Raspberry Pi, Childs Play

My son Ben is 9, a mirror image of myself at his age, into Lego, Star Wars and computer games. We’ve been following the Raspberry Pi story together for sometime now with great interest. The great thing about the Pi, is that it allows him to experience computing as I did back in the 1980’s with early home computers like the BBC Micro, where we actually played with the computer itself rather than just playing games on them.

We were lucky to get our hands on one of the first few Pi’s and so I’d like to share with you how we got on with it.

Setting up the SD card was relatively straight forward using the instructions on the official site's Downloads section, but obviously beyond the average 9 year old. We went with the Debian image as it seemed to work well and isn't too complicated. Having said that, there are a lot of menu options within the LXDE menu and it is not immediately obvious what most of them are for.

The biggest hurdle we faced initially was that the image did not fit on the screen properly. This turned out to be due to something called "overscan" (which I had never heard of) which seems to affect televisions more than monitors. This meant that the login prompt and the menus were all off the screen which made life difficult. Luckily, the RPi website contained some instructions for creating a file called config.txt which, amongst other things, can be used to specify how much, or little overscan is required. Later Debian builds seem to have defaulted to a certain amount of overscan which should resolve this for most users.

With the image fitting on the screen properly we were ready to start trying out some programming. We spent a bit of time looking at Python, since this appears to be the programming language of choice for the RPi it seemed to make sense to have a go. I dabbled with a bit of Basic on my school's BBC micros and my own Amstrad CPC. At university I dabbled with Fortran and C but cannot consider myself to be a programmer. So the idea of looking at Python was of interest to me and the idea of both Ben and I learning something new together was exciting.

We found a website which had some simple Python programs, starting with the traditional "hello, world!" program and off we went. Initially Ben was a bit perplexed, why was all the extra stuff needed when he could just type hello, world onto the screen himself?? But when we tried the next exercise it suddenly clicked. He typed in the code, then we ran it, corrected his typos and ran it again until it worked. He was able to get the RPi to ask for his name, then respond to him and acknowledge what he had just typed in - magic. Before long he had amended the program to ask for my name then, rather than greet me nicely, tell me that I smell. Thanks!

Some simple mathematical examples were interesting and we could see how the RPi could be used to calculate some sums that he had been given at school.

One of the great things about the RPi is the community that is building up around the device even though many are still waiting for thiers to arrive. One interesting development is that one group have put together a community magazine called The MagPi. The first issue is both interesting and informative and, bearing in mind that none of the contributors actually had a Pi at the time of writing, something of a triumph. We printed out a copy and Ben has read through it. Like some of the magazines available to us in the 1980's it contains programs that readers can type in. One that caught his eye was called "Lottery Numbers" which uses the random number library to give you your lottery numbers for this week - lucky dip style. It worked well and we were able to tweak it a bit to make sure we had a bonus ball and now we have the winning lottery numbers for this weekend's lottery - honest! Think how many Pi's we could afford with £3M...