Raspberry Pi device will 'reboot computing in schools'

A tiny computer called Raspberry Pi and costing £20 is the big hope for this year. But most of the orders come from private schools
Pupils at The King’s School, Chester, check out a Raspberry Pi computer
Pupils at The King’s School, Chester, check out a Raspberry Pi computer. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian Christopher Thomond/Guardian

Eben Upton was an academic working in computer science at Cambridge University when, five years ago, he began to notice a disturbing trait among the applicants he was interviewing for degree course places. "None of them seemed to know enough about what a computer really was or how it worked," he says. "I found it worrying."

What Upton realised was that schools weren't teaching pupils the basics of computing any more – they were just teaching them how to use software. "Children were learning about applications, which are pretty low-value skills. They weren't being properly equipped to think about how computers are programmed, about how they're built and how we make them work."

That, says Upton, had led not only to a decline in the quality of candidates for university degree courses, but also in the number of applicants. "Computing wasn't being seen as the exciting, vibrant subject it should be at school – it had become lacklustre and even boring," he says.

The answer, Upton believed, lay in the development of a computer that would give children the knowhow and inspiration they were missing. "What was needed was a return to an exciting, programmable machine like the old BBC Micro; and it had to be affordable, say around £20, so every child could potentially have one."

Upton gathered a group of like-minded teachers, academics and computer enthusiasts around him, and the dream of the Raspberry Pi – a cheap, credit-card-sized, programmable computer – was born. Last week, the first prototypes arrived at his Cambridge laboratory; by the summer he hopes they'll be available in some schools, and by September he hopes they'll be starting to make a real difference to the teaching of computing across Britain.

The first 10 devices are being auctioned on eBay, with some bidders pledging more than £2,000 for a machine that will retail at around £22. But why? Upton hopes it signals support from the computer community for Raspberry Pi as a concept, as well as speculation that early models will one day be worth high sums. "We're a charity, and our ambition is to keep the costs as low as possible to enable as many schools as possible to invest in it for their students," he says.

Until now, though, inquiries from independent schools have outnumbered those from state schools, by around five to one. "My hope is that businesses will sponsor their purchase for less advantaged schools as well," he says.

At Kesgrave high school in Ipswich, a state school, computing teacher Clive Beale is eagerly awaiting the machines. "There's not been anything like it for 25 years," he says. "We'll boot it up and it will just blink at us – we'll have to tell it what to do. It's going to give pupils a chance to be creative."

He says computing has been neglected in schools for years. "Not only have we not given students opportunities to learn programming, we've also failed to encourage what I'd call computational thinking, which is a way of thinking about and solving problems ... it has applications across the curriculum, so it's something pupils would gain enormously from knowing about."

And the number of pupils choosing the subject for A-level is going down. "I currently have three students in my year 13 class, compared with as many as 20 in year 13 classes in other subjects," he says.

Beale is pinning his hopes on the device – named because of the computer industry's fascination with fruit, and because the program it first used was the Python. "The Raspberry Pi is going to reboot computing in schools, and lots more young people are going to get interested in it as a result."

Professor Simon Peyton Jones, who chairs the Computing at School working group, says one of the key features of the gadget is that it will give children the chance to "mess around". "The computers that children currently come into contact with are mission critical for either their family or their school – they're not computers they can be allowed to mess up. But this is a machine children can fiddle with." He believes every child should have some knowledge of computing. "We understand that physics, for example, is a subject children need to have at least a basic understanding of, because it plays a key role in the world. It's the same with computer technology: do we want the adults of tomorrow to see it as a mysterious box they can't understand, or do we want them to have a sense of how to master it?"

Additional reporting by Jessica Shepherd