Operation Manual

This is the sort of situation I want to see the back of, where potential and enthusiasm is squandered to no purpose. Now,
obviously, I’m not monomaniacal enough to imagine that simply making the Raspberry Pi is enough to effect all the changes that
are needed. But I do believe that it can act as a catalyst. We’re already seeing big changes in the UK schools’ curriculum, where
Computing is arriving on the syllabus and ICT is being reshaped, and we’ve seen a massive change in awareness of a gap in our
educational and cultural provision for kids just in the short time since the Raspberry Pi was launched.
Too many of the computing devices a child will interact with daily are so locked down that they can’t be used creatively as a tool
—even though computing is a creative subject. Try using your iPhone to act as the brains of a robot, or getting your PS3 to play
a game you’ve written. Sure, you can program the home PC, but there are significant barriers in doing that which a lot of children
don’t overcome: the need to download special software, and having the sort of parents who aren’t worried about you breaking
something that they don’t know how to fix. And plenty of kids aren’t even aware that doing such a thing as programming the
home PC is possible. They think of the PC as a machine with nice clicky icons that give you an easy way to do the things you
need to do so you don’t need to think much. It comes in a sealed box, which Mum and Dad use to do the banking and which
will cost lots of money to replace if something goes wrong!
The Raspberry Pi is cheap enough to buy with a few weeks’ pocket money, and you probably have all the equipment you need
to make it work: a TV, an SD card that can come from an old camera, a mobile phone charger, a keyboard and a mouse. It’s
not shared with the family; it belongs to the kid; and it’s small enough to put in a pocket and take to a friend’s house. If
something goes wrong, it’s no big deal—you just swap out a new SD card and your Raspberry Pi is factory-new again. And all
the tools, environments and learning materials that you need to get started on the long, smooth curve to learning how to program
your Raspberry Pi are right there, waiting for you as soon as you turn it on.
A bit of history
I started work on a tiny, affordable, bare-bones computer about six years ago, when I was a Director of Studies in Computer
Science at Cambridge University. I’d received a degree at the University Computer Lab as well as studying for a PhD while
teaching there, and over that period, I’d noticed a distinct decline in the skillset of the young people who were applying to read
Computer Science at the Lab. From a position in the mid-1990s, when 17-year-olds wanting to read Computer Science had
come to the University with a grounding in several computer languages, knew a bit about hardware hacking, and often even
worked in assembly language, we gradually found ourselves in a position where, by 2005, those kids were arriving having done
some HTML—with a bit of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets if you were lucky. They were still fearsomely clever kids with lots
of potential, but their experience with computers was entirely different from what we’d been seeing before.
The Computer Science course at Cambridge includes about 60 weeks of lecture and seminar time over three years. If you’re
using the whole first year to bring students up to speed, it’s harder to get them to a position where they can start a PhD or go into
industry over the next two years. The best undergraduates—the ones who performed the best at the end of their three-year
course—were the ones who weren’t just programming when they’d been told to for their weekly assignment or for a class
project. They were the ones who were programming in their spare time. So the initial idea behind the Raspberry Pi was a very
parochial one with a very tight (and pretty unambitious) focus: I wanted to make a tool to get the small number of applicants to
this small university course a kick start. My colleagues and I imagined we’d hand out these devices to schoolkids at open days,
and if they came to Cambridge for an interview a few months later, we’d ask what they’d done with the free computer we’d
given them. Those who had done something interesting would be the ones that we’d be interested in having in the program. We
thought maybe we’d make a few hundred of these devices, or best case, a lifetime production run of a few thousand.
Of course, once work was seriously underway on the project, it became obvious that there was a lot more we could address
with a cheap little computer like this. What we started with is a long way indeed from the Raspberry Pi you see today. I began
by soldering up the longest piece of breadboard you can buy at Maplin with an Atmel chip at our kitchen table, and the first
crude prototypes used cheap microcontroller chips to drive a standard-definition TV set directly. With only 512 K of RAM, and
a few MIPS of processing power, these prototypes were very similar in performance to the original 8-bit microcomputers. It was
hard to imagine these machines capturing the imaginations of kids used to modern games consoles and iPads.
There had been discussions at the University Computer Lab about the general state of computer education, and when I left the
Lab for a non-academic job in the industry, I noticed that I was seeing the same issues in young job applicants as I’d been seeing
at the University. So I got together with my colleagues Dr Rob Mullins and Professor Alan Mycroft (two colleagues from the
Computer Lab), Jack Lang (who lectures in entrepreneurship at the University), Pete Lomas (a hardware guru) and David
Braben (a Cambridge games industry leading light with an invaluable address book), and over beers (and, in Jack’s case, cheese
and wine), we set up the Raspberry Pi Foundation—a little charity with big ideas.
Why “Raspberry Pi”?
We get asked a lot where the name “Raspberry Pi” came from. Bits of the name came from different trustees. It’s one of the very few successful bits