Raspberry's and Pythons!

Raspberry Pi, an education platform!

Raspberry Pi, low cost credit card sized computer , has initially been put together by the charitable trust that designed it as an educators platform.  The primary intention to educate the young (under 18 year olds) in the mysteries of computer architecture and programming.  

A step back to the days of self build computers in the late seventies and early eighties.  I do remember buying Personal Computer World and looking at the Commodore PETs and wincing at the price beyond my pocket money.  Migrating to the more techie magazines where bare boards could be bought and made up the costs again seemed to escalate.  The Sinclair ZX80  arrived, still too expensive (half a weeks wages for the average for the worker) then the ZX81 (I finally managed to own one of these).   Then came Windows! 

Each time a new "consumer" computer arrived the machine became more enclosed and a black box culture started to emerge of plug and play.  In amongst this the educational use and then the UK National Curriculum for IT or ICT arrived.  This sought to educate people in the end use of technology as opposed to understanding the technology. The lack of understanding of what is within the black box was obscured by the use of WYSWYG applications that bridged the gap between hardware understanding and programming skills.   Basic engineering and STEM (the new buzz word) skills were no longer there since the cost of the item was so expensive tinkering with the engineering was naturally shied away from.  The Raspberry Pi again gives this feel of a new start to computing.  

Raspberry Pi is a Linnux based system with the operating system stored on an SD card which in effect is a solid state hard drive.  This comes in various different versions and images downloadable from the Raspberry Pi foundation.  The interesting feature for me at the moment is that the latest images are supporting Python.  Python is one of the fundamentals to Google Course builder.  As system is Linnux based, a precursor of Android and uses an ARM processor it should be possible to get the Raspberry Pi to run the App engine.  

Manufacturing of the Raspberry Pi has only really just started to go into volume.  At a price of £35 for the basic unit a more economical way of ensuring cheap access to the digital classroom than an Apple or a Samsung solution.

  

 

Digital Classroom and Dyslexia

Opening access for people with Dyslexia

Look at any group of people in the UK and the chances are that between 5 and 10 % of that group are dyslexic. That is assuming that they have been tested.  The general population over a certain age would not necessarily be diagnosed but their difficulties in reading and writing may be still a problem.  In "Western" societies where proficiency in written communication is a judgement on how successfully people interact with their environment, this is a hurdle for the digital classroom.

How do you include 10% of the bell curve?  Clearly a solution for such a large group of people who may be excluded from the digital community to a greater or lesser extent has to work across many platforms.

A font known as OpenDyslexic is the possible solution.  A recent article  on the BBC website describes how this font has started to be taken up by many of the major apps and browsers.  I have downloaded and installed the extension to my browser of choice, Google Chrome. Using the settings and extension menu it very easy to check the box to enable and enable the app.  The only disadvantage would appear to be relative complexity of installation on Apple products.  As digital classrooms develop the choice will increasingly become one of Apple or Android (Windows 8 apparently is being enabled to run Android based apps).  The Tablets by Chinese company Huawei and the Kindle Fire by Amazon all work on  fork versions of Android (which itself is a derivative of Linnux).  Kindle apparently does not support font embedding so OpenDyslexic will not not work on a Kindle.  Samsung appear to use a non-fork version Android and will remain part of the mainstream developers.  The customer is not tied to the one provider of apps.

So, installation of the OpenDyslexic font.  First access the OpenDyslexic page (click the link on word OpenDyslexic).  Choose the tab get if for Get it Free! select your product.  It is as simple as that!

I will be adding the link for the OpenDyslexic font to the top of this blog.  A source of information regarding dyslexia is  the British Dyslexia Association http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/.