ABSTRACT

I spoke at an educational conference where I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Alan Mycroft, one of the Brainiacs behind the Raspberry Pi. As I’m sure you hipsters know, that’s the company that created a credit-card sized computer that costs less than a McDonald’s family meal; the ultimate in stripped-down tech. It’s cheap and easy enough that students at school can really start playing with programming, coding and computer design. He wasn’t a corporate shark circling education; he was just worried about the decreasing skills he saw as a member of the University of Cambridge’s computing department. Whereas kids in the 80s (like me) grew up with Ford Model T computers that were simple enough for us to start getting to grips with, by the third millennium, computers were black boxes that defied scrutiny by the casual user. Also, school IT had taken a disastrous turn, focusing on end-user applications. Kids were getting a lot of training about how to use Excel and PowerPoint, and not a lot about coding.