Deutsche Welle news article on Raspberry Pi - "Raspberry Pi and the new computer science kids"

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Computer science is coming back to UK schools. Google and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are distributing 15,000 free computers and hope to create a new generation of computer scientists.

At a computer science class at Graveney School in South London, a group of 11 and 12 year olds are being taught the basics of programming... more...

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DisneyWizard the Fantasmic!
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Schmidt accused the British government of ignoring the importance of science and engineering and of throwing away what he called the UK's "great computing heritage."

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Too flipping right, all they care about is sport. They throw millions at that to get a few medals, which they probably paid for anyway, worth less that a weeks wages for most people, when just a few thousand invested in training an engineer or scientist could have returns in the millions of pounds for this country.

All the hype and fuss over the olympics, the feting and honouring of its "stars", OBEs, MBEs and all the rest of it, yet engineers and scientists rarely receive the honours they deserve for their achievements.

(Rant over -sorry)

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Reply to
Stuart

Hear, hear. And no apology required.

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Huge

On 11/04/2013 10:09, Stuart wrote: []

.. although even the average Joe in the street will have heard of Sinclair, Sugar and Dyson. Sugar got into the House of Lords. But there is need for more awareness of science and engineering in the UK - I keep suggesting having a teenage "geek" in one of the teenage soaps, but I don't know whether that's been taken up. The Raspberry Pi /has/ attracted attention, at least.

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David Taylor

You'll note that they are learning programming on Windows machines, though the school hope to obtain some Raspberry Pis in the future.

The problem in computing at schools has very little to do with hardware and a lot to do with a very outdated view that IT lessons should be about learning to use standard packages.

Ian

Reply to
The Real Doctor

None of those are engineers though,. they are conmen and businessmen who donated a lot of cash to the right parties after doing a year of charity work etc etc.

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The Natural Philosopher
[]

I'm not sure I would put Dyson in the "con-men" category.

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David Taylor

Even the computing courses over the years have problems, I have associations with staff doing teaching and the infrastructure so well aware of the issues. The major issue starts with heads who think any beige box is a computer and can do anything and episodes like businesses 'donating' their old computers to schools and ven too old for a school to use.

The other problem you get is exam boards, having seen things like preferred language is Pascal, best quote from official text book on the syllabus by examiners

"WMF file format is only for CDs"

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Paul

I am perfectly sure I would...

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Pascal, aw bless, I haven't seen that let alone used it since the early

80s.

It's unclear to me that there should be any teaching of programming at school. Stuff like Office should be extra curricular since it changes so rapidly anyway.

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Tim Streater

Sinclair and Sugar are not people I'd describe as scientists, canny businessmen certainly with a great eye for sellable tech and very good at getting their engineers to drive down the production costs below reasonable levels. Dyson I don't know so much about, but I gather the vortex trick was entirely his idea if so then he is at least a genuine inventor.

With this I couldn't agree more.

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Ahem A Rivet's Shot

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Show us anything half as useful written in Python.

Office has hardly changed for years. M$ are struggling to think of enough innovations to keep them ahead of LibreOffice.

British public education is a dog's breakfast. Partly designed to enable publically-educated students to slot into menial office work, partly designed to enable politicians to wave a piece of paper saying that results are improving year on year.

Reply to
Hils

Centrifugal separation had been used industrially for decades. His trick was to scale it down to domestic vacuum cleaner size.

Ian

Reply to
The Real Doctor

you gather wrong. Its a standard technique..in industry. Ther is no evidence to suppose it is a better way of extracting dust than filtration. As are his 'super lightweight brushless motors'

The genius ( if there is any) is in a transparent dust collector that even a housewife can see needs emptying and shows LOTS OF DOOST being collected, this tying in with the *idea* that the machine is more efficient.

You can fool a lot of the people nearly all the time..

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Ineptocracy 

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

The UK's computing was undermined by New Labour employing Bill Gates as Tony Blairs Special Adviser for technology in schools

I think your rant should be directed more at stopping local councils selling off school playing fields

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Geoff
Reply to
glavallin

How will that help science and engineering?

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Tim 

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Reply to
Tim Streater

If you've ever used one of his vacuum cleaners, you'd realise they are pretty poor efforts. All noise, not a lot of suction.

Dave

Reply to
Dave Higton

given the choice between playing football on a wet Friday afternoon in the mud, and playing with a raspberry Pi as part of e school computer club, which would YOU pick?

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Ineptocracy 

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

...but they have one huge advantage over all the disposable Chinese crap: Dyson run an online spares and accessories store that not only has bits for fairly old machines (everything they've ever sold? - mine's a DC-06) but, at least the guy I dealt with was helpful and knew what he was talking about. I'd rate Dyson as a decent engineer. IME his machine had about as much suck as a Little Henry and has lasted a damn site longer.

But, back on topic, it is a bit more publicity went to good scientists, e.g. Harry Kroto, Jim Lovelock, Robert Edwards and to leading engineers - think Frank Whittle, Tom Smith, Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson.

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Martin Gregorie

I'd use a football. The mud would do the Raspberry Pi no good at all.

Ian

Reply to
The Real Doctor

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