Pupils of all ages bring your parents for some fun coding tasks at the Jam Packed Family Hack being held at Hamilton Grammar School on Friday 28th August. Come along between 6pm and 8.45pm and join in these tasks being set by the Jam Packed Team.
To book visit:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/family-hack-jam-hamilton-south-lanarkshire-280815-tickets-17200152118
Here is a wee video which I have made which outlines the plans so far…
Hi Folks,
I just want to make you aware that the Jam Packed Team will be running a Jam Packed/Raspberry Jam Event at Hamilton Grammar School, Hamilton, South Lanarkshire on Friday 28th, Saturday 29th August 2015.
Details are still being ironed out as to the exact format of the event however the proposed running order will be along the lines of…
Friday 28th morning – pupil workshops in the school for classes from within the school
Friday 28th afternoon – CPD for teachers on getting started with the Raspberry Pi in Learning and Teaching
Friday 28th evening – “Family Hack” – pupils and parents (any age, any school) can bring a laptop for some fun filled computing challenges as presented by the Jam Packed Team.
Saturday 29th August – Raspberry Jam
10.30am – 3.30pm
We will be hosting a Raspberry Jam event. So there will be:
To control numbers all tickets for all events will be available via eventbrite.
For more information as it unfolds and follow the link to tickets from:
The Jam Packed Team are being supported by RM and the Raspberry Pi Foundation to run these events.
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So, please come along and help make this event a success. Please contact me if you’d like to demonstate a project, lead a workshop or lead a seminar and I’ll see what we can do!!! I look forward to speaking to some of you there.
Colin
After registering with RS Components and Element 14/Farnell on the launch day of the Raspberry Pi way back in February I can finally report that the second of the Raspberry Pi’s have been delivered today. This was just in time as one of the those which I ordered I was giving to a friend of mine – Andreas Ronge (@ronge). Here is a wee photo of our excitement of the first boot up of our Raspberry Pi.
I have been waiting for this moment for months and was worried that I wouldn’t receive the second Raspberry Pi in time. The best bit! Andreas didn’t even know he was getting one! It was a compete surprise! Wasn’t it!
Anyway we are both now enjoying our first foray into the world of Raspberry Pi. Although, thanks to the blogs, wiki’s and YouTube articles the downloaded Debian squeeze images onto the Level 4 San Disk SD cards worked first time without hitch.
I’ll give a full run down of the setups used at a future juncture.
For now! I’m just happy when a plan comes together.
Where do I expect my use of the Raspberry Pi to go?
Well there has been much play of the use of the Raspberry Pi to re-establish programming amongst youngsters in school and the need to bring back computing in school. This issue is different for those of us who live in Scotland as our education system never let go of Computing.
In our junior school we teach programming using scratch and have done for a few years now. This is the most recent addition to programming within the curriculum. 
The raspberry pi can further help pupils play with scratch as can be seen on some of the youtube videos demonstrating Raspberry Pi. More traditionally most Scottish Secondary Schools teach Computing Studies at Standard Grade which includes an introduction to programming which includes sequence, selection and iteration. We use Visual Basic to deliver this element of the course. However we have previously used pascal, comal and basic in years gone by.
At Higher, we further teach parameter passing, modular programming and simple searching whilst at Advanced Higher we study Searching Techniques, Sorting Techniques, File Handling, Record Structures, Classes, Polymorphism and Encapsulation and pupils create a project which encompasses some of these features.
Many schools, like ours, elect to study the Artificial Intelligence and use prolog to allow pupils to develop their knowledge.
Are we overly complacent about this? No!
That’s why we agree wholeheartedly with the philosophy of the Raspberry Pi. I’d like to see them used to allow pupils to develop their programming skills and having watched many tutorials from many YouTubers like Liam Fraser
http://www.youtube.com/RaspberryPiTutorials
and
http://www.youtube.com/Metalx1000
I’ve spent many hours learning python using these tutorials and others from MIT via iTunes U. Personally, this has been a very interesting learning experience but even knowing a lot about computing my main observation is that for a large number of learners there is a large learning curve.
One of the other nice things is that the open source cross platform nature of python allows pupils to continue to develop their skills outside of school. This is a hurdle with respect to Visual Basic which we currently use. If pupils can program at home as well as school then we can further develop the curriculum beyond that which we currently offer.
In that direction I’d like to start a Pi club which pupils could come to at school.
Our curriculum is moving on… We have a new national curriculum, a Curriculum for Excellence, which is gong to take us a further step forward. Programming will increase in this new curriculum and the development of computational thinking will develop further. One of the further considerations which I have in this respect is given our finite allocation of time and what language should we teach. Yesterday, I attended the Learning Through Technology conference at Our Dynamic Earth by Holyrood. At this conference, I had a brief chat with a senior professor who shall remain nameless. Whilst computational thinking should be our focus rather than any specific language the reality is that the 14 Scottish Universities seem to rely on Java as their language of choice when is comes to teaching programming. This begs the question should schools be teaching this? This could potentially create a more coherent joined up approach to computing and allow the Universities to elevate their expectations and starting level to beyond the current benchmark but Java is not the easiest language to get started with conceptually for pupils. Is it within the reach of pupils to understand Java as a post scratch experience? And does this meet the needs of our curriculum!
The computing outcomes within Curriculum for Excellence have a strong focus on games development which is easily achieved in Scratch. But what next? Does Java easily allow development in this way within the time allowed at school? I’m sure the answer can be yes! But how easily can this be achieved and how much CPD will be needed or provided to allow this to happen? Python has a number of extensions which in my limited experience of them look attractive, PyGame as already mentioned, PyGTK+, PyQt4/5 etc
I have no answers at the moment but lots of questions. Will Raspberry Pi save us? I doubt it but that does mean that it’s not going to be fun to play with.