August 6-17, 9am to noon. Through Acton Boxborough Community Education
In this ten day class, you’ll start with a pile of parts. You’ll assemble your own computer and install the Linux operating system. Your Raspberry Pi will be a real computer with WiFi and Bluetooth, USB ports and a 7 inch touchscreen. You’ll explore the command line and the GUI interface to customize your computer. Then you’ll learn to make fun, touch-enabled games in Scratch and Python. At the end of the course, you’ll take your computer home with you, so you can keep learning, playing, and exploring.
A pile of parts
The Raspberry Pi you’ll be using is the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, released in 2018. Its a surprisingly powerful little machine!
The display you’ll be using is the official Rasperry Pi Touch display. Any HDMI display works with the Raspberry Pi, but this one has a touchscreen with a first party driver, and there are cases that hold it all together.
You’ll get a case to hold your computer together, a keyboard and a mouse, and a plug in power supply. Since the Raspberry Pi is powered over micro-USB, I sometimes power mine with a phone backup battery. It works great!
We’ll be using the Raspbian operating system, a variant of Debian Linux made especially for the Raspberry Pi. The work we do with Linux will be useful well beyond your time with the Raspberry Pi. It includes a web browser (Chromium), and programming languages like Scratch and Python ready to go. It even includes a version of Minecraft made especially for the Pi which is programmable with Python.
Installing Raspbian Linux
More questions? Let me know by contacting me at mark@gameswithcode.com.