High altitude ballooning

Students launch a #RaspberryPi into near-space

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During a recent half term, students from Truro College sent two Raspberry Pis up with a high-altitude balloon and took photographs and other atmospheric readings. The payload eventually reached a height of over 80,000 feet. Despite losing the payload initially, it has since been recovered. It was project managed and developed by students from concept to execution. You can read more here.

Education, Shopping

CamJam and The Pi Hut team up to bring electronics kit to #RaspberryPi owners

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Cambridge Raspberry Jam and The Pi Hut have teamed up to develop the CamJam EduKit for the Raspberry Pi. This low-cost kit has been designed to get kids interested in the fascinating world of electronics and programming by providing them with a small set of components and a stack of worksheets.

Soon, they will be building their own electronic circuits, flashing LEDs, reading button presses and making beeping noises by programming their Raspberry Pi with the Python programming language.

The CamJam EduKit is priced at £5 and comes with everything you need to have fun with basic electronics projects, including a tin to keep it all in! We hope that this low price point will allow the CamJam EduKit to appeal to both families and education. If it is successful, there will be more CamJam EduKits, the first of which will use sensors to detect temperature, light levels and movement.

“We hope that the CamJam EduKits will be used to further the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s educational aims and to get kids started not only with electronics but with Python programming as well,” said one member of the team.

All profits from the kits will be donated to the Cambridge Raspberry Jam to continue its educational and community work.

More details about the kit can be found at http://camjam.me/edukit

You can download a press release and associated graphics and photographs here: http://goo.gl/XoGUkp

Blogger’s note: I am one of the members of the team for this project, but I’m really excited about it as it means we’re using the CamJam educational material away from the Jam and really getting a lot of value from it.