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Raspberry Pi Gets an Open Source Educational Manual

Posted by samzenpus on from the read-all-about-it dept.

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."

8 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Khan Academy Lite by mbuimbui · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

    1. Re:Khan Academy Lite by jamalex · · Score: 4, Informative

      Thanks for the link! We're working on a package to put into the RPi store, to make it even easier -- stay tuned for more soon!

  2. For 8yr+: Scratch, Python and Bash in that order. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The last python chapter is a actually useful with some GPIO stuff with python.
    Just in case anyone else was curious.

  3. Re:sounds cool to bad it's not college = useless t by ddd0004 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Nostalgia but relevant. by gukin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. speed power expandability by swell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...
    1. Re:speed power expandability by yo303 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes. [ObGeekCred: I wrote Wayne's World for the Gameboy in Z80 assembly and put my picture in as an Easter egg.]

      This would be an amazingly revealing tool. If debugging and tracing tools had been a standard thing the whole time for everybody, we would have so many more programmers now, because they let you look inside. It's like when they invented grandfather clocks with windows showing the mechanism: it made for more grandfather clock makers, because more people saw how cool it was to be able to make grandfather clocks.

      Further, this needs to be a standard free app on smartphones. More kids are likely to develop for and on their smartphones than for Pi or Arduino. This is much more true in the 3rd world, where many have limited access to PCs while they easily find cheap Android phones.

      Once you run it and agree, it turns into a debugging service that traces everything. It runs in a side window and has a slider that runs contiguously between assembly language, through system calls, through full speed. It can slow down any app -- their app -- with stepping, tracing, and breakpoints. It is a virtualizer running on the phone itself.

      This tool can easily be developed by a team of ad hoc developers. Imagine that anybody in the world can take apart an app and make a list of when it makes a graphic call, or have it freeze when it makes a file system request, or build timing graphs of various interesting things. This is what builds programmers.

      The project needs only a few managers, programmers, marketers, bloggers, braggers, and other passionate people. Building a team of varied people is what will make this work.

      Will you help make this happen? Picture that everybody can suddenly take apart all their apps, and see how they work inside. This could really be how things are a year from now. Mail me at j at jth period co

  6. Re:It's Non-Commercial (CC-NC) therefore useless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All I can say is that you need to read the actual license. NC does not mean what you think it means.