Use of Raspberry Pi in Primary Schools

[maur...@gmail.com]

I really only became fully aware of the possibilities of using the Pi to introduce Primary School pupils to programming rather than just using computers last week. The school where I've been a governor for 12 years are also enthusiastic about the possibilities, and I've volunteered to help research a project.

 

While I can see that building a robot would excite many of the boys (and some of the girls), can anyone suggest a source for other projects. Maybe Alex can help.

 

Best Regards,

 

Maurice Jordan (yes, Romilly, that one)

[Simon Walters]

Ideas are - cheap ultrasonic sensors/PIR sensors to make bedroom/classroom burglar (sister/brother.mother) alarms :)
7 leds arranged in die pattern - get them to make an electronic die version

7 segment LEDs - same idea - make it display number 0 - 9

Motor driven fairground rides (while playing music)

One of my girl groups made a twirling ballerina a la musical box

The primary school problem is that you unlikely to have monitors that can take the HDMI output of the Pi and then your into a high level of cost when the same end result can be obtained from a cheaper Arduino plugged into existing computers

regards
Simon
http://cymplecy.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/scratch-gpio-version-2-introduction-for-beginners/

http://cymplecy.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/scratch-controlling-shrimparduino/