A number of children from year 4, 5 and 6 took part in the club after school. They were supported by the subject teacher, a governor and the borough’s ICT person. The children were taught:
- How to connect the raspberry pi to existing screens and power in the ICT suite
- The components in a raspberry pi and others to make it work for us: power, RAM, CPU, operating system, keyboard, screen
- How to expand the operating system onto the SD card
- How to navigate the ‘maze’ that is the pi’s file system, using linux text commands
- How to visual the file system as a hierarchy
- How to update the software, using linux text commands
- How to write, debug and test a conversational program using Python 3 and nano (all text-based)
- How to install a webserver
- How to write an html webpage and access it from any computer on the network, using the IP address of their pi
At the end of the project, the children went on to become ambassadors and help other children joining the next raspberry pi club
‘I can’t wait for Tuesday’s to come round so I can go to the RP club. It has been great fun learning about where the plugs go and how to set it up. I have also enjoyed learning about how to program and how computers work, not just taking it for granted they will work.’
Georgia
‘The Raspberry Pi Club is amazing. It helps us learn about the cables needed and the background programs to computers. I would recommend this club to anyone. In only 4-5 sessions I now know how to set up a Raspberry Pi and some programming language.’
Tom
‘The Raspberry Pi club is really fun and different from any other ICT club. It’s amazing that a cheap computer can be built up and programmed to become a computer of your choice.’
Charlotte
‘I personally think it has been a great success and have a large number of pupils keen to join next half term’
Subject Leader for ICT
The following video shows how to introduce activity 4 from the list above (if you just click play). If you choose ‘Play All’ you will get more technical videos showing how to set up and connect a raspberry pi:
The following PowerPoint summarizes the text-based linux commands that you could teach children