Ask Director Eben Upton About the Raspberry Pi Foundation 194
When Eben Upton isn't working as an ASIC architect for Broadcom, he is the Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation is a UK registered charity which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level. Raspberry Pi plans to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost
computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. Their first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed
to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a baseline Model A device, and $35 for a Model B device with integrated 2-port USB Hub, 10/100
Ethernet controller and 128MB of additional RAM. Eben has agreed to answer your questions about what it takes to make an ultra-low-cost computer, running an educational charity, or anything else. The usual Slashdot interview guidelines apply: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment.
How... (Score:3, Interesting)
...is competence in programming, much less actual computational science, better serverd by possessing a computer as opposed to promoting a strong foundation in fundamental mathematics?
(Yes, this is a loaded question, because there's a general concensus that possessing and using technology does not result in better education, much less an education in something as complex as the technology itself.)
HDMI CEC (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the HDMI CEC wire hooked up with a driver transistor? Hooking up that wire will let the PI control all of the HDMI devices. People are already doing this with the Beagleboard so there is software available.
Introduction to programming (Score:3, Interesting)
The raspberry pi is meant to introduce programming concepts to school-level children.
My question is: How are you planning on doing this from a UI perspective? The BBC micro (as far as I can tell, a little before my time) simply dropped the user into a BASIC prompt and left the rest to their imagination. This seems like a pretty fundamental design question for the raspberry pi, but I haven't been able to find a clear answer yet.