Abstract
The original aim when creating the Raspberry Pi was to encourage “kids”—pre-university learners—to engage with programming, and to develop an interest in and understanding of programming and computer science concepts. The method to achieve this was to give them their own, low cost computer that they could use to program on, as a replacement for a family PC that often did not allow this option. With the original release, the Raspberry Pi included two programming environments in the standard distribution software: Scratch and IDLE, a Python environment. In this paper, we describe two programming environments that we developed and recently ported and optimised for the Raspberry Pi, Greenfoot and BlueJ, both using the Java programming language. Greenfoot and BlueJ are both now included in the Raspberry Pi standard software distribution, and they differ in many respects from IDLE; they are more graphical, more interactive, more engaging, and illustrate concepts of object orientation more clearly. Thus, they have the potential to support the original aim of the Raspberry Pi by creating a deeper engagement with programming. This paper describes these two environments and how they may be used, and discusses their differences and relationships to the two previously available systems.
Highlights
The Raspberry Pi computer has been immensely successful for countless electronics projects: Its low cost and accessibility have made it a favourite for do-it-yourself tinkering experiments and special purpose projects, from home control to data gathering on balloons to being shot into the upper atmosphere, and everything in-between
Greenfoot and BlueJ are both included in the Raspberry Pi standard software distribution, and they differ in many respects from IDLE; they are more graphical, more interactive, more engaging, and illustrate concepts of object orientation more clearly
Before the initial release of the Raspberry Pi standard image, BlueJ [5] and Greenfoot [6], two of our own environments which we developed for the learning and teaching of programming, were considered for inclusion as Java development tools
Summary
The Raspberry Pi computer has been immensely successful for countless electronics projects: Its low cost and accessibility have made it a favourite for do-it-yourself tinkering experiments and special purpose projects, from home control to data gathering on balloons to being shot into the upper atmosphere, and everything in-between. Despite being a general purpose computer, its low cost has made it feasible to be used as a component in single-purpose devices. These projects—impressive as many of them are—were not, the original main purpose of the creation of the Raspberry Pi. In this article, we come back to the original goal that led to the development of this low cost computer: Getting an programmable machine into the hands of kids to get them to learn to program and get them engaged with computer science. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.”
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