Education, Outreach

Tanzania secondary school gets the power of Raspberry Pi

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Masekelo secondary school in Tanzania doesn’t have many resources. The children have to collect water for the school every day and there are often not enough desks and chairs to go around. The Tanzanian government has decreed that every school should have a science lab, but yet has provided no funds for it – everything is supposed to come from donations from parents or other sources. Considering the parents of the children at this school tend to be subsistence farmers, this has proved to be something of a challenge!

Janet Chapman from Wikimedia visited the school last September and spoke to the headmaster about the issues and donated a Raspberry Pi filled with pre-loaded content from the RACHEL project (which includes Wikipedia for Schools, 2,000 maths and science videos from Khan Academy, and 800 classic books and various health resources). The Pi (which is battery-powered) runs a wifi hotspot so that the content can then be accessed from available tablets and phones which the school already has.

You can read more in Janet’s report on Wikimedia. You can also follow the progress of the Masekelo project on the school’s Facebook page.

Geeky Techiness, Internet of things, Software

LEGO internet-of-things smart home with a Raspberry Pi

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The guys over at PubNub have created a house out of LEGO then filled it with LEDs and sensors which are controlled and read by a Pi. They’ve then used their own proprietary software to create an Internet of Things link up to the components and something called Blink created by the Chromium Project to do the GUI. Read more here. They’re planning on creating a full-fledged tutorial for the project soon, so I’ll keep an eye out for that and re-blog it when it comes out.

Education, Events, Picademy, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi education CPD Picademy goes up North

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Picademy, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s continuing professional development course for teachers, is going to York. The National STEM Centre is hosting the event which is taking place on the 26th and 27th May. If you are a teacher and you want to learn how to bring the Raspberry Pi into the classroom, you can apply here. Read more about it on their blog or on their dedicated Picademy page here.

Compute Module, Media centre, Reviews

Review of the Slice Raspberry Pi media player

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Here’s some great news for all your Slice backers. Smittytone has now got his and has reviewed it over on his blog. The review is highly positive and there’s really only one caveat: that you could download the software, install it on a Pi 2 and do-it-yourself if you wanted to (which is fair, but doesn’t look as nice!). Read the full thing over at the blog.

Cases, Crowdfunding

Raspberry Pi housing with an integrated screen and keyboard – the PiKasa

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I was contacted by South Africa-based Ian Harrison who, together with his team, is doing a crowdfunding campaign to fund the PiKasa. The PiKasa is a housing for the Raspberry Pi with an integrated 800×480 screen, a splash-proof keyboard, a 5-port USB hub and amplifier/speaker. It looks rather neat – a bit retro with those keys, quite stylish with the curved edges and all self-contained and child-friendly. It’ll be interesting to see if their campaign, which is on IndieGoGo, goes well. It’s clearly something they’ve put a lot of thought into and I can see this being used quite happily for learning and programming. Take a look at the IndieGoGo campaign here or view the video below.