Adafruit already welcomes newcomers to do-it-yourself device culture, but it still assumes a certain amount of comfort with coding and soldering. The shop now wants to accommodate the most basic of beginners by starting a children’s web series that teaches electronics. Circuit Playground will provide activities, songs and stories that put a friendly face on engineering, in some ways very directly: many of the shows will involve big-eyed characters (and, naturally, corresponding toys) like Cappy the Capacitor. Although the series doesn’t start until March, it could be vital to a generation of kids growing up immersed in technology — and ultimately create a larger customer base for Adafruit in the process.
It’s a safe bet that a fair few children of geeky moms and dads will be finding a rectangular-shaped parcel under their holiday tree tomorrow. And when they rip off the shiny wrapping those lucky kids will find an oh-so-tasty Raspberry Pi inside: a $35 mini computer that can play Blueray-quality video and has more graphical power than a Nintendo Wii — although none of that will be immediately obvious. The Pi is a learning tool not a plug-and-play toy.
The first thing the kids are likely to notice after they winkle their Pi out of its antistatic packet is that it looks a bit weird. If they’ve grown up surrounded by slick, shiny consumer gadgets like iPhones and iPads they may never have handled an uncovered circuit board before. Reclaiming electronics from the sealed box approach is all part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s plan to get kids learning to code – curiosity being an essential component of learning and creativity.
So in the spirit of stripping away a few more layers, I’ve been asking the Foundation what the secret is to making a $35 mini computer. The basic recipe is this: having extremely skilful cooks who can craft batch after batch of Raspberry Pis as quickly as possible, and with as few duds as possible.
Many Raspberry Pis are made in the UK, in Sony’s Pencoed factory in Wales which landed a multi-million pound contract to manufacture Pis for one of the Foundation’s Pi licensees, Premier Farnell, back in the fall. Premier Farnell also has two locations in China which produce Pi but the majority of its production (70 percent) is in Pencoed, and in January the factory will account for its entire Pi output. (The Foundation can’t disclose exactly how much of the Pi pie each of its licensees accounts for.)
Sony’s Pencoed factory makes an average of 4,000 Model B Pi‘s every day — or one every 7.5 seconds. Which is hard to imagine when you consider the intricacies involved in churning out thousands of double sided PCBs (printed component boards) with surface mount components on both sides and plated through hole components on the top — with blobs of molten solder being laid down in just the right spots, and the correct components stamped on them at a rate of 5.5 parts per second. And doing it all on a very tight budget.
Boards are made in panels of six Pis which go through four “key processes”: mounting the bottom surface components, mounting the top surface components, mounting the plated through hole components; and then testing and packing.
Pi on a budget
Of course, making a Pi is nowhere near as complex as making a modern smartphone, but the balancing act here is keeping the price down without eroding the distributor’s business model. The most costly components in the Pi are the Processor and Memory core silicon, closely followed by the connectors.
With a $35 price tag (and just $25 for the forthcoming Model A Pi) components have to be bought at the right price but also the right quality — since manufacturing defects also have to be minimised and squeezed out of the production process till they’re barely ever there. It’s no good slowing production either: demand for Pi is so high they have to be able to make thousands per day.
“To achieve the low price whilst still yielding a sustainable business model requires skillful manufacturing optimisation and parts procurement,” says Pi hardware designer and Foundation trustee Pete Lomas (no relation!). “The production line has to run efficiently and deliver a very low failure rate. Component vendors must be selected for both quality and price and any potential changes passed through a detailed selection procedure. It is little use saving 40 cents on the components if the failure rate of finished Raspberry Pi rises. Equally every defect is aggressively pursued to understand it’s root cause and eliminate it.”
“Test failures” do still exist of course, but Lomas says that “to our knowledge” fewer than 100 boards have been returned by users as defective — meaning less than 0.1 percent of boards have slipped through the quality-control net. “Of these, some had physical (transit) damage and others had no fault found, so the actual figure is somewhat lower again,” he adds.
Selling like hot cakes
In terms of keeping up with demand, Lomas admits the Foundation was initially caught on the hop — having drastically underestimated people’s appetite for Pi — which resulted in shipping delays in the early months. “We were caught out by a massive increase in interest in the Pi in the very early days,” he says. “Whilst we were setting up for a modest production run of 20,000 units the expressions of interest overtook us by a factor of 10. At that point we decided to engage with our partners Premier Farnell and RS.
“Even with their significant resources, the logistics of getting components for a hundred thousands of Pis and getting them built was a challenge.”
Unlike an electronics giant like Apple or Samsung, the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation and its suppliers were not in a position to stockpile components prior to launch to scale up for the unexpected surge in demand. (And let’s face it, even Apple can’t always keep up with demand.) Another delaying factor is long lead-times on some of the Pi components, says Lomas.
“[Our partners] didn’t have the opportunity to stockpile before launch (unlike, say, Apple), so things were always going to be tricky. Scalability also depends on the components and the lead-time on some parts, especially the processors, is significant and still can present issues a year in to manufacture.”
The Foundation is expecting to sell about a million Pis in its first year of operation — a far cry from the original 20,000 production run it budgeted for.
Baked in the U.K.
The Raspberry Pi was born in the U.K., so it’s only natural the Foundation wanted Pi to be made in the UK too. Sony’s Pencoed factory was chosen because it ticked a variety of boxes, says Lomas — not least, being open to visits from children to see Pi making in progress.
“Making Raspberry Pi in the UK is a desire that we had on day one. The Foundation’s aim is to encourage children to develop an interest in programming, electronics and related engineering subjects. Having the manufacturing of Pi in a place that we could provide opportunities for ‘show and tell’ was also important and the overall philosophy of the Sony management and staff has been a significant enabler for this,” he tells TechCrunch.
“Sony Pencoed was chosen because both their world-class technical capability and their enthusiasm for the Raspberry Pi project overall. We also should not forget that they offered our licensees a viable cost model on a par with the ‘all in cost’ of Far East manufacture. Equally from a technical point of view, the management and resolution of any design related production issues or optimisations is much easier when they are only a few hours away.”
The factory now has more than 22 staff dedicated to Pi production. The overall lead time from first contact with the factory to hitting “volume production” was around 14 weeks — giving an indication of how long it took Sony to devise the Pi production line. Now there’s a “rolling production forecast” between Premier Farnell and Sony which allows for “a degree of production flexibility” with around a month’s notice, says Lomas.
“The only process that Sony did not already have in their production process was Package on Package. Within the introduction programme they researched the process in depth, selected and installed the equipment and ran trials to validate the process before introducing it to the Pi line,” he adds.
Another helping of Pi
Asked whether Sony’s factory could scale up to greater production capacity in the future, Lomas says there is “significant extra capacity” that could be brought on stream. “Ultimately it is the licensee’s decision where to place additional capacity, but overall the Sony experience has been excellent,” he adds.
There has been no let up in demand for Pi, according to Lomas, but the Foundation believes its existing Pi factories have enough capacity to keep up with demand. “We hope that in the next few months we will reach equilibrium where manufacturing is balanced (as much as it ever can be) with demand. We have options to increase capacity with our existing manufacturers and so additional factories would in all probability not be required.”
For more on Pi production, Lomas has written an excellent, blow by blow account of the various stages and processes of Sony’s Pencoed Pi production line — such as the reels of surface mount components used to keep production ticking along, how Pi boards are baked (yes really) in giant ovens to make sure all the components are properly adhered, and the perils of “lava accidents.”
The Foundation has also put together a video montage showing some of the Pi production stages:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, maker of the $35 mini computer, is on a mission to get more kids to learn to code – and what better way to get children excited about the power of programming than by involving virtual block-builder game Minecraft? An official Mojang produced port of Minecraft: Pocket Edition was announced for Pi at the weekend – known as Minecraft: Pi Edition. Now the Foundation has put up a video showing how Minecraft gameplay on Pi can be combined with programming commands so kids can use text commands to control the world
Here’s the Foundation describing one possible set-up
All you have to do is set up a network connection to the running game, and then you can send text commands to control the world. This makes is possible to program in any language which supports network connections, and you can access the game from any computer which is connected to the Pi. One possible setup is to have a Python prompt and the Minecraft window side-by-side on the Pi.
Minecraft Pi edition does not require programming to play it but text commands can be used to “place large numbers of blocks in particular patterns to speed up the building process” — which makes it sound of like a 3D version of Tetris.
The Foundation sent a volunteer to demo Minecraft: Pi Edition at Mojang’s MineCon conference, which took place in Paris at the weekend — noting that he was able to write a simple loop which “simultaneously changed the position and type of blocks being placed, which soon resulted in lava cascading from mid-air and setting fire to the wood below”.
The more creative programmer will only be limited by their imagination. Want to build a digital clock into the wall of your house which displays the real time? Easy. Want to get back at a friend who stole your precious diamonds? Remove the floor from underneath their feet and let them fall into a pit of lava. The possibilities are endless.
The Foundation says its goal is for Minecraft: Pi Edition to be released by the end of the year — and offered as a free download, so even more kids can start cutting their coding teeth on Minecraft’s blocks of virtual earth and ore.
Scientists and researchers around the world are always investigating better ways to help children learn important subjects like math and science. A group of researchers at Durham University has been working for the last three years on a project to design and develop the classroom of the future. The project is called SynergyNet and hopes to help children learn mathematics more efficiently.
The location is referred to as the “Star Trek” classroom because it replaces individual desks with futuristic communal desks featuring a multitouch surface. All of those desks are linked to a main “smartboard” used by the teacher. The desks allow students to work collaboratively on solving problems in ways that traditional pen and paper are likely to limit.
According to the researchers working on the project they have found that 45% of students who use the high-tech classroom increased the number of unique mathematical expressions they created after using the system. In contrast, only 16% of students who used the traditional paper-based method increased the number of unique mathematical expressions they created.
The system has a way to go before it might show up in classrooms around the world. Some notable holdbacks at this point are the cost of the system and the complexity of maintaining it.
Eternal September is now somewhat of an antiquated term, but its relevance as a concept is nonetheless alive and kicking on the internet today. Once upon a time, September was the month when a whole new group of individuals — primarily college students — were introduced to Usenet discussion boards, and many took a few bruises as they were introduced to online etiquette. Eventually, tightly knit digital communities became unable to cope with the deluge of new users, and it’s said that online discourse has never fully recovered. So the saying goes, we now live in Eternal September.
As proof that not all hope is lost, developers and educators are now collaborating on a project known as MinecraftEdu, which aims to teach digital citizenship in the classroom. Through virtual interaction with others, the game exposes students to a wide variety of concepts such as ethics, privacy, research and safety. From there, educators are able to use the in-game experiences to lead discussions that focus on protecting oneself and taking responsibility for one’s actions. In effort to reinforce these concepts, developers are also integrating quizzes and lesson reviews into MinecraftEdu. Much like the real world, Minecraft’s open-ended style is thought to demonstrate that an online community is what you make of it, and as development progresses, perhaps we’ll all come to benefit from its lessons. In the meantime, you can stick your nose into these forward-thinking classrooms with the video below.
Introducing tablets into the classrooms on the surface might seem that it might benefit students the most – after all they will be the ones interacting with it and learning from it, right? Well it seems like a nice side effect has come out of using tablets in the classrooms and in an article by Edudemic, it has been suggested that using the iPad in the class not only benefits the students, but at the same time invigorates the teachers that are using the iPads as well! It seems that by using this new form of teaching method and technology in the class has invigorated some teachers, making them become “facilitators of student learning” as opposed to just pushing rote knowledge. Of course we expect that this will differ from teacher to teacher, but it’s still interesting to note that everyone benefits from new technology being introduced in the classrooms. Any teachers out there who might have had experience teaching with tablets in their classes? Let us know in the comments below!
If you’ve ever swallowed your pride and bit the bullet on hotel WiFi, you’ve probably felt the sluggish pull of other users dragging down your connection speed. Coffee shops, airports and other heavily impacted public hotspots can slow to a crawl as they try to mete out data to dozens of users sharing a single channel. All hope is not lost, however — a team at NC State University are about to release a paper detailing a technology that could bolster WiFi data throughput performance by up to 700 percent. The team is calling their technology WiFox, and it’s already made their local test network four times faster, on average. WiFox keeps track of the amount of traffic gumming up a WiFi channel and actively assigns priority access to avoid a traffic jam of data requests. Fixing sluggish hotspots should be a snap, too — Student and lead author Arpit Gupta says WiFox could be “packaged as a software update that can be incorporated into existing WiFi networks.” The full paper will be presented at ACM CoNext next month in Nice, France. Can’t wait? Feel free to click on the source and ogle the paper’s abstract.
These are—according to Fox Business data—the best and worst educated states in the United States of America, ordered by percentage of residents 25 or older with at least a bachelor’s degree in 2011. The table also shows how those states voted. Can you see any pattern? More »
U.K.-based distance learning university, the Open University, is developing a series of apps to deliver undergraduate course materials to students’ smartphones and tablet devices, starting next year. The OUAnywhere app will allow undergraduates to access their main course materials through their handheld devices, along with the audio and visual content the OU produces to support studies.
The team developing the apps say they are being designed from the ground-up for touch interfaces, and will offer “high quality visual images rather than lists”.
The apps are being made available across “a plethora of platforms”, with native iOS and Android apps in the pipeline, plus HTML5 apps for other platforms. Supported devices will include
Android devices
iPads (iPad 1 and above)
iPhones (iPhone 3GS and above)
Kindle Fire
Microsoft Surface
OUAnywhere is being created in response to increasing use of mobile devices by students — the OU notes that mobile usage of its virtual learning environment in one month is now comparable to usage for an entire quarter of the previous year. It’s also noticed students are spending much more time online via mobile and tablet devices, and clocking up more repeated visits. (Students using gadgets? It’s not exactly rocket science… )
Ultimately the university wants to be able to provide all course learning materials on one device to make it easier for students to squeeze study sessions into their day — an important factor for its many part-time students who combine studying for a degree with full- or part-time work.
Currently it delivers some course materials online, but also sends out materials via post — such as print textbooks, audio CDs and DVDs. The apps will be able to streamline all these different course resources into a single interface.
The OU notes that its scalable XML workflow can automatically render a single input file to multiple formats (print, web and ebook) — giving it the ability to repurpose existing study materials for new delivery mechanisms such as mobile. However in future iterations of OUAnywhere it says it will look to create “new learning products” specifically designed for mobile and tablet devices — rather than converting legacy learning materials.
The university also plans to develop interactive e-books with embedded audio, video and HTML5 learning activities (using the EPUB 3 specification) for future iterations of the apps.
The first wave of OUAnywhere apps are due for release in Q1 2013.
The story sounded far-fetched: OLPC researchers, working with a team of technicians in Ethiopia, created a special “hut” covered in solar panels where the children of a few distant towns could go to recharge some toys they were given. The toys were boxed Motorola Xoom tablets and every child between the age of four and eight got one. The researchers were expecting the children to play with the boxes and potentially open them in the first week. Instead they turned them on in less than an hour and a few months later were modifying the settings and singing ABC songs. It was, at once, a triumph of technology and of the human capacity to learn.
The hut became a focal point for the town’s children, and the kids loved their tablets so much that they slept with them. One kid would learn how to launch a Disney movie and the others would follow. Another kid learned how to unlock the built-in camera. It was a form of viral education that we see, under the surface of many childhood interactions, every day. They learned without learning.
We first heard this story last week in Boston when we were touring the MIT Media Lab and it sounded too good to be true. The thought that children cut off from education by dint of their physical location were able to learn, without teachers, the rudiments of English and how to manage a complex tablet device, was wild. Luckily MIT’s in-house magazine, Technology Review put together a very nice story about the project and I have to say I’m impressed.
After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.
I’ve been down on the educational value of “throwing” electronics at kids for years. However, this example of a positive outcome is inspiring. Sadly, these children would presumably have no education at all if they didn’t receive these tablets and the fact that they far surpassed the researcher’s expectations proves, categorically, that modern technology has moved from the realm of the technical to the realm of what can be called conversational. I’m reminded of William Gibson’s comment on going to the movies for the first time.
But I remember being taken to my first film, either a Disney animation or a Disney nature documentary (I can’t recall which I saw first) and being overwhelmed by the steep yet almost instantaneous learning curve: in that hour, I learned to watch film. Was taught, in effect, by the film itself. I was years away from being able to read my first novel, and would need a lot of pedagogy, to do that. But film itself taught me, in the dark, to view it. I remember it as a sort of violence done to me, as full of terror as it was of delight. But when I emerged from that theater, I knew how to watch film.What had happened to me was historically the result of an immensely complex technological evolution, encompassing optics, mechanics, photography, audio recording, and much else. Whatever film it was that I first watched, other people around the world were also watching, having approximately the same experience in terms of sensory input. And that film no doubt survives today, in Disney’s back-catalog, as an experience that can still be accessed.
Reading a book, he wrote, was hard. It required years of education and training and a concentration that many children don’t possess. But, thanks to advances in technology, he and every other child can understand a film, or in this case, a tablet. The skills needed to open a Xoom, turn it on, and play with it have been subsumed deep within the technology. In short, the tablet hides complexity so completely that anyone with a finger and a good head on their shoulders can learn from it. This is a triumph but it is double-edged. On one hand it creates a grave disconnect between the nuts and bolts of the OS and the user, and on the other hand it encourages projects like the Raspberry Pi which aims to bring the bare metal back into computer interaction.
Teachers are important. Technology, thankfully, can replace some of their skills. I doubt that dropping a dozen tablets on a remote village in Ethiopia or – and this is true – rural Georgia is the end of our responsibility to these children. It is, however, a promising beginning.
Read the rest of the piece here. Being down on OLPC is fashionable recently, but it’s clearly working.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Introducing tablets into the classrooms on the surface might seem that it might benefit students the most – after all they will be the ones interacting with it and learning from it, right? Well it seems like a nice side effect has come out of using tablets in the classrooms and in an article by 
