Learning at home with the Raspberry Pi Foundation

In many countries around the world millions of young people were unable to attend school during the epidemic, and Chief Executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Philip Colligan wants to share an update on how the Raspberry Pi Foundation is helping young people learn at home. He is offering you some great resources and tools.

As Chief Executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and as chair of governors at a state school in Cambridge he has seen first-hand the immense pressure that schools and teachers are under. He has also witnessed them display the most amazing resilience; commitment and innovation.

Schools and teachers all over the world have been doing a heroic job over the past ten months; managing the transition to emergency remote teaching during the first round of lockdowns. Supporting the most vulnerable pupils dealing with uncertainty. Changing the way that schools worked to welcome pupils back safely; helping pupils catch up with lost learning and much, much more.

Resources & Tools from Raspberry Pi Foundation

Here’s some of the resources and tools that Raspberry Pi Foundation created to help you continue to deliver a world-class computing education: 

• The Teach Computing Curriculum is a comprehensive set of lesson plans for KS1–4 (learners aged 5–16) as well as homework, progression mapping, and assessment materials.
• Working with the fabulous Oak National Academy, we’ve produced 100 hours of video for 300 video lessons based on the Teach Computing Curriculum.
• Isaac Computer Science is our online learning platform for advanced computer science (A level, learners aged 16–18) and includes comprehensive, interactive materials and videos. It also allows you to set your learners self-marking questions. 

All of these resources are mapped to the English computing curriculum and produced as part of the National Centre for Computing Education. They are available for everyone, anywhere in the world, for free!

Start learning now

That’s not all, visit Pishop for a Raspberry Pi Kit and a variety of books for young & old and start learning now!

Fun alternatives

Parents and carers are the other heroes of remote learning during lockdown. I know from personal experience that juggling work and supporting home learning can be really tough, and we’re all trying to find meaningful, fun alternatives to letting our kids binge YouTube or Netflix.

That’s why we’ve been working really hard to provide parents and carers with easy, accessible ways for you to help your young digital makers to get creative with technology:

• Hundreds of step-by-step guided projects for coding in Scratch, Python, and more. The projects are self-guided, tailored for different levels of experience, and translated into dozens of languages.
• A YouTube channel filled with code-along videos led by our team of educators, including weekly Digital Making at Home live streams for young people and video tutorials for parents who want to support their children to learn coding.
• Competitions and activities to inspire young digital makers, including our Coolest Projects online technology showcase and the Astro Pi Challenge (where young people get to write code that runs in space).

Getting computers into the hands of young people who need them 

As Philip explains; one of the harsh lessons they learned last year was that far too many young people don’t have a computer for learning at home. There has always been a digital divide; the pandemic has just put it center-stage. The good news is that the cost of solving this problem is now trivial compared to the cost of allowing it to persist.