Christian Tsu-Raun has written a lovely piece at scholastic.com about what to put in your work area for your Maker activities. He describes a great work desk and explains all about what you need to fill it with to get maximum utility and enjoyment. Above is a picture of the finished space but you can read all about the individual parts of the work desk here.
Bob LeSuer has created something which I’m dying to add to the Picorder. It’s a spectrometer. A spectrometer is (according to Wikipedia):
an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically used in spectroscopic analysis to identify materials
The impressive thing is that the programming is a mix between Mathematica and C. It’s the first decent application of the Mathematica language I’ve seen on the Pi and just shows what an excellent platform it is for creating scientific graphs.
You can read all about it over on Bob’s blog. I’m hoping the increased hits from my blog will convince him to write a more detailed tutorial, but there’s plenty there, including code, to help you get going.
Kano, the British start-up who ran an enormously successful Kickstarter campaign in November/December last year have claimed that schools are allowing their Raspberry Pis to gather dust, without checking their facts first. This article, which appeared on the PC Pro website, contained this little gem from Alejandro Simon, Kano’s head of software:
“It wasn’t friendly for the teachers,” he said. “They received [Raspberry Pi] kits and massive instruction books and they weren’t prepared for it – so they were gathering dust.” “I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault – you can’t force ICT teachers to learn,” he added. “They aren’t going to know without guidance.”
Neither PC Pro nor Kano themselves had decided to talk to Eben Upton or anyone else at the Foundation before publication of the article. Their evidence is entirely anecdotal and they clearly haven’t looked very closely at the Google Pi boxes. I’ve seen Google Pis in-the-flesh, as it were, and I can assure you that they don’t contain ‘massive instruction books’ – on the contrary, they include a very concise, professionally-produced, how-to-get-started pamphlet.
Fortunately, however, someone pointed the article out to the Foundation and Eben has since had a response published on the same website. The highlight of that article is this quote from Eben:
“We do have good tracking on the vast majority of those,” he said. “The reason why I’m absolutely certain that, if there are some [kits] languishing on shelves they’re in a tiny minority, is because we’re required by Google to have very good visibility.”
He then goes onto explain the measures the Foundation has gone to to ensure that this tracking is carried out.
Unfortunately for Kano, they’ve decided to compound their initial mistake by offering this:
“We don’t think Raspberry Pi is gathering dust in general, just that particular ‘kit’ and documentation wasn’t used as it was supposed to.”
Which is neither apology nor evidence that they have changed their minds or researched the issue any more than they did to begin with.
Although I broadly appreciate the work that Team Kano has done creating their product and funding it, and I like the look of their books and the kit itself, I’d like to point out to them that their product doesn’t guarantee to end up in the hands of kids. The kit is at a good price point that means that hobbyists and hackers will be attracted as well. One wonders how much of the $1.5 million raised represents kids getting hold of the product. I haven’t, I admit, asked them for an estimate, so I invite them to comment on this blog with statistics that show that their aim of getting their kit into kids’ hands is being met by their Kickstarter campaign. They have said in the original article that one school bought as many as 80 kits. Well, is this the tip-of-the-iceberg, or is this just a single case?
One hopes that, in future, they think carefully before effectively ‘biting the hand that feeds them’. Without the Foundation’s original goals, and without the amazing product they brought to market, the Kano kit simply would not exist. The Foundation is so open to questions and suggestions that Team Kano had ample opportunity to get their facts right – let’s hope they’ve learnt their lesson.
This is an opinion piece and, therefore, represents my opinion only. I have no affiliation to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, although I am a strong supporter of their mission to build up the next generation of programmers and hackers.
I am not a fan of the Kano. I feel that it became enormously popular because of some good marketing and product design. The heart is the Raspberry Pi and, although I think their documentation shows promise, it doesn’t make the Raspberry Pi any more user-friendly or kid-friendly by sheer virtue of being orange. I also think their keyboard is too small for long-term programming. But that’s just me!
This is an outstanding piece of work by Trevor Appleton. He has converted his Raspberry Pi into an animation studio by writing a piece of software (with a GUI) to take pictures with the camera module and then to string the frames together to create a video.
I won’t say any more here because his blog post stands on it’s own, but you should definitely take a look if you’re at all interested in photography and what the camera can be used for!
Paul’s been hard at work turning the Raspberry Pi into a geocaching tool.
Geocaching is a hobby which involves tracking down (using GPS and the naked eye) small boxes and packages. They contain a log book to record who found them and sometimes even small collectables which you can swap for your own. It’s a great way to get outdoors and makes a cool hobby for all the family.
Articles from Jason Birch don’t come along that often but when they do they’re always worth reading.
This time, he’s created a camera with a screen and buttons to take pictures & video and do time lapse photography.
