21st Century Skills InnovatIon LIbrary Contents Chapter 1 Making Pi Chapter 2 Setting Up Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Writing your First Program Chapter 5 What’s next Installing Linux Glossary Find Out More Index about the authors 4 9 13 21 26 30 31 32 32
MakerS as innovaTors Chapter 1 Making Pi M ost of us spend at least part of each day using a computer tablet or smartphone These devices are designed to be as easy as possible to use We rarely have reason to peek inside to see how the computer works A Raspberry Pi computer is different You can see everything the soldering the ports and the circuit board Why would someone make a computer and show you the guts Why would people work six years and donate their own money to create a computer and then charge just 25 to 35 for it And why did the initial batch of 10,000 Raspberry Pis nicknamed RasPi sell out in less than 24 hours The story begins in 2006 at England’s University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory A group of people at Cambridge including Eben Upton Jack Lang Rob Mullins and Alan Mycroft started noticing that something had changed When many of them had applied to college in the 1990s competition to get into a computer science program was fierce Everybody seemed to come to college already knowing how 4
RaspbeRRy pi The BBC Micro was once a popular computer among beginning programmers to program in at least one language Students had often learned programming languages as a hobby on machines like the BBC Micro the Apple II or the Commodore 64 But by the time Upton and his friends had become the teachers far fewer students came to computer science school with programming experience This batch of incoming students might have built Web sites 5
