With over 25 million Raspberry Pi computers being programmed by young people around the globe, Raspberry Pi founder Pete Lomas is a pioneer, whose ambition to empower young people to unleash their digital creativity has had astonishing success.
Pete Lomas was Moreton Hall’s Bronwen Society’s guest, talking to students, parents and staff about his own story from getting creative with a cardboard box to the invention of the Raspberry Pi computer, intended to offer affordable computer programming opportunities for young people, encouraging them to become creators rather than consumers of the digital revolution. So far reaching is the project that Tim Peake delivered Raspberry Pi computers to the International Space Station, encouraging youngsters to literally reach for the stars.
As Moreton Hall student, Taryn explains: “Raspberry Pi is a small, low-cost computer that can easily be plugged into a monitor or laptop that allows children to learn to code in different programming languages like Python and Scratch.
“Pete Lomas told us how, through Raspberry Pi, he wished to ignite and facilitate the creativity of youths by supplying them with their own technology. He made it cheap to allow children to open it, change it, and be unafraid to unleash their inner-engineer. Listening to him was truly inspiring and made all of us want to get creative.”
Head of STEM at Moreton Hall, Sean Lang commented: “The ethos behind the Raspberry Pi is to take students back to the basics of computing. Too many children are merely consumers of other people’s extraordinarily complex, and frankly incomprehensible, software. What the Raspberry Pi offers is the opportunity for children to create their own software, to design their own machines, and to learn the skills that will make them tomorrow’s suppliers not consumers.”
Principal George Budd said: “The part of the talk which resonated with me was the line ‘The imagination of children knows no bounds’. This is something we see on a daily basis at Moreton Hall across Art, Music, Drama and academic pursuits.”
With their mission to put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world, Pete Lomas and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are certainly at the cutting edge of the digital revolution. The audience at Moreton Hall felt very lucky to hear this story.