Operation Manual

Introduction
“Children today are digital natives”, said a man I got talking to at a fireworks party last year. “I don’t understand why you’re
making this thing. My kids know more about setting up our PC than I do.”
I asked him if they could program, to which he replied: “Why would they want to? The computers do all the stuff they need for
them already, don’t they? Isn’t that the point?”
As it happens, plenty of kids today aren’t digital natives. We have yet to meet any of these imagined wild digital children,
swinging from ropes of twisted-pair cable and chanting war songs in nicely parsed Python. In the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s
educational outreach work, we do meet a lot of kids whose entire interaction with technology is limited to closed platforms with
graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that they use to play movies, do a spot of word-processed homework and play games. They
can browse the web, upload pictures and video, and even design web pages. (They’re often better at setting the satellite TV box
than Mum or Dad, too.) It’s a useful toolset, but it’s shockingly incomplete, and in a country where 20% of households still don’t
have a computer in the home, even this toolset is not available to all children.
Despite the most fervent wishes of my new acquaintance at the fireworks party, computers don’t program themselves. We need
an industry full of skilled engineers to keep technology moving forward, and we need young people to be taking those jobs to fill
the pipeline as older engineers retire and leave the industry. But there’s much more to teaching a skill like programmatic thinking
than breeding a new generation of coders and hardware hackers. Being able to structure your creative thoughts and tasks in
complex, non-linear ways is a learned talent, and one that has huge benefits for everyone who acquires it, from historians to
designers, lawyers and chemists.
Programming is fun!
It’s enormous, rewarding, creative fun. You can create gorgeous intricacies, as well as (much more gorgeous, in my opinion)
clever, devastatingly quick and deceptively simple-looking routes through, under and over obstacles. You can make stuff that’ll
have other people looking on jealously, and that’ll make you feel wonderfully smug all afternoon. In my day job, where I design
the sort of silicon chips that we use in the Raspberry Pi as a processor and work on the low-level software that runs on them, I
basically get paid to sit around all day playing. What could be better than equipping people to be able to spend a lifetime doing
that?
It’s not even as if we’re coming from a position where children don’t want to get involved in the computer industry. A big kick
up the backside came a few years ago, when we were moving quite slowly on the Raspberry Pi project. All the development
work on Raspberry Pi was done in the spare evenings and weekends of the Foundation’s trustees and volunteers—we’re a
charity, so the trustees aren’t paid by the Foundation, and we all have full-time jobs to pay the bills. This meant that occasionally,
motivation was hard to come by when all I wanted to do in the evening was slump in front of the Arrested Development boxed
set with a glass of wine. One evening, when not slumping, I was talking to a neighbour’s nephew about the subjects he was
taking for his General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE, the British system of public examinations taken in various
subjects from the age of about 16), and I asked him what he wanted to do for a living later on.
“I want to write computer games”, he said.
“Awesome. What sort of computer do you have at home? I’ve got some programming books you might be interested in.”
“A Wii and an Xbox.”
On talking with him a bit more, it became clear that this perfectly smart kid had never done any real programming at all; that there
wasn’t any machine that he could program in the house; and that his information and communication technology (ICT) classes—
where he shared a computer and was taught about web page design, using spreadsheets and word processing—hadn’t really
equipped him to use a computer even in the barest sense. But computer games were a passion for him (and there’s nothing
peculiar about wanting to work on something you’re passionate about). So that was what he was hoping the GCSE subjects
he’d chosen would enable him to do. He certainly had the artistic skills that the games industry looks for, and his maths and
science marks weren’t bad. But his schooling had skirted around any programming—there were no Computing options on his
syllabus, just more of the same ICT classes, with its emphasis on end users rather than programming. And his home interactions
with computing meant that he stood a vanishingly small chance of acquiring the skills he needed in order to do what he really
wanted to do with his life.