Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi was a big challenge for me.  I had a chance to try it out during a PD that I attended but I was unsure how I was going to make it accessible to the kids.  I found a tutorial that I wanted the kids to try.  I designed each of the stations to make the kids as independent as possible so I printed off the step by step tutorial for them to try.I did a Python3 tutorial to code a turtle to draw a snowflake.  I did some troubleshooting to make sure that I could make it work, really I am the test subject!  If I can make something work then all of the kids can do it too.  

I have to say that I really enjoyed this station, it wasn't for the faint of heart.  You really needed to follow the directions very closely and be willing to proofread the code to find out why it wasn't working.  There was some work that needed to be done to have it draw the snowflake and this is not for every student.  The ones that did persevere were empowered by the experience and one of our students asked for a raspberry pi for Christmas and has been enjoying it ever since.

There are other programs loaded on to the Raspberry Pi and lots of cool projects that you can do, I just chose this because it fit in the time slot and was different from the other activities that the students could try.