Why do kids need to learn to code? A talk by Cat Lamin at PyConUK

Cat Lamin is a former primary school teacher who now makes a living sharing her knowledge of education, particularly as it relates to computer science. She founded the Coding Evenings movement and is a regular at Raspberry Jams in the South East. She recently attended PyConUK and gave a talk titled “Why do kids need to learn to code?” It’s a terrific talk – it sums up the issues that teachers face with the new curriculum and looks at ways they can be helped, and help themselves. It’s not all Raspberry Pi-related, and it’s much more of an educators view of the world, but it really highlights some of the issues and some of the ways the Pi community can help.

You can view the video of her talk below and see the slides here.

Cambridge Raspberry Jam – September 2016 – talk videos now available

On Saturday, 17th September 2016, myself and Tim Richardson welcomed over 200 people to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge for our 13th (!) Cambridge Raspberry Jam.

We are very lucky at the Institute to be able to have our talks live streamed and recorded. Thanks to Andy Batey, the talks from Saturday are now available online on the Jam’s YouTube Channel.

You can download the programme for the day so you can see what talks there were by viewing the PDF here.

Raspberry Pi Zero used for the world’s smallest MAME Arcade Cabinet

Over at Adafruit, Philip Burgess has blogged about a marvellous little project involving a Raspberry Pi Zero. And when I say “little”, I mean “little”!

They’ve used the Zero, together with a 0.96″ OLED display, an amplifier, some tiny speakers and some buttons to create the world’s smallest arcade cabinet. They’ve then installed Mame on the Zero’s SD card, wired it all together and voila! You can see in the picture above and the video below that it is fully working. Just astounding.

Read about the project (which is not a step-by-step guide, they are keen to point out) over at Adafruit.

Programming the Raspberry Pi and an Oculus Rift with VR Zero

At a CamJam long past, Wayne Keenan brought along a Raspberry Pi running a virtual reality demo viewed with an early version Oculus Rift. Looking something like the image above, it featured a brick pi symbol floating on a sea of green ‘grass’. He has always wanted to improve the system that ran it, but until now just hasn’t had the time. Several years, and some software library improvements, later, Wayne has managed to integrate a new Oculus Rift DK2 headset and has re-written everything into a library, called VR Zero. He has written the project up on his blog and made the code available on GitHub. Great stuff, Wayne! You can see a video of the new code in action below:

Using a Raspberry Pi to control a face-tracking desk fan

The Foundation have just blogged this nice little project from Instructables user DevinL9.

He’s taken a Raspberry Pi, hooked it up to a servo and then used the servo to control the position of a small fan with a small webcam mounted on top. The webcam provides a video feed to the Pi which is programmed with OpenCV to detect a face and track it. The servo then turns so that the fan always points towards you. For those long, summer months it could be just the job! You can read the Instructable here.

Spotted on RaspberryPi.org.