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Raspberry Pi Gets an Open Source Educational Manual
Last year a group of UK teachers started working on a Creative Commons licensed teaching manual for the Raspberry Pi. That work has produced the Raspberry Pi Education Manual which is available at the Pi Store or here as a PDF. From Raspberry Pi: "The manual is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 unported licence, which is a complicated way of saying that it’s free for you to download, copy, adapt and use – you just can’t sell it.
You’ll find chapters here on Scratch, Python, interfacing, and the command line. There’s a group at Oracle which is currently working with us on a faster Java virtual machine (JVM) for the Pi, and once that work’s done, chapters on Greenfoot and Geogebra will also be made available – we hope that’ll be very soon."
Empty hard bound books. They come with a FREE document printed inside!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Could we get an eink friendly format? I understand that technical manuals are not designed for reflowable text, however I would like to read a manual on my Nook and then check diagrams on my laptop.
If you are looking to get free educational materials on a Raspberry Pi you should check out: http://kalite.adhocsync.com/. Intern Jamie Alexander did a fabulous job getting the entire Khan Academy site including setting up accounts, watching videos, and doing exercise problems working on a Raspberry Pi. You can read about it here: http://jamiealexandre.com/blog/2012/12/12/what-i-did-at-khan-academy-khanberry-pi-ka-lite/
The last python chapter is a actually useful with some GPIO stuff with python.
Just in case anyone else was curious.
Here's a tip. Don't live strictly based on the demands of someone else.
If you want to learn about Raspberry Pi, here's one method that cost you nothing. Don't learn about it and then throw a fit when someone else doesn't hand you a large bag of money for learning it. Learn about something that you like to learn about.
If you can apply it to a career, that's even better.
CC-BY-NC-SA is not open source, not by the traditional definition of open source. The NC part of the license is the problem. Open Source licenses should permit commercial redistribution, and this is in fact part of the first criterion given in the definition of an open source license:
(emphasis added) The NC portion restricts selling the manual. It isn't a free cultural work either for the same reason.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Right now, the RP has a rudamentary X-server but a full ssh server and GCC. It's capable of so much more, just like Linux was 15 years ago. There's hints of what it can do, rendering 1920x1080 video and some VERY capable openGL stuff ( Quake3 at respectable rates) but at present, it's a $35 device hiding a lot of Gee Whiz. Sure any Android device can connect and run some really cool apps but RP can do such more, has the same latent capabilities Linux did, the same capabilities that captured the imaginations of so many, the capabilities that have brought Linux to where it is today.
RP is a year old now but it's in a position where it isn't going to get stale, where a 300MHz P2 and a 3DFx Banshee card would be pretty awesome. Sure it won't run Crysis but it's a wholey remarkable piece of hardware and one that does or should capture the curiosity of every Linux afficianado over the last 15 years and the attention of anyone who has gotten excited about Linux in the last 15 years.
Android is as nearly locked up as IOS but RP is as wide open as . . . GNU linux.
This is what we want in our working computers. Not our educational tools.
Long ago, in the days of the Apple ][, there was a computer emulator called the Visible Computer 6502. It was a graphical representation of a 6502 processor along with its registers and IO ports. You could program it in assembly language and watch it execute the code. Top speed was probably about 5 cycles per second, but you could slow it down for a better look at program execution, or you could step thru one cycle at a time.
This was an intimate look at the inner workings of a computer that a 9 year old could appreciate. It gave insights that elude college graduates today.
If someone will use Raspberry Pi to demonstrate this elemental relationship between hardware and software in a visually compelling format, then it will have served a revolutionary purpose and millions will see computers in a new light.
speed power expandability not required
...omphaloskepsis often...
All I can say is that you need to read the actual license. NC does not mean what you think it means.
In itself, the Pi is just another small cheap computer. Right now it's got a great lead over other similar devices because of all the fan-publicity (I suspect mostly led by dewey-eyed 40-somethings who remember their teenage programming years on the BBC B and the like). At some point the honeymoon will be over and the Pi will be in a box in the back of the garage with all the other Christmas geek toys that were fun for a week in the holidays.
What will give it life in the educational sphere will be the development of decent educational supporting material. Provide educational material - particularly content that ticks off required elements in the National Curriculum that teachers have to deliver - and you have something will get taken up by thousands of schools.Without it, the Pi will be just another piece of hardware foisted onto teachers that they have to manage and maintain on top of their already busy schedules, that they will get fed up with and dump as soon as they can.