Recently, Google and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have teamed up to provide up to 15,000 free skeleton computers to be available for secondary students in the United Kingdom.
These computers will be given to students who show a desire to learning computing. Last year, Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, criticized the U.K. for its lack of programming lessons in the computer science curriculum. Over the past decade, there has been a significant drop in the number of students studying computer science at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Both Google and the Raspberry Pi Foundation hope that the donations will spark a new generation of inventors and programmers.
The Pi device, although small, is the basic brain of a computer. By letting students see the inside workings of a computer while programming it to do something, it allows them to learn the coding system. They will learn about the operating system and be able to make changes to the software as they please.
“We hope that our new partnership with Google will be a significant moment in the development of computing education in the UK,” said Raspberry Pi co-founder, Eben Upton.
Google and Raspberry Pi will also be working with six education partners to ensure the proper distribution of the computers. They include Code Club, Computing at School, Generating Genius, Coderdojo, Teach First, and OCR. In addition, OCR has created an education packet to help students get the most out of their new devices.
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