Using Raspberry Pi to get teens involved in open source

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Raspberry Pi model B+

Luis Ibanez

At the end of last month, I had the unique opportunity to participate with a few of my work colleagues on the US2020 RTP STEM EXPO. About 500 students from North Carolina interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) showed up to the event. My colleagues and I gathered around a couple of tables and chatted with students, teachers, administrators, and parents about open source, open hardware, and programming.

One table had 6 laptops running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Firefox setup as kiosks for the kids to do some programming with Scratch. They were given a challenge, and if they could write the code to do it they would get a prize.

Photo by Giovanni Sanchez CC-BY-4.0

On the other table, we had a few things set up as display to try to catch the kids' attention to our area. We had an overhead projector rolling through a presentation about open source, a screen showing the short animated film Big Buck Bunny, which was created entirely with open source technologies. We also had several little toys and gadgets made with a 3D printer and my very own Raspberry Pi controlling 500 lights blinking in sync with a few songs I hand picked for the event. The setup for the lights was the one I used to write Create your own musical light show with Raspberry Pi.

Photo by Giovanni Sanchez CC-BY-4.0

Throughout the day, one thing became clear to me: most of those kids really wanted to grow up to be someone working in the technology field. I had several kids ask me for advice on how to get started in the fields of programming, system administration, and contributing to open source projects. And that's where the idea for this article was born.

It was surprising to see how many kids that went by our tables had been exposed to some sort of technology beyond game playing or social media. Quite a few of them had even already used Scratch at school, yet not many of them have had the opportunity to install an operating system before. When I stopped to think about it, my personal conclusion was that parents are not willing to gamble with the stability of their home computers for their kids to tinker at that level. I have three kids, two of them teenagers, and I myself wouldn't be comfortable letting my 15 year old "try" to install Linux on his laptop. I mean, he uses it for school papers and math homework. If he messes it up, I would rather not have to be technical support. It's expensive, not only as a time investment, but also financially.

That's where the Raspberry Pi comes in. It's a $35, fully functioning computer that kids can plug into a TV and mess with without the risk of "destroying" the family computer. They can follow instructions on the Internet for how to install NOOBS, Raspbian, or Pidora on a MicroSD card, plug it into the Pi and "tinker" with Linux.

So, my advice to a lot of those kids was to take their birthday or Christmas money, buy a Raspberry Pi, and search the Internet for how-tos and get started guides. Once they've got it up and running, they should look up some Linux how-tos, learn basic shell commands, and figure out how to install and remove packages. Once they've understood a little bit of that, they should pick a programming language (Scratch, Javascript, Logo, Python, Php, Ruby, Perl) and do some "Hello World" applications. And finally, I would tell them to find something they are passionate about, because most likely there will be one or more open source projects around the world that relate to it.

Part of the goal here for these kids is that eventually they will be able to start giving back to the open source community by reporting and fixing bugs, helping with documentation and marketing, or even doing translations of open source. That's how I started, at least.

At the end of the event, all of us were patting each other on the back, calling our booth a great success for the kids, and already talking about doing it again next year.

I can't wait.

Thanks to Giovanni Sanchez for contributing to this article.

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This article is part of the Open Hardware Connection column coordinated by Rikki Endsley. Share your stories about the growing open hardware community and the fantastic projects coming from makers and tinkers around the world by contacting us at open@opensource.com.

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Anderson was introduced to Linux by his uncle back in 1996. In the early 2000s, he transitioned from being a developer to a system administrator. Today, Anderson leads the Red Hat Information Security Incident Response team. He is also an active Fedora package maintainer.

6 Comments

Great article with lots of great ideas for involving students.

I like your idea but what's wrong with a vm? It's completely free

Hi, VMs are great, but with the Pi you get the entire aspect of electronics with the GPIO interface and all the cool sensors and add-ons the Pi has. But, yes, if the issue was just installing an OS, a VM could do it, yet some parents may still be reluctant to allow kids to install something like VirtualBox on a 'production' machine (ie the family computer) :-)

In reply to by jrich523 (not verified)

Great article. I picked up a Pi some time back and my 12 year old son and I have messed with it a bit. Definitely need to expand our horizons with it.

My son bought a Pi a little over a year ago. The biggest hurdle has been finding interesting projects that don't need a lot of extra hardware. Deciding on a first project has proven very difficult...

You can do some programming with Scratch and learn about the Linux operating system and Python programming including Turtle graphics. This might be some help too. https://youtu.be/mCApxqLLIyw

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