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PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPosted Mar 21, 2013 4:21 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)Parent article: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi
Been following it for years and still don't understand.
Kids don't program. Getting them to download a programming language is too much of a barrier to entry. Getting them to obtain and bring up a Pi isn't. Huh?
Wouldn't it be better to simply package all the wonderful intro level teaching material and Pythonic software they have put together onto a CD-R for Linux (bootable live CD) and Windows? Yes the hardware hacking is also a hook and something that kids need to learn about (but didn't really get to do in the 8bit world of yesterday). But again, a USB to GPIO/i2c/etc dongle with support in the distributed software bundle would be easily achievable in the same $25 price range and would have a full PC behind it for processing the data.
The reason kids aren't learning to program are legion, but these cover most of it:
1. No need. In the 'day' you typed in rudimentary stuff from magazines and then modified it into something usable. These days unpopular playforms have thousands of ready to run, fairly stable programs available. Popular ones have millions. The idea above about hooking into Minecraft sounds like one of the best ideas I have heard in years to solve this problem.
2. No entry level programming environments that aren't too limited to create 'real' programs. It goes straight from Scratch to Eclipse and Visual Studio with few points between. Drag n drop to object oriented programming in one giant step. (Yes WE know about a few options, but no school will touch them.) We need a modern answer to BASIC. Javascript is a poor candidate but with some help could answer the call. The big thing that would help is good entry level docs for programming Javascript without a web server in the picture. If you have Firefox installed, you have a full Javascript devel environment complete with graphical debugger.
3. Programming is for 'nerds.' And lets be brutally honest, despite intense politically correct efforts at inclusion, programming is still a very male dominated area. Schools these days are all about anti-intellectualism and the needs of girls. Unless somebody can finally find the magic formula to interest girls in signing up for programming classes AND convince school administrations that is really going to happen, forget getting buy in.
4. Schools teach Microsoft Word & Powerpoint and call it Computer Literacy. If the Pi bufuddles schools admins enough to get in the door, perhaps that single act justifies the entire project.
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PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 5:46 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
parents are also reluctant to let the kids experiment too much with the family computer, it's really easy to mess things up badly (even with a bootable CD)
a 'impulse buy' priced computer that's completely separate doesn't have these issues.
A lot of people got started with programming not by typing programs in from magazines, but from tweaking existing games (i.e. 'cheating')
something along the lines of a Pi is perfect for that, the worst you do is damage the OS badly enough to need to re-write the SD card.
It doesn't have to work the majority of the time, at a million units shipped already, if it only works a fraction of 1% of the time that still gets a lot of new programmers.
And I think it does wonders at changing a computer from something super special that only special people deal with into something that they aren't afraid to experiment with, even if they don't do any programming themselves.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 9:13 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]
Agreed. For kids, I suppose this can really be their very own inexpensive toy, while an actual PC (even if its "their PC") is more of an expensive tool that we, parents, provide them.
BTW, the hopefully reduced barrier for entry for low income family may be beneficial too...
There is also the issue of simplicity: the Pi is a computer, but it is a simpler one than a modern PCs which is nearer from a supercomputer than it ever was.
I agree that Minecraft idea is brilliant. Btw, Minecraft success itself may be based on the same ground: simplicity, reachability.
As to boys vs. girls, I have no clue yet personnally; but I agree that this is an important question. The most astonishing is that girls seem so uninterested that they do not even bother taking the time to explain why programming apparently is so uninteresting to them...
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 12:19 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
Indeed. It's just a pity that this fine project about computer literacy chose a proprietary platform booting a proprietary OS to implement it. So many other things would have been better. But it is cheap, and it turns out that 'cheap' plus 'good marketing message' is ridiculously successful.
And there are now so many pi hackers that videocore reverse engineering is going on at a reasonable rate. They have a binutils already, I understand. So hopefully what goes around comes around...
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:15 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That really doesn't matter. The BBC B, the ZX81, the C64, all of those were every bit as proprietary. People dug into the guts and figured out how they worked. My only worry is that these days, if people try to publish disassemblies and the like, they'll get sued by the likes of, well, Broadcom...
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 18:39 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] The hardware above the chip level was documented in the manuals for the Acorn machines and I've seen a pretty thorough manual for the Amstrad CPC series that upholds this level of documentation. Most of the ICs were commodity components, and the only notable exceptions in the Acorn machines (and in the Sinclair machines) were the ULAs, for which you did get a block diagram in the former case. Ignoring the physical reverse engineering done on various ULAs, particularly the successful work done on the Spectrum's ULA, it is completely possible to logically reverse engineer these components, and I believe that various emulators actually achieve reasonable accuracy. An interesting test would be to actually try and use such software to drive the hardware and see how compatible the implementation is, although I imagine that you'd need to put work in to do things like refresh the DRAM and other bus signalling that "just happens" in an emulator. Of course, the software in the microcomputers of that era was proprietary and disassembly listings that were actually published in books did lead to legal action. So some things haven't changed at all. (I wrote this stuff up here.)
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 19:28 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] You didn't need to dig very hard on the C64, at least Stateside; the same stores that sold C64s also sold a $19.95 book documenting its internals (including schematics, pinouts, the 6510 instruction set, the memory map, ...)
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 20:30 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
I wasn't comparing with the 1980s, but with other much more open platforms of recent years. Two I've been particularly involved with were the lart and the balloonboard. More recently things like beaglebone (yeah I know, powerPV GPU lets it down). The Pi's lack of freeness wouldn't matter if they didn't go on and on about the openness, which is pretty ironic given that it comes out of Broadcom. There have been plenty of very misleading statements (all that hullabaloo about their free graphics driver for example). If they didn't say that stuff then it wouldn't make me grumpy.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:27 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
so have someone buy a chip and development kit from broadcom, that should give them all the documentation that they need to re-write the binary blob and release the source.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 21:39 UTC (Thu) by hamjudo (subscriber, #363) [Link] "It doesn't have to work the majority of the time, at a million units shipped already, if it only works a fraction of 1% of the time that still gets a lot of new programmers."In the last 2 months of 2012, I distributed 6 pi's to people I thought I could get interested in programming on them. 2 teenagers are actively using theirs. So I sort of got a whopping 33%. Although, one of them only counts as a conversion to Linux. He was already programming. A 15 year old boy tried to impress my 15 year old daughter with the Mandelbrot sets he generated. A sure sign that he was an excellent candidate for using a Raspberry Pi. Also a sure sign that romance will not come easy. Not counting the ringer, I still got a respectable 20%.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 12:53 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Wouldn't it be better to simply package all the wonderful intro level teaching material and Pythonic software they have put together onto a CD-R for Linux (bootable live CD) and Windows? This is the most convincing argument against unquestioning adoption of the product in the education sector. Computers have become common in the schools of the "developed world", so a lack of hardware isn't the problem: it's the lack of appropriate software. Yes the hardware hacking is also a hook and something that kids need to learn about (but didn't really get to do in the 8bit world of yesterday). Hardware hacking was done at various levels - for example, wiring things up to various expansion ports - but serious hardware hacking was done less because it was a lot more involved, the exchange of knowledge was more restricted than it is now, and things are cheaper in real terms than they were then. Moreover, the computers themselves were the equivalent of the repeatedly mentioned "family PC" that tinkering children aren't supposed to be messing up, at least when considering the cost of replacing a microcomputer that has been accidentally damaged in a hardware hacking exercise. But again, a USB to GPIO/i2c/etc dongle with support in the distributed software bundle would be easily achievable in the same $25 price range and would have a full PC behind it for processing the data. I imagine that such dongles already exist and can't really believe that no-one has pitched this (even on a crowd-funding site) and seen it through to market.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 19:59 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Computers have become common in the schools of the "developed world", so a lack of hardware isn't the problem: it's the lack of appropriate software. Yes, but the computers in school are confined to the »computer room«, and usually at least 3 out of 10 are out of commission because of viruses, etc. The nice thing about the Raspberry Pi is that every kid can have their own computer and take it home with them after school. Moreover, the computers themselves were the equivalent of the repeatedly mentioned "family PC" that tinkering children aren't supposed to be messing up The problem with messing up the »family PC« today is that one's big sister will come down on one like a ton of bricks if she can't get her history project done (or go on Facebook for that matter), and Mom and Dad will be less than enthusiastic about having to fix the PC again before they can use it to do whatever it is that they want to do. If the Raspberry Pi needs its SD card rewritten then at least the rest of the family can still go on the Internet.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 21:51 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
It's certainly true that the "family PC" is more likely to be shared these days than it was, but I think people still disregard the cost argument too easily when reframing the 1980s as some time of unhindered computational experimentation. In fact, the blog post I linked to in my own commentary mentions someone almost ruining their Apple II with hardware modifications; such activities would have been much more risky back then: $1000 in early 1980s money is quite a sum now, and even ruining a C64 would have been more costly in real terms than replacing a fairly powerful laptop today.
I think it is nice that each child can take their computer around with them. It reminds me of the Acorn Pocket Book which was a rebadged Psion Series 3, but the difference is that the Raspberry Pi needs a display and thus largely relies on children having their own television because we all know how inconvenient it was back in the 1980s to share the family television. Yes, televisions are cheaper now, but it all adds up.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 23:23 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] The difference between the 1980s and today is that the main application for home computers in the 1980s was fooling around. Today, the Internet is so pervasive in all aspects of modern life that a working computer is pretty much required for many serious things, including sending and receiving important e-mail, doing the taxes, schoolwork etc. Regardless of the hardware cost many people cannot afford fooling around with the »family PC« because all family members depend on it in various ways. It's great if one's family can afford more than one computer such that the kids can use one for fooling around and there is another one handy to go onto the Internet to figure out how to fix the first one if it is broken. Many people do not have that luxury. In that case a $35 Raspberry Pi is a more reasonable option than a second computer that costs several times as much even if one buys it used, and requires the same sort of peripherals (display, keyboard, mouse) as the Raspberry Pi. As far as the display requirement is concerned, one can use a Raspberry Pi with an old tube TV from the attic. It's not a lot of fun but it is better than nothing. Even if there is only one good monitor in the house one can plug it into the Raspberry Pi instead of the good PC and avoid breaking the good PC when fooling around.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 22, 2013 13:41 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I'm not disputing the inconvenience of messing up the family computer. My point was purely that the obstacle to hardware hacking in the 1980s was not the lack of access to the hardware internals (there were plenty of robots and other things made for the education market) but the huge financial penalty incurred if one damaged the computer. What we have seen is actually a shift in the consequences from financial inconvenience (spending a few thousand dollars in today's money) to practical inconvenience (having to log into the netbank from work to pay the bills).
So no, I don't disagree with you, but I think people underestimate the investments that people were having to make back in the day, and when people look for reasons why certain things were not rampantly popular they would do well to consider the matter of how much these things actually cost in real terms. (There's also the schoolyard arguments about certain computers being expensive, others being cheap, and which features were necessary, but one has to remember that the BBC Micro had to do so much that one wonders whether the BBC were actually trying to specify a technical platform for their own purposes, which in some ways they were.)
The appliance nature of the Raspberry Pi is a positive step forward (or backward to a simpler era, if you like) and one that the involuntary "cartel" of retailers, manufacturers and Microsoft has managed to keep away from the average consumer for far too long. And yes, the price is also very nice, and it certainly will help to lower hardware acquisition costs for a lot of people even if the board itself is not the total cost of the package. Where I come from, a lot of old TVs will have either antenna or SCART inputs and to use them will require yet more extras, just like using old school monitors will require adapters for the VGA inputs.
My point is that some of the practical aspects have been downplayed with a somewhat nostalgic spin on the inconveniences everyone had to endure back in the day. There will be add-ons that mitigate this, but a bit more foresight and less of the spin would have made a more convenient product, in my opinion.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 22, 2013 18:34 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
calling a Pi an 'appliance' is seriously misleading.
Appliances are single purpose devices that almost always prevent you from making any changes to the software on the device.
If you squint hard enough, you could define a Pi this way, it's single purpose is to run a general purpose, open source operating system
But by that argument, Mac computers are appliances, their single purpose is to run OS/X.
I don't think you would find many people agreeing that Mac computers are appliances, and by the same token Pi computers are not appliances.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 22, 2013 23:17 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I meant appliance in the way that you switch it on and it just works. Given that the very nature of the device requires you to supply your own operating system and that you have complete control over what that is (subject to obvious technical constraints, in case anyone wants to pick apart that statement), I think it's obvious that I didn't mean appliance in the sense that only the manufacturer gets to decide how the device is used.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] 3. Programming is for 'nerds.'Nerds are cool these days, hadn't you heard? Also, to be blunt, back in the 80s before the old typing courses took over computer education in the UK, programming was a subject that got a widely-watched set of TV programmes made about it with their own enormously popular microcomputer. It was not a niche subject back then -- or, if it was, the niche was huge. Most UK free software developers got their start then -- it's one reason why the field is aging at roughly a year per year and most of us are a similar age: we all came out of that era. The whole point of the Pi is to try to bring those days back.
There is a reason for 80s nostalgia. Posted Mar 23, 2013 10:25 UTC (Sat) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]
I feel really grateful to have been raised in the 80s as the home computer boom was taking off. Of course back then I was also lucky my family was well connected enough that I got to play with everything from the Jupiter Ace to the ubiquitous Spectrum and eventually the Atari ST. Although out of the box the ST wasn't super programmable once I had a copy of DevPac and ST Internal (full annotated assembler listing of the BIOS!) I was away.
In the UK it has been a problem for years that we can't get enough graduates with decent programming experience. Even CS students can come through the system having learnt Java and only having a peripheral understanding of what actually goes on under the covers.
The Pi isn't perfect but it is cheap and has the momentum of the educational community behind it. Python I think is a reasonable choice for a introduction to programming and of course being based on a full Linux the possibilities are limited only by imagination. Even the relatively lightweight main CPU is orders of magnitude faster than anything we had to play with in our day.
The UK government has recently abolished the widely mocked ITC GCSE subject, rightly arguing that learning skills like using spreadsheets and word-processors should be covered as tools in other classes. It remains to be seen if we'll see a return of an actual programming based GCSE computer science like in my day but even if we don't it's heartening to see that kids are taking to the platform and letting their imagination run riot :-)
There is a reason for 80s nostalgia. Posted Mar 26, 2013 0:44 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Of course, the whole reason for the longstanding dearth of people with decent programming experience is because of that very abolished ITC GCSE subject. I was one of the first people to take it, and it was utterly, utterly useless. Hours wasted on Excel and Word 1.0 and PageMaker, while I was writing operating systems in 6510 asm and teaching myself OO in my spare time. Of course, nobody wanted to do A level computing, not if it was as useless as the GCSE (which I understand it was).
It's a real shame that they kept the typing course on (that's what ITC is the descendant of), while ignoring the BBC TV computing programmes and all that sprang from them (a generation of UK hackers! The last generation until now, to be honest. Even now, the newly-resurgent UK computer gaming industry is mostly populated with people who grew up with the BBC B and Speccy.)
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 22, 2013 12:47 UTC (Fri) by stevan (subscriber, #4342) [Link]
So I would guess that the old SUSE Linux tagline "Have a lot of fun..." doesn't sit comfortably here?
Part of the proposition is the fun factor, not the hard-core educational outcome, and the multiple use aspect rather than the specific.
While the Pi may have some aspects that are a little distance from the ideal, such as the closed examples often given, there is no doubt that it has been successful in attracting all ages to the active side of technology, actually making something rather than merely consuming. It's done so in a wide way, having entry points for the purely educational, the fun and the project users. It seems to me to have done so in the spirit of open-ness too, even if the execution has had to be compromised from the ideal of full hardware open-ness in order to get produced. These things are to be celebrated far more than curmudgeonly elevating the compromises to the point that they detract from the good.
IMHO, of course.
S
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