Raspberry Pi in Northampton

A informal, but heavily over-subscribed (15 places but around 70 people registered interest), Raspberry Pi  event for  teachers and STEM ambassador was held at the University of Northampton on 16th October 2013. A collaboration between the Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, University of Northampton; LEBC (who support STEM activities within Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes through the STEM ambassador); with support from BCS Northampton through the loan on the night of some extra equipment.

The session was meant to be (and I hope was) a chance to exchange ideas for teachers and ambassadors; set-up and try out Raspberry Pis; try a little Scratch or Python programming and to start up a discussion across the area what can be done (and is being done) with Raspberry Pi. Nigel Barrett (Corby Technical School) and Scott Turner (University of Northampton) facilitated the groups, with support from Julie Messenger and other LEBC staff.

Some interesting resources were highlighted

• The MagPi magazine a free to download magazine with some interesting things to do with the RaspberryPi.
• ScoopIts on Physical Computing
• how to find the operating system on-line; download and install the operating system on to a SD Card http://learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/adafruit-raspberry-pi-lesson-1-preparing-and-sd-card-for-your-raspberry-pi.pdf by Simon Monk and the main download site for Raspberry PI OS http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
• Setting up the Raspberry PI including selecting basic configuration settings:      http://learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-2-first-time-configuration.pdf 
• Interesting article on Raspberry and Minecraft (again from MagPi)
• There is even and on-line teacher's resource and the main resource the student's book on combining Python, Raspberry Pi, and Minecraft.