One of the things I’ve been doing as a STEM Ambassador is to help support a Raspberry Pi club at a local high school. At first the club was led by the sixth form students, with the teachers and myself helping out as required. This was working well at first, but with many of the […]

The Big Bang Science Fair is an annual event to promote the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and maths) to children. It’s a way of encouraging young people to study STEM and consider a STEM related career in future. This years show was held at the NEC in Birmingham with smaller local events called “Big […]

I’ve been looking to create a program with my eight year old daughter since running a Code Club at the end of last year. We’ve done some little bits in Scratch, but without a specific project I found my daughter became distracted. I also try and incorporate activities at home related to school projects they […]

Recently I taught programming Scratch to some primary school teachers. One of the questions I was asked was about the youngest age that you could teach Scratch to. It’s a difficult question and as with all teaching it depends upon the ability of the child. I gave the answer that “Scratch is designed for children […]

Each year the RSPB hold a Big Garden Birdwatch to monitor the birds visiting gardens. Volunteers spend an hour watching their garden and record the birds that they see during the hour. I signed up for this years bird count (25 to 26 January 2014) before realising that it clashed with a busy weekend driving […]

As an adult I often try and imagine myself in my children’s shoes to try and think about how appropriate something would be for their age group. Usually I can get a reasonable idea of how well they will pick something up, but this review is one where my daughter has helped me to see what it is like to learn programming through a child’s eyes.

This is a review of the Fuze Raspberry Pi based computer.

In the past few years we’ve created a family craft project at Christmas. This has normally been a large Christmas picture. This year we have created a craft project using electronics and programming on the Raspberry Pi.

For my latest Raspberry Pi project I wanted to be able to detect when a person was in the room. I happened to have a Zilog PIR sensor from SK Pang that I’d bought, but not used. This provides details to get the PIR sensor working with the Raspberry Pi. The data sheet for the […]

I’ve just finished a term of Code Club, teaching programming to primary school children aged 8 to 9. This is my experience of running the club. About Code Club Code club is a programming club aimed at primary school children designed to be run in a school or youth organisation. It’s run by volunteers, who […]

This guide is how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a host Wireless WiFi hotspot. First what does that mean? This will not turn your Pi into a wireless router (although you’d be half-way there), but instead provides a way to connect and control a Raspberry Pi using a dedicated wireless network. The reason I […]