I ordered a Raspeberry Pi during the summer holidays and it arrived a couple of days ago. There’s been a lot of excitement surrounding the device and its potential for computing in general so I wanted to try one out for myself. Obviously, I’m really eager to see what it can do from an educational point of view and over the next while,  hopefully I’ll be able to share some of the things I figure out. It took so long to arrive that when it finally did, I was tempted to do an “unboxing” but thought I’d just take a simple photo of the box instead!

Raspberry Pi

My first plan of action is now to get the pieces of equipment I’ll need to get the machine working. According to the instructions, I’m going to need a number of things, thankfully a lot of which I have, including the correct power supply, a network cable, a keyboard and mouse. I’ll have to find a HDMI or DVI capable monitor somewhere and I’ll grab a decent SD card at Shop4Memory or somewhere like that.

As Raspberry Pi seems to be designed to run a Linux set up, from an educational point of view, I’ll be seeing what kinds of programs I’ll be able to run. The first one that springs to mind is Scratch. Obviously having an Internet connection will be the most important factor as almost everything I run these days is cloud based. I also had a look on the Internet for some interesting ideas for the Raspberry Pi and found this complete portable computer system from Geek.com. I think I might just start with the basics!

Image from Geek.com

Raspberry Pi