A Raspberry Pi Scratch Resource

Tomorrow I will be running a workshop for MozFest, a massive community event in London organised by Mozilla. Young Raspberry Pi enthusiast, PiNet creator and all round evil genius Andrew Mulholland somehow found himself organising a Rasperry Pi Zone at the event (I definitely had no involvement in this whatsoever) and so he coerced/bullied me into helping out.

This will be my first time running a workshop by myself for strangers (working with children you’ve known since they were four really doesn’t count) and I’m a little bit nervous, but I am pleased with the worksheet that I’ve created, so I figured it was worth sharing it with you guys. If you’d like to take a look, it can be found here. Please feel free to take it and use it in your own classrooms if you think it’s useful.

I’ve tried to make the worksheet easy to follow and easy to use with minimal resources – you need a Raspberry Pi with either Scratch GPIO or Raspbian Jessie, a PiStop, a PIR sensor and some female to female cables and that’s about it!

I’m planning on introducing the workshop by taking about the Pi and what you need to get it started; it never ceases to amaze me how little children know about the actual parts of a computer and most of them think that the monitor is the computer itself, so I like to spend time talking about what the parts do – the screen is so that you can see what it is thinking, the the mouse and keyboard are so you can control how it thinks, the SD card is it’s brain so that it can think and store memories, if you want to hear what any sound you need to plug in some speakers, if you want it to connect to the internet you need to give it a wifi card etc. The whole point of the Pi is to help children understand computers better so let’s make sure we’re using it properly!

You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve forced myself to cut back on extra curricular activites after this weekend so hopefully I’ll have a bit more time to blog and try things out – I have so many toys in my collection ready to go!!

Thanks for reading and I hope the resources is of use to you!

Cat