[HN Gopher] A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers (2011)
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A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers (2011)
Author : dcminter
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-10-22 11:43 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| dcminter wrote:
| For anyone headline skimming, this was the original Raspberry Pi
| and that's PS15 not 15lb!
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Isn't miniaturization great? What used to take a whole fifteen
| pounds of electronics now runs on this single little circuit
| board...
| fanf2 wrote:
| I love this comparison of 60 years of progress
| https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20151129/
| tessierashpool wrote:
| admins, can you all change the title to say PS15?
|
| imagine if you could somehow sum up the total aggregate
| cognitive drain accumulated by every HN reader outside the UK
| wondering why children need such heavy computers
| nsteel wrote:
| Isn't it only the US plodding on with non-metric weights and
| measures?
| AltF4me wrote:
| No, we like to use imperial and metric in the UK.
| lewispollard wrote:
| But it's very rare for us to use lbs as a measurement of
| weight (at least directly)
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I think the majority of educated people can figure out the
| title given the context of the domain. "15 pound...
| _bbc.co.uk_ " took half a second for my brain to figure out.
|
| Similar to how you don't get too confused with these
| (admittedly more common) titles:
|
| - "How memory works... (health.org)"
|
| - "Networking best practices... (sysadmin.info)"
|
| - "Languages of the future... (sociology.harvard.edu)"
| hugs wrote:
| I'm a huge Raspberry Pi fan. I use it in my robotics work and I
| have two sons who I set up a Pi for years ago to learn to code
| on, but...
|
| Did Raspberry Pi fail at its original mission of inspiring young
| programmers?
|
| It's obviously a huge success in industry and in the
| maker/hobbyist community, but it feels like kids would rather use
| a phone or a tablet to do anything. And in my work as a robotics
| team coach for middle-schoolers (First Lego League), we do all
| the coding with Chromebooks.
|
| (fwiw: both my sons are now either currently majoring in computer
| science in college, or will next year... but cumulative time
| spent working with the Pis over the years was minimal. Either
| way, maybe Pi and I should take the win?)
| tomatocracy wrote:
| From what I see with my own children, Scratch has very much
| ended up as the "go-to" tool for teaching coding in schools.
| But Scratch doesn't really "inspire" them as such.
|
| What does seem to inspire my children in terms of coding is
| hardware - at younger ages it's things like Beebot and Ozobot,
| and then moving onto projects using the GPIO pins on the Pi -
| eg we got a Pi-controlled robot car kit a couple of years ago
| which has been great.
| mholm wrote:
| Honestly, I think the idea of a less capable computer being
| used to teach kids to love _programming_ was misguided from the
| start. Raspberry pis are excellent for making electronics
| projects accessible and easy. I had an intro class in college
| that used Pi's for teaching electronics. It dramatically
| expands what's possible because you have a real computer with
| accessible pins, and the ecosystem made it all simple and
| comfortable. It felt much more accessible than Arduinos.
|
| But teaching programming? Why? It does not enhance what's
| possible, it limits what's possible in a teaching way. That
| screams the sort of thing that educators would find useful and
| students would tolerate. Sure, they eventually get comfortable
| and see the benefits, but most of those aren't in programming.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| In my opinion, it's actually closer to its original mission
| than previously as it can, in its current form, be quite easily
| used as a main computer.
|
| Some kids will naturally like tinkering with these kinds of
| things and that's where the original, cheaper model is better,
| but most will want a computer to accomplish a task, so the best
| way to get them to learn this kind of thing is to give them a
| practical reason to. Want to play Minecraft/Roblox/Whatever on
| your pi? Go ahead, you just need to figure out how to actually
| set that up on Linux.
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> Did Raspberry Pi fail at its original mission of inspiring
| young programmers?_
|
| Mostly yes, with a big but. Obviously the Pi has succeeded on
| its own terms in the hobbyist community (and industry, to a
| remarkable degree), but it was just too complicated and fragile
| and fiddly for most schoolkids to handle. The lessons from the
| failure of the RPi in education were the basis for the BBC
| micro:bit, a much simpler dev board based on an ARM
| microcontroller.
|
| The micro:bit is just a brilliant tool for teaching the first
| stages of CS and EE. There are multiple toolchains supporting
| Scratch, Swift, MicroPython and a variety of block-based visual
| programming environments. It can be programmed directly from a
| browser-based IDE, so you can get to hello world very quickly
| and it works on essentially any device with nothing to install.
| It has Bluetooth and a bunch of sensors, so it can do fun and
| interesting things.
|
| https://microbit.org/get-started/what-is-the-microbit/
|
| https://microbit.org/projects/make-it-code-it/
| anta40 wrote:
| >> "but it was just too complicated and fragile and fiddly
| for most schoolkids to handle"
|
| Really? Well I'm certainly not a highschooler, and have been
| working as a software developer for more than a decade. Until
| today, I see R Pi as tiny Linux box. Okay for running your
| PHP/Python apps.
|
| If you want to go lower level, which I believe is necessary
| for CS/EE education, perhaps get one of those ARM
| microcontrollers.
| forinti wrote:
| I think you can say that, much like the BBC Micro, the
| Raspberry Pi succeeded in many areas, not just inspiring and
| educating kids.
|
| Of course it was never going to be as prevalent as any 8 bit
| micro, because the technology landscape nowadays is just
| endless.
|
| But it got some kids into tinkering, got older programmers into
| new sorts of projects, it got into industry, product
| development, gardening, home automation, on so on.
| fanf2 wrote:
| They have sold more Raspberries Pi than any 8 bit computer.
| Record holder for biggest sales of any desktop computer is
| the Commodore 64; Raspberry Pi has sold about 50% more so
| far.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| > but it feels like kids would rather use a phone or a tablet
| to do anything.
|
| Please define "anything".
|
| Mobile devices are basically consumption-only devices. Yes
| there's lots of options to turn 'em into general purpose
| computers or even do development on them. But they just...
| aren't it.
|
| A RPi otoh is a general purpose computer (and Chromebooks too,
| for the most part).
| _fzslm wrote:
| It worked for me. I got a Raspberry Pi when I was 12. I learned
| the Linux command line on it.
|
| I built doorbells and game sites to use in school. I learned PHP
| on the thing, my first proper programming language.
|
| Good times. :)
| baz00 wrote:
| Glad to hear it worked out for you. My kids school went full on
| Pi and they were broken and discarded after 2 months because
| they are mostly not suitable for educational settings from a
| software and hardware perspective. The hardware is not robust
| or reliable enough and the software requires fixing by staff
| too often to be productive.
|
| Instead they taught them python on windows.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| I'm surprised to hear that. We had an entire job tracking
| system in a large factory running off of them and they lasted
| years. This was with daily handling by factory workers.
| baz00 wrote:
| Imagine monkeys on meth and you basically have the school
| environment.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think the students are doing more "system integration"
| work than your factory workers are doing with their day-to-
| day handling. So they're touching all of the GPIO pins
| immediately after shuffling across the carpet to rub 18
| balloons against themselves, connecting every GPIO pin to
| every other GPIO pin just for fun, rebooting by unplugging
| the power, etc.
|
| If the Raspberry Pi had 5V compatible GPIO and SD cards
| stored data permanently immediately after fsync() returns,
| the Pi would have been much more successful in the
| educational environment.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| While I can't say my factory workers were keen on opening
| them up and poking around they did have a habit of
| hitting them with forklifts.
| theodric wrote:
| I have a friend who has two children who are now allegedly
| young adults. They smash about one phone each per six
| months and one laptop screen each per three years. Their
| iPads are somehow intact, but dented to fuck. I, myself,
| broke a laptop screen when I was 16 (1999) by kneeling on
| it while it was open and concealed under my bedclothes. In
| the intervening 24 years, I have broken zero (0) laptop,
| desktop, PDA, or phone screens except by activities that I
| knew might result in their destruction (i.e. disassembly
| without proper tools under an understanding of 'either I
| manage to fix this right now or I order a new one and it
| arrives tomorrow').
|
| All this to say: kids are just rough on shit. They're
| inexperienced with potential failure modes and thus fail to
| anticipate what precautions might need to be taken in
| trying to avoid them. But they mostly grow up (after
| killing a few pieces of hardware).
| baz00 wrote:
| Crikey. Mine all have iPads and iPhones and have for a
| long time. They haven't broken anything yet!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Same here; multiple broken phone screens (and we're not
| buying him a new phone every time it breaks, he gets
| hand-me-downs at best), laptops (he managed to cram a
| power cable into the HDMI port in a panic, closed a
| laptop with probably something like a pen in between
| shearing the hinge, he probably punched it out of
| frustration / wanting a new one and blamed it on "some
| kids that used it as a shield"), multiple broken bikes,
| etc.
| nre wrote:
| Honestly a lot of kids in the US/UK should have no problem
| finding a used desktop/laptop to play with if they're into that
| sort of stuff. Even a 15 year old computer can run Linux today
| and people are practically throwing those out.
| niccl wrote:
| yeah, but...
|
| It's not as much _fun_ as making an obvious circuit board do
| Stuff (tm). There's a very tactile satisfaction about making
| an RPi or similar go. YMMV, of course
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I do wonder where old computers end up at (or where they
| should be taken to), they don't seem to have much at charity
| shops for example which used to be great for things like
| secondhand PCs.
|
| I have an old PC at home still collecting dust (~10 years old
| I think), I need to clean its storage and get rid of it.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Whoa. This is heavy.
| James-Livesey wrote:
| [Disclaimer: I work at the BBC.]
|
| ...later on, the BBC made[0] the micro:bit[1], another PS15
| (well, around PS15 back then for the V1) computer to inspire
| young programmers. Funny to think that little did the BBC know
| that they'd be creating their own cheap computer.
|
| [0]: Well, the BBC didn't _make_ it exactly -- rather, the
| development and manufacturing was subcontracted to third-party
| companies (though some people at the BBC were involved in
| designing the prototypes -- I've had a chat with one such person
| who did some prototype PCB fabrication in his own kitchen). The
| BBC came up with the initiative, though.
|
| [1]: https://microbit.org
| b800h wrote:
| Did the BBC miss an opportunity to major on the Raspi? For a
| lot of kids it could have been the only real computer in their
| house. Another BBC Computer Literacy Project would have been
| amazing, the micro:bit doesn't feel like it does the business.
| James-Livesey wrote:
| As much as the Raspberry Pi is really great for computing
| education, in my personal opinion, I think the micro:bit does
| well in terms of setting it up and getting started with it,
| especially in a school environment when there'll be around
| 20-or-so of these devices all being used by students.
|
| With the Pi, you have to format the SD card and flash an OS
| to it, then plug in the peripherals such as the display,
| keyboard and mouse. While schools will likely have this
| equipment, having to reconnect all these devices from a
| school PC can be a chore, especially when it comes to the end
| of the lesson. Schools would likely also have to issue a lot
| of these peripherals alongside Pis for kids to use them as
| their only computer in the house, and that can get expensive.
|
| With the micro:bit, all you need is a computer (which most
| schools will have), a USB cable (supplied with micro:bits)
| and a connection to the internet to access the online IDEs.
| Granted, that does place some barriers to their use at home
| when kids don't have a companion computing device for coding
| on.
|
| Despite the micro:bit being limited as a microcontroller with
| a 5x5 pixel display and 2 user buttons, it does have a lot of
| on-board sensors that can bring a lot of potential
| opportunities to students in terms of creating physical
| projects that Raspberry Pis don't have built-in (you have to
| purchase external sensors, such as accelerometers, to match
| the functionality).
|
| That being said, the micro:bit does require a special
| connector to use its GPIO pins in a DIP format that can be
| connected to a breadboard (the Pi is better at this due to
| its GPIO header). And, while the Pi does give a full-blown
| Linux environment that would have been great for all learners
| to interact with, the immediacy and portability of the
| micro:bit does have some advantages for new learners.
|
| I was in fact in Year 5 back when the micro:bit was launched
| and given out to Year 5 school children, and now I'm an
| apprentice at the BBC (similar stories exist for the original
| BBC Micro); so I'd say in that respect that it was overall a
| good investment from the BBC :)
|
| That's my thoughts, anyway!
| James-Livesey wrote:
| With mentioning that while I was still interested in
| programming and even had a Pi before I got my micro:bit,
| I'd say that the micro:bit did introduce me to
| microcontroller development.
| physicsguy wrote:
| The issue with the MicroBit was that it wasn't really a
| well thought out initiative with multi year funding. They
| gave them out for free to one single school year, and then
| schools had to pay for them which meant practically that
| most schools didn't do anything with them because it wasn't
| worth the time investment. They were also late delivering,
| so didn't turn up at the start of the school year when they
| were supposed to but half way through the spring term. I
| helped do some training of teachers to use it in 2015 while
| I was doing my PhD, and they'd not even got the kit for
| their classes at that point.
| mhh__ wrote:
| It could've been if it was done now but the "zoomers have
| never used a real computer" phenomenon is slightly after peak
| raspberry pi
| nsteel wrote:
| I'd love to know what they didn't team up.
| elFarto wrote:
| It wasn't the first computer they've made, or at least had
| their name on[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
| FerretFred wrote:
| I picked up a couple of micro:bits out of curiosity and was
| impressed by the build quality. The after-market eco-system was
| impressive too, and I wrote a couple of projects to see what I
| could do with them. My favourite has to be the Wireless MQTT
| client (https://petergarner.net/notes.php?thisnote=20220502-BBC
| +micr...) which used a bolt-on IOT module card. Prior to that
| I'd installed a micro:bit in a small leakproof sandwich box
| bolted to a drainpipe which transmitted light level and
| temperature value to my computer inside the house (https://pete
| rgarner.net/notes.php?thisnote=20200125-Experime...). Hats off
| to whoever designed the device as it withstood sub-zero and
| summer temperatures without faltering. Great times!
| Koshkin wrote:
| I haven't weighed my desktop, but 6,8 kg sounds about right.
| jacobtt21 wrote:
| I got my first pi when I was still in high school and the only
| thing I did on it was build a LAMP server. Cool project though.
| userbinator wrote:
| Designing an SBC around a proprietary SoC from a notoriously
| secretive company to "inspire young programmers" never seemed
| like anything more than PR stunt to me. IMHO that mission is
| better served by getting them into something like retrocomputing
| and exposing them to the _actually_ open PC-compatible ecosystem
| of the time, instead of encouraging them to participate in
| another thinly-veiled walled garden.
| camkego wrote:
| I mean this thing really put the Osborne 1 computer to shame,
| which weighed 24lbs. /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
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