If youre a hardware hacker who knows your apples youll have heard of the Raspberry Pi and maybe even bought one already. Its the super cheap mini-computer which featured prominently at ourHackathon event last month.

But theres more to the Pi than a decent processor at bargain basement prices ($35/a $25 version is coming soon). We got the chance to chat to Eben Upton, founder and trustee of the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation and the man responsible for the overall software and hardware architecture of the Pi about the very big-hearted ambition behind the project.

TC: What was your motivation in creating Raspberry Pi what were you setting out to try and achieve?

Eben: I was working at the university in Cambridge about six years ago and I had this awful experience of seeing the number of people applying for Computer Science every year going down and the sorts of things theyd have to do getting less and less impressive.Ever since then theres been an effort largely focused around the computer centre in Cambridge to develop some sort of system, some sort of platform for giving kids the opportunity to get involved in programming.

And this went through a number of iterations, and during that process I joined Broadcom as a chip architect, and fortunately it turns out that theres a Broadcom chip that I was involved in designing which has pretty much exactly all the features you need for a low cost programming platform for kids. And thats where the whole thing came from.First this realisation we had a problem and then some sort of slightly contrived good luck in having access to a platform that we could use to make this.

Weve always had this idea that youre not going to appeal to children with a platform that cant do anything interesting, that cant do anything recognisably modern. So one of the nice things about Raspberry Pi is weve ended up with a platform that can play 1080p can play Blueray quality video; thats got more graphical power than a Nintendo Wii; its something which is recognisable its not a retro machine. It may look a little retro but in terms of performance its a recognisably modern piece of hardware.

TC: Did you attribute the decline in programming skills to a lack of hack-friendly devices?

Eben: I grew up with a computer I could program. I learnt to program not because anyone ever thought of teaching me to program and I think a lot of people of the same generation had the same experience an experience that is transparently not available to children now.

Not every child has a PC, even the ones who do have a PC, the PC is not a particularly friendly environment for those who want to program. So our hypothesis is this is whats happened: we started to lose those programmable 8-bit machines of the late 80s that then led in quick succession to the loss first of kids who were programming, then it was undergraduates who were programing, and then of graduate recruits to industry who were programming.

Originally posted here:

Raspberry Pi: The Small Computer With The Big Ambition (To Get Kids Coding Again)