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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."
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.
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.