When the $35 Raspberry Pi credit card-sized computer launched in early 2012, it was an instant hit. The toy-like PC was designed by Eben Upton, a Broadcom chip architect by day, who spends his nights devising ways to boost computer science interest among the rest of the non-logic designing world. Wired Business talked to Upton about Raspberry Pi, the state of children’s computer science education, and why everyone, whatever their job, could benefit from some coding chops.
Wired: What lit a fire under you to create Raspberry Pi?
Eben Upton: While I was studying for my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, I also worked for the university as the Director of Studies, organizing undergraduate studies. Every year we got fewer people applying to study computer science, and every year the sorts of things incoming students knew how to do got less impressive.
Raspberry Pi was my attempt to reboot hobbyist computing for children, as a way of solving the recruitment problem in the university and ultimately a recruiting problem for industry.
I saw that unlike in the 1980s, where lots of children had access to machines like Commodore 64s and TRS 80s, students weren’t using computers as a hobby. The fact that children didn’t have the opportunity to pursue hobbyist computer activities was actually starting to hurt academia.
Wired: How did you get hooked on computers?
Upton: I’ve worked with computers for all of my adult life. The vast majority of work I’ve done hasn’t relied on my formal educational background. It’s relied on stuff I taught myself when I was a child and an adult. I’ve got a strong interest in enabling children to do hobbyist activities.
Wired: A lot of what you learned about computers as a kid, you taught yourself. What did they teach you at school?
Upton: Almost all schools in the 1980s had one or more BBC Micro Computers, similar to a Commodore 64. They were largely used to run educational software to teach kids about other subjects – not about computers.
However, these machines were programmable. When you first turned them on, they booted into Basic and before loading a program, you had to program them. That meant that quite a lot of us were beguiled into learning to program, and I think that’s where my generation of hobbyist programmers came from. It certainly didn’t come from formal government computer science education.
Wired: Are kids learning to code in school now?
Upton: In the UK, there’s a program called Information and Communications Technology (ICT). It’s largely about teaching kids to use a computer to accomplish other goals and it’s explicitly not about teaching kids how to program computers.
There is a widespread realization that it’s been a bit of a disaster. It’s frequently rated by children as the most boring subject in school. We somehow managed to take playing with computers, which is like playing with LEGO, and turn it into the most boring subject in school.
Wired: Is it boring because kids are more computer savvy, or is it because there is less DIY opportunity with today’s software and hardware?
Upton: It’s boring for kids because today’s computer platforms are incredibly intuitive. Children don’t need a lesson to teach them how to use PowerPoint: They figure it all out in the first lesson and then they have a year of someone trying to teach them something they just learned how to do. It’s no wonder it’s boring.
Wired: So you want kids to learn to write software, not just use it?
Upton: They aren’t learning how to program or how to break problems down into smaller problems. They’re also not learning any high-value computing skills, like understanding how to put a character on a screen. What’s unfortunate is those are really easy things to teach. We’re not talking about getting kids to a point where they can write Microsoft Word, we’re just trying to get everyone to a point where they can make the computer say “Hello World.”
Wired: At least in the UK, has anyone tried to change children’s computer curriculum?
Upton: During a lecture last August, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt lambasted the British government for throwing away a lot of the computing heritage in the UK by not teaching children anything more than how to use Microsoft Word. That was a really good wake-up call for the government.
Now there’s a program in place to dismantle ICT with the intention to free schools up to experiment. Good schools have taken this as an opportunity to experiment not just with Raspberry Pi, but with a whole range of approaches to teaching computer science.
Wired: If ICT was a disaster. What should we be teaching kids about computers instead?
Upton: Computational thinking and computer science. Even people who aren’t going into computer science or engineering programs, should be exposed to computer science. Programming teaches you how to take problems, break them down into smaller problems, and solve them. Any kind of job that involves problem solving can benefit from computing.
Wired: Where does Raspberry Pi fit into all this?
Upton: I have a lesson where I bring a Raspberry Pi and code for the game “Snake” – that computer game that used to be on early cell phones. I’ll ask students to change the color of the snake, so they’ll hunt through the code and most of them find the line that has the word “red” in it. I’ll tell them to change it to blue. The kids change it and the snake changes color.
You can build up from there to where you can make enormous changes and turn Snake into a completely different game. By the end of the session, you have to pry the boards out of the children’s hands.
Wired: All that using this tiny computer?
Upton: Yes. The great thing is we take these Raspberry Pis to classrooms and put them in front of kids and they want to learn. If we were trying to go against what children wanted, we would be doomed.
Teenage boys in particular have an ill-formed ambition to work in the game industry. Markus Persson, the game developer who built Minecraft, is a like a rock star for these kids. When I go into classrooms, kids ask me if he has a Raspberry Pi or if he knows about it. So you’ve got this situation where a programmer is a rock star to these kids. They want to be engineers, they just don’t know how.
We’ve also come over for the Maker Faire and you see all these kids doing science fair-like projects with Raspberry Pi. It’s really heartening because it shows that kids really want to do engineering.
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