Amazing things to do with a Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi got another mention on Boing Boing last week, promoting a brief sampling of some of the wonderful things you can do with it:

"Raspberry Pi, the tiny, cheap and hackable computer for children of all ages, may be used as the heart of an Ambilight media center, a cat feeder, a Minecraft or MAME console, to pwn your foes' websites and serve torrents, or as the brains of a supercomputer cluster. Me, I've been recreating the magic of failing to learn to program in the 1980s, when every home computer challenged you with a code interpreter the moment you turned it on. You can make it pretty with a custom case, and check out a zillion other great Pideas at Pingbin, Ars Technica and the official homepage. "

I just wanted to point out that one other cool thing you can do with them is teach kids to code. Back in March, I was one of two teachers bringing the knowledge to 9-16 year olds at the annual US Python conference, PyCon. The Raspberry Pis we used were generously donated, so we were able to set up uniform workstations for all the kids (with rented peripherals), and the kids got to take the boards home with them at the end of each day-long class.

In case you haven't seen it already, there's a little more information about it on the PyCon web site:

https://us.pycon.org/2013/events/letslearnpython/

And both of us (the teachers, that is) wrote recaps on our own blogs:

http://www.mechanicalgirl.com/post/young-coders-learning-python-pycon-2013/
http://therealkatie.net/blog/2013/mar/19/pycon-2013-young-coders/

You can also find some cool projects on raspberry.io (this site was built for PyCon as a place to house projects designed by students - both our young students, and adults working in the Raspberry Pi lab).