ABSTRACT
The first thing that most people do when they get a Raspberry Pi is to hook it up to monitor, keyboard and mouse to have a look at what the operating system is - to see it "working". On an individual basis, in preparation for understanding and working with the Raspberry Pi in a school environment, this is not a bad place for the teacher, child or technician to start. A virtual machine will boot up very quickly and can be shut down with a few clicks of the mouse. In the early days of computers, there weren't any desktops with icons to click on. To use them, people had to type text commands in. Python is a text based computing language. Whilst it may seem a big jump from Scratch to Python, it is not. Python requires the syntax to be exact to work, so it helps teach skills like resilience and debugging.
