Cambridge Science Festival programme announced with lots of #RaspberryPi goodness

The Cambridge Science Festival runs from 10th-23rd March and is a great event for all the family. This year, there are several Pi-related events happening:

  • Thursday 20th March, 6-7pm – Mill Lane Lecture Rooms
    A festival piece of Raspberry Pi. Find out about the history of the Raspberry Pi from its inception at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory to the amazing projects being undertaken throughout the world today.
  • Saturday 22nd March, 1-5pm – The Institute for Manufacturing
    Raspberry Pi at the IfM. Meet the creators of the revolutionary Raspberry Pi low-cost computer with demos, competitions and hands on activities.
  • Saturday 22nd March, 10.30-12.30pm & 1.30-3.30pm – Cambridge Junction
    How to make music with the Raspberry Pi. In a two hour workshop, you will get the chance to learn some basic coding, allowing you to create music on the Raspberry Pi computer. Supported by Dr Sam Aaron, Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Rachel Drury, Creative Producer.

Read more about the Festival here or download the full programme here.

New #RaspberryPi Foundation education website to launch at the end of March – some resources available now

The Hour of Code is an initiative to give children a flavour of programming in a single hour, with the hope that they’ll continue their exploration afterwards. The Foundation have just released a set of tutorials and resources to support Hour of Code and, at the same time, have given a launch date of “end of March” for their education website launch.

I’m ever so glad that my assumption of “weeks rather than months” was correct – I’d rather hung my reputation on it in some quarters!

The choice of GitHub to store the majority of the resources is an interesting one and I hope it doesn’t put people off contributing. But, I guess it’s a fairly safe choice as a ‘sort-of’ CMS and as a code-storage device it can’t be beaten IMHO.

Take a look at these new resources now

There is also a blog post about how to contribute to these resource.

Kano beta review by #RaspberryPi IV Beginners

Just spotted this on Twitter. Matt Manning of Raspberry Pi IV Beginners has shot a video review of the Kano OS beta. He covers a lot of what the OS gives you and gives his very frank and honest opinion on the whole enterprise. I haven’t yet installed the beta (was busy writing the book review yesterday) but Matt has confirmed what I thought would probably be the case: that the project has some merit but has a habit of simplifying things which don’t need simplifying.

Have a watch of the video and tell Matt (or me!) what you think!

If you want to try Kano out for yourself, go to their download page