A couple days ago (as of writing this, at least!) (on the 26th of June, 2014), I went out to a school with a staff member from University and supported a session on Raspberry pi. The session was part of a club taking place during a week where the students didn’t have regular classes and lasted the whole day – it was part of a whole week of sessions on Linux, Raspberry pi, computing, and programming done for that club.
My role as a STEM ambassador for the activity was to help out in the session when students had trouble doing something. I’m pleased to say, however, that that didn’t happen too much: the students were very awesome and learned so quickly!
They were first handed out a raspberry pi each with raspbian and other required software pre-installed and were shown how to remote control the pi with ssh and vnc and run an X session remotely without a monitor attached to the pi. They actually managed to run zenmap and find all the IP addresses of the raspberry pi, then pointed a browser to the IP addresses to find the one where they had written their name on apache’s default index page!
They also got to log in to a single raspberry pi and run as many applications as possible to see how much it could take – I was surprised to see that even with 8 different tightvncserver sessions and several applications running, it could take the load up to a point!
Finally, there was a short session on HTML and JavaScript and building a simple application that would first just read a number from a textbox and then read 2 numbers and add them (it was supposed to be later developed into a full calculator). Again, I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly they were able to figure out how to do this.
Overall, I was blown away by how organised the teacher and school was for the activity, and by how well-behaved and quick to learn the students were. We can definitely hope for a generation of more people interested in STEM fields if programs like this keep up!
I had an awesome time as a STEM ambassador for the activity, and I’m looking forward to supporting more activities in the future when I have time. I encourage anyone with an interest in STEM and getting more young people into the field to be an ambassador, it’s an amazing experience!
(Copyright info: You’re welcome to use the post text under CC-BY like my other posts, but please don’t use the pictures without permission as they weren’t taken by me)
Very cool. Wish I could do it. But why teach Linux instead of freebsd?
OK! Mac is a proprietary (and very EXPEN$IVE) machnie architecture (currently using a variant of Free BSD & like Linux, a Unix clone) while Linux is an open source, incredibly heavy duty, versatile and free (financially, legally and ethically) operating system. Comparing the two, is like comparing a chrome toilet bowl, to a huge plumbing shop, in which every item is free. NEWS: A GUI is not an OS. Those still paying for ass wipe, needn’t look down their noses at Linux users.