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Kids don't want to code. They want to solve problems us oldies can't perceive
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When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they'll do the rest.At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups - eager for the respect of their peers - shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.
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these kids are using sensors on a Raspberry Pi to read the air quality of the room, alerting asthmatics to seek an environment less likely to give them breathing problems. Over there - because sometimes the referees miss goals - a netball-crazed 11 year-old girl used an ultrasonic sensor and Raspberry Pi to create an automatic scoring system.Consider three ten year-olds who fussed and fiddled with LittleBits - a mashup of Lego with the Internet of Things - until they found just the right combination of pieces to create a system that allows you to know whether that sushi tray gliding by on that continuous track has been sitting around a little too long to be safe to eat. (Their inspiration was a teacher who'd gotten sick from bad sushi.)
The examples of kids' projects in the article aren't particularly strong. Have Soylentils seen kids doing particularly cool things with RPi's or Arduinos?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:59PM
And let me tag along with what you're saying and ask, "Who does teach computing from the ground up?" Who? Everything I have ever seen, my whole life, pre-supposes that you install some program or OS or have some hardware platform before they begin to teach you something built on that platform. Even if you're at university, you cannot drill down to the utter basics because the professors will always wave their hands and say, "let's assume you have this..."
That being the case (and how I wish it wasn't!), how can any level of tool-user decry the level of tool-use made available to children to get them excited about building stuff?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by OwMyBrain on Monday August 31 2015, @03:10PM
In my computer science program I was require to take a sophomore level EE course that taught computer design starting with the transistor. Or are you upset that they didn't go over doping my own silicon?