Google's charitable arm, its Google Giving fund, is providing funding for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The company's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been visiting a Cambridge school where he and Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton have been speaking to a classroom of local kids.
The funding will provide 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs for school kids around the UK.
"We're absolutely made up over the news," writes Upton on the Raspberry Pi blog. "This is a brilliant way for us to find kids all over the country whose aptitude for computing can now be explored properly. We believe that access to tools is a fundamental necessity in finding out who you are and what you're good at. We want those tools to be within everybody's grasp, right from the start."
The Foundation will be working with Google and six UK educational partners to identify the kids who could benefit from having the devices: CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR.
Raspberry Pi Foundation
"The announcement today by the Raspberry Pi Foundation is one that will truly take the Raspberry Pi into the education sector - a dream which has been at the centre of their thinking since the project was created. It is great to think that, because of this innovative device, young people can develop new transferrable skills in computer science that the engineering industry is crying out for," adds Mike Buffham, Head of EDE at element14, one of the two chosen distributors of the Pi.
"We hope that this will also prompt discussion about what education departments, and indeed Governments, are going to do to ensure the next generation of design engineer will have the necessary core skills. Providing the Raspberry Pi to schools is one thing, but putting real computer science back on the school curriculum would have an even greater impact."
Source:
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2013/01/29/55460/google-gives-to-the-raspberry-pi-foundation.htm
