea takes off – I hope so.