OCR releases more #RaspberryPi resources for education / @Raspberry_Pi

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged that OCR had released a batch of rich, educational material for teachers to use in their ICT lessons. I’ve checked back this morning and they’ve doubled the number of documents available. The new documents are as follows:

  • A comprehensive Getting Started guide and tutorial. (This is perfect for beginners, regardless of whether they’re in education or not!)
  • Two “recipe cards” which are essentially very small, quick projects.
    • Flashing LED (done without a breadboard, which isn’t the best idea, but hell, it works!)
    • Singing Jelly Baby – play a sound when you squeeze a jelly baby. (This sounds nuts, but apparently is a party trick for the Foundation’s techies. I think there is a picture missing of how to put the paper clips in, so I’m not sure how much use it will be).
  • Classroom Challenge: Hardware Characteristics – learner/teacher worksheets taking you through various aspects of hardware. Quite tricky, this one.
  • Classroom Challenge: Hardware Hacking and Robotics – learner/teacher worksheets using the PiFace add-on board. (This is the ‘fun’ one, of course, but the PiFace isn’t exactly cheap at £20. Some of the photos on this one are a bit ‘muddy’)

I commend OCR for continuing to release these tutorial sheets. They’re well-produced (okay, some of the photos could be better) and cover a lot of the basic projects you would want to undertake. In fact, any beginner would benefit from working through the sheets, even if they’re not a teacher or a pupil.

I’ll keep an eye out for more material being released.

RGB-LED Teaching Kit for the #RaspberryPi

Raspberry Pi enthusiast Meltwater has developed his second board kit for the Raspberry Pi. The first was the PSU Kit which was a voltage regulator board.

The new one, called the RGB-LED Teaching Kit (snappy name…) gives you a collection of 5 RGB LEDs that you can control over GPIO.

You can read more about the kit and find the link to buy one on Meltwater’s website. The kits are £14.49 each (which seems a lot for 5 LEDs, a few pins and a bit of board) but could be fun if used in education at the right learning stage.

Airtime – run a radio station from a #RaspberryPi

Airtime and Raspberry Pi part 2: planning for peak performance

In this second article, Martin Konecny explores the performance issues of Sourcefabric’s open source Airtime sofware which provides management facilities for radio stations.

Read the article: Airtime and Raspberry Pi part 2: planning for peak performance.

This sounds a very promising project, especially as Martin works for Sourcefabric and therefore can tap into their development team and redevelop parts of the software specifically for the Pi.

One to keep an eye on.