Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton: How We're Turning Everyone Into DIY Hackers 90
redletterdave writes "Eben Upton is the CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's trading company, where he oversees production and sales of the Raspberry Pi. In a lengthy interview with ReadWrite, Upton shares how he invented Raspberry Pi, and what's coming next for the $35 microcomputer. Quoting: 'There's a big difference between [just] making a platform like Raspberry Pi available and offering support for it. I think if you just make it available, you'll find one percent of eight-year-olds will be the one percent who love that sort of thing and will get into it, regardless of how much or how little support you give them. ... [S]ince we can afford to pay for the development of educational material, we can afford to advocate for good training for teachers throughout this. There's an opportunity to get more than one percent. There's an opportunity to reach the bright kids who don't quite have the natural inclination to personally tackle complicated technical tasks. If you give them good teaching and compelling material that's relevant and interesting to them, you can reach ten percent, twenty percent, fifty percent, many more. We look back to the 1980s as this golden era [of learning to program], and in practice, only a very few percent of people were learning to program to any great degree. ... I think the real opportunity for us now, because we can intervene on the material and teacher training levels, we can potentially blow past where we were in the 1980s.'"
Re:It's not the thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand the moderation on my comment nor your reply. We're talking about hardware and communities here, which the Arduino has too. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the Arduino community, with its dozens of variants, is a lot bigger than the Raspberry Pi community.
Re:It's not the thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Arduino isn't a computer, it's a programmable microcontroller.
There really isn't any comparison between the two.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning Linux on a RaspberryPi is like learning about cars by working on a lawnmower.
That's how I did it... started with two stroke engines and worked my way up to four stroke engines.
Actually, I started with a suspended tin can with two angled holes in it, some water, and a heat source. After understanding the steam engine and its drive train, the move to a two-stroke engine with spark plugs didn't take much work; then I got to learn about throttles, priming, flow control, etc.
After mastering these bits, four stroke engines were much less of a mystery. Plus, I was able to build go karts well before I knew the details of the four stroke engine :)
I think this is precisely the point they're trying to make with the Pi.