Teach them to fish or give them a fish finger..?

Here's a cool little device, it's a computer that could easily fit in a fish finger (note the 20p piece at the bottom of the shot) but more impressive than the size is the price; the developers (the Raspberry Pi Foundation) reckon it weighs in at a meagre £15 a pop! (or about the price of a kilo of salmon, just to keep the fishy thing going... )

Each one of these devices has a processor, 128Mb of memory, HDMI (to connect to your TV), USB, SD card slot and a bunch of open-source software to make it all work, that's quite an achievement in the form factor shown above. The main objective of the foundation in making such a device is to facilitate the teaching of real computer science to children. This is a noble aim in my opinion, kids that don't know their way around a computer are as disadvantaged as those that could not read or write in days gone by. Clearly, this doesn't mean that everyone will or even desire to become a Shakespeare or J.K. Rowling but at least they will stand a chance of exploiting the possibilities indirectly. Many people these days stand isolated from the actual task of making computers do things for them, they rely on others to provide tools and content, often that means expense; and a great deal of creativity is potentially stultified simply because of the ease by which someone else's ideas can be cut and paste.

This is a subject close to my own heart and is a source of some frustration even in my own limited experience. The few teachers I do know seem to perceive science subjects like this as "optional", ICT as a subject seems to have morphed into something that would be more accurately called "Learning Microsoft Office" and no one seems interested in encouraging kids how to "create" their own stuff any more. I do wonder why this is, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that most teachers at the foundational levels are arts/literature graduates, maybe it's because of their own limitations and non-scientific backgrounds, perhaps that's over simplifying? It would be nice to have a landscape where computers as learning tools are used in every class to facilitate the different educational and problem solving challenges in each subject, in the same way that reading and writing are used ubiquitously to the same end, after all that's what real working life is like.

When I started this blog back in 2006 the topic of computer science was one of the first things I posted about, not much has changed since, hopefully developments like this can help.