As you may have noticed, I’m a bit of a Raspberry Pi fangirl, which came from attending Picademy last July. I did what many primary schools did – heard about Raspberry Pi and bought some Maplin kits which then sat on the shelf because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had a look on the internet, but I just wasn’t really confident enough to give them a go – I did manage to set them up once or twice and desperately tried to use LXTerminal to make a jelly baby scream, but I really didn’t know what I was doing. One day, while checking twitter I happened to see a post about Picademy and started doing some research – at that point they had hosted one Picademy and were advertising for two more in June and July – luckily for me the July course coincided with the end of term and so I made a video and sent off my application; once my place was confirmed, my school agreed to pay for my expenses and I was all set for two days in Cambridge.
The first thing I really loved about Picademy were the emails that started flying back and forth beforehand. Within an hour of being offered a place, Christine, a teacher in Bradford, had agreed with me via twitter to try to get everyone staying in the same hotel. Within a few days about 80% of us were booked into the same Travelodge on the outskirts of Cambridge and we were getting excited about meeting each other.
I was the second person to arrive and I headed down to meet Tom Sale in the hotel bar for a quick meal. As we sat there more and more people arrived, some people recognising each other, others of us being strangers to everyone – people were offering to collect other members of our group at the train station, we were starting twitter hashtags around our jokes and, much to Carrie Anne‘s dismay, the beers were flowing freely. It was a fantastic bonding experience and as the evening drew to a close, we booked our taxis to PiTowers for the morning.
The first day of Picademy we arrived and had to chose one of 4 tables – the tables were labelled with the names of 4 ‘master teachers’ from our group – much to our surprise, several of our new friends were already making a mark in the world of computing. I chose to sit with Matthew Parry, a robotics specialist working in a special school and our adventure began.
Most excitingly, we were starting Picademy on the day that Raspberry Pi B+ was launched and so everyone one of us had a brand new B+ in our goodie bags – we were the first people in the world to start using one – a huge honour!
After a brief intro from Carrie Anne Philbin, we were taken into another room to look at some Scratch GPIO and Minecraft coding in Python – both of which were new and interesting to me. After a lovely lunch we were then shown how to set up a PiCamera and then spent some time with Sonic Pi – Unfortunately for us, we were the only cohort to not have the experience of Sam Aaron showing us how to live code music, but I have since seen him perform and can honestly say that he is amazing!
The lovely people at The Raspberry Pi Foundation took us out for a meal in Cambridge and then we headed to a nearby pub to start discussing our independent project ideas for the next day – there were some really cool ideas flying around like coding a Minecraft version of Portal or using plates and tin foil to make a dance mat and everyone was really excited for the next day to come around. Back in the hotel bar, more ideas were bouncing around the table, some ludicrous and some perfectly feasible.
When we sat down the next day, Matthew revealed to us his idea – while the other tables in the room split off into pairs or small groups, we stuck together and planned our Tweeting Babbage Bear.
The idea was to use the Raspberry Pi mascot Babbage Bear and make a twitter bot which photographed you and sent it to twitter; the only difficulty was getting permission to pull apart the beloved bear!
We split into teams with different task – Matthew and Hannah worked on the code for photographing, whilst Eve and I set about finding out how to tweet from the push of a button attached to the Pi with various other members of our team working on other ways to make Babbage interesting, from sounds to LED vests. All credit to Ben Nuttall of the Foundation who very patiently guided us through the set up, using GitHub and finding the right commands for Twitter API and apologies to everyone else for the massive scream of delight from Eve and myself when we finally got the code to work. We were so proud of our tweeting Babbage and particularly so when a few months later Ben turned the project into a resources on the Raspberry Pi Website.
After receiving our badges our adventure at PiTowers came to an end; however, that wasn’t the end of the story at all.
Since Picademy, not only have I kept in touch with my cohort, I’ve come in contact with members of the other cohorts via Google, Twitter and through meeting them in person at events. I’ve also made contacts with people wanting to join Picademy who want to ask my advice or just to find out about what it’s like. I’ve become part of the Pi community, making dozens of new friends, some of whom I’m finally met this weekend at the Pi Birthday party. I know that if I have a teaching or Pi problem, dozens of helpful people are simply a tweet away. Through my contacts I’ve ended up speaking at BETT and organising coding evenings and, most importantly, I’ve gained the confidence to affectively teach the children in my care as well as to share my ideas with my fellow teachers.
Picademy was one of the best experiences of my life and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone else.
PS Here are some pics of the destruction of Babbage – not for the faint hearted!
PPS – this photo was captioned ‘Certifiable’ and was taken just after we became RCEs – I’m meeting these two lovely ladies for some cocktails in a few weeks so not only have I made amazing professional contacts, but I’ve also made a great bunch of friends!
Cat Lamin 
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