Community image from raspberrypi.org
The Raspberry Pi Community is huge, and it can often be difficult to know where to start. To help, I’ve compiled a large list of people in the Community and linked to where they can be found on Twitter (still the primary online location for most of the Community). Take a look here and let me know if you think I’ve missed somebody!
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a new article for beginners to the world of digital making. Called “Getting Started with Digital Making on the Raspberry Pi“, the article highlights some essential skills and places to start. Take a look at the article here. It’s intended to be a work-in-progress, so if you feel it’s missing something, get in contact with me and make suggestions! 🙂
Giles Booth has recently been rediscovering the Flotilla range from Pimoroni. By putting together various components, such as the Flotilla dock, a slider, a touch-button add-on and an 8×8 matrix, he’s created an internet radio. The back-end is MPC and MPD and the Python script simply calls this software to change channels in response to the various Flotilla inputs. A nice little project with Flotilla! Read more here.
Spencer Organ is organising a Raspberry Jam at his school on 22nd August from 10am-3pm. The venue is KESH Academy in Birmingham (B26 2RZ) and it’s aim is to be fun for all the family. It will include workshops involving Minecraft and physical computing. Free tickets are available from Eventbrite.
JC Torres over at SlashGear has written an excellent, extremely comprehensive review of the pi-top laptop. They go through assembling the laptop and then using the pi-topOS, including a word about the pi-topCODER and pi-topUNIVERSE. Overall, the pi-top receives an 8/10, which I think is fair considering the minor flaws they find. You can read the review here. Find out more about pi-top on their website and explore their range of products in the shop.
When you’re ready to move from Scratch to Python, this transition can be quite painful. Suddenly, you’re faced with a pure-text programming interface and even with IDEs like Thonny helping you to get things going, you’re still left with the fundamental question: Where have all my coloured blocks gone.
Enter EduBlocks, a programming environment developed by Joshua Lowe which seeks to bridge the gap between Scratch and Python by helping you to write Python code, but with a Scratch- or Blockly-like interface.
He’s been developing it for a while now and you can give it a go by opening up a terminal and running the following command:
curl -sSL get.edublocks.org| bash
Once you’ve got it installed, you’ll want to head over to the Learning Portal where you can download worksheets. These include physical computing exercises (using components from CamJam EduKit 1), Sonic Pi and even Minecraft. I spoke to Joshua recently and he let me know about a new series of worksheet material he and others are developing: Lesson Plans. These exciting new resources for teachers will bring together the existing worksheets with plans to use in lessons with identified objectives and other stuff you need for the actual teaching. The first one, written by Claire Wicher deals with Minecraft and includes a teachers booklet and an accompanying Powerpoint presentation. To access this, and future lesson plans, head over to the Learning Portal and click on the Lesson Plans button. To find out more about EduBlocks itself, head over to the website.
This is really fantastic work by young Joshua and also by Claire. It takes EduBlocks forward to be something that can be used in classrooms by those on the cusp of text-based languages. It may seem strange to some to couch the Python language in a visual environment, but I think it’s a great idea to bridge that gap. Take a look if you’re approaching that gap, or if you have children who are ready to move on – the resources are there, you just need to use them 🙂
