Raspberry Pi Arrives at Techco

We are thrilled to have received our very own Raspberry Pi computer at the Technology Cooperative.

For those unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi, I have lifted the following description from the Raspberry Pi website.


What’s a Raspberry Pi?



The Raspberry Pi is perfect for what we are trying to do at the Technology Cooperative.  Our plans are to use them as a platform to program video games.  We also plan to make our Raspberrry Pis into a “mini console” with the near/long term goal to put a Raspberry Pi in the hands of every child that learns to program at Techco.

The programming language of choice  is Python.  Python is a free to use programming language that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.  You might have noticed that we have Game programming with Python courses on our schedule.  In the courses we will focus on learning the Python programming language and 2D game programming using a Python module named PyGame.

In addition to learning how to program games, we plan to build our own cases for the Raspberry Pi units.    With the use of a lot of imagination and 3d printing technology, we hope to have case design worthy of a double-take.

While doing some case pre-planning we noticed that with no mounting holes on the tiny computer board, case design might be a problem for our students.  To give them a head start, we created a mounting bracket that cradles the computer board and yet still gives access to the ports and connectors on all sides.  The bracket provides mounting holes on each side to allow you to put the board anywhere.  We call our new bracket the Raspberry Pi Mounting Bracket or PiMB.

Raspberry Pi Mounting Bracket

We plan to make the PiMB available for a $15 dollar donation to the Technology Cooperative.  The products available for donation will be cast in a durable resin, pre-drilled and packaged with the necessary screws.  Give us a couple of weeks to get our production ramped up.  If you have in interest, sign up on our notification list below.
Sign up to be notified when the PIMBs are ready for sale

The text we will use for our Python programming course is “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” an excellent (and free download) book from Albert Sweigart.  I highly encourage you to check out his website here.