Raspberry Pi

[Murgatroy]

My daughter is in fifth grade, she is having a year end STEM project inspired/sponsored by Google in which she is allowed an hour a day during school to work on a project of her own. We have decided to build a Raspberry Pi. 

 

Does anyone here have an experience with them?

 

I have done a little research, and being electrically engineering oriented (of many, many years out of date) I have pieced together a set that includes a RP 3 with a 3.5" touch screen, case and 32GB card. I am assuming that Raspbian is the goto OS for a starter?

 

I am thinking of buying two kits, just because the idea of it seems neat and I want to build it too. Thus we can build one at home together and she can build one at school for her own use.

 

Opinions? She needs the parts by Friday, which means I need to order them soon.

 

Thanks!

[MacGyver]

Any of the starter kits should work well.  

The one my kids have was a little more than piecing it together yourself, but they did the whole thing themselves:

https://kano.me/

Make sure to check out adafruit, too.  You'll be inspired for all kinds of fun projects:

https://www.adafruit.com/

[Murgatroy]

I saw the Kano kit, but it is nearly double what just the Rasberry Pi is. I am concerned about anything that might require soldering at school, so I eliminated a few of the RC vehicle coding projects she was interested in.

 

The requirements for the project are very vague, leading me to believe that just building a box would suffice, however, I might steer her towards using it for an emulator, as we already have an NES Classic, we would steer clear of many copyright issues if she were to install Mario Bros on it or similar.

[RED333]

WOW, I had no idea how far things like this had come. Here I thought making a VOM meter in school was "it".

[Ronald_55]

Take a look at the issues of MagPi on the RaspberryPi website. They cover lots of project info. I have a v1 B.

Also, SD card are cheap, don't limit yourself to one OS, get a few.

[MacGyver]

Yeah, the benefit of the Kano was case, keyboard, wireless NIC, etc all being included with instructions they could follow.    You can totally piece it together less expensively. 

I don't know if Kano makes their OS image available on Github or something, but their "introduction to the command line" was really instructive. 

She shouldn't need to solder anything.  Everything pretty much just fits on the PI's

My kids built a joystick plus two buttons early on and had a blast with a lot of the Atari classics.  

We're having a blast with Makeblock mBot Ranger right now.  It's Arduino powered.  They use the Scratch programming language to conduct their own Mars missions.  

[Murgatroy]

I was hoping to keep the completed packaging small and simple, that is why I like the idea of the 3.5" touchscreen case. We have monitors and keyboards at home we can hook it up to after the project is complete.

The Raspberry Pi 3 comes with wireless and Bluetooth built in, so that saves time and space.

I do like the idea of the coding program though, that is what she is interested in. She wants to write video games. 

[Ronald_55]

1 hour ago, Murgatroy said:

I do like the idea of the coding program though, that is what she is interested in. She wants to write video games. 

A good start is Scratch and take a look at Python. 

Does her school have a Lego First robotics team? My son loves it and they have to program the robots actions in a fairly simple drag and drop type program. The idea is not too far off from game programing at its base level.

[Murgatroy]

I ordered two identical kits this evening, RP 3, with 3.5" touch screens, two 16GB SD cards and two silicon roll up keyboards.

 

The goal is to build one together, so she knows what she is doing, set up a card, then send her to school with the dismantled computer and set up card. She is very excited about the prospect of using Python to modify some Minecraft, so I got her a book on that as well since Raspbian includes an older version of Minecraft. I did look at the Kano, and I think I will set up an SD Card on the Kano OS as well for her to play with.

 

After her project is complete we are going to use one of the computers to build a robot of some form out of the dozens of kits available.

 

She is pretty excited.

 

And to be honest, so am I. It has been twenty years since I built my first computer, and I was twice her age at the time. It is amazing how time flies. 

 

 

[MacGyver]

The Phyton Minecraft mods are pretty cool.  My oldest two have gotten a lot of mileage out of them.  

[A.J. Holst]

 

On 4/23/2017 at 10:47 PM, RED333 said:

WOW, I had no idea how far things like this had come. Here I thought making a VOM meter in school was "it".

What happened to showing a potato can be used as a battery.

And I had to Google raspberry pi

Edited April 29, 2017 by Gotthegoods

[RED333]

3 hours ago, Gotthegoods said:

 

What happened to showing a potato can be used as a battery.

And I had to Google raspberry pi

Glad I was not alone on that.

[MacGyver]

Look at it another way.  

Most kids won't pay any more attention to this than they would the potato battery.  They'll be back to instagram and Snapchat by the end of class period, escaping school with a marginal education that they've put minimal work into.  They'll be ill prepared to be anything but good cookie cutter consumers. 

But for a few it will spark their imagination in a way that cannot be unkindled.  The problems that these kids go on to solve will change the world.