An Idea Begins

My Raspberry Pi should arrive tomorrow. It is a credit card-size computer running Linux.

Very geeky.

And like a baby, it will have potential but almost nothing more.

When I’m teaching class, there’s always the question of what do they already know? Are they beginners or experts or some of each? What OSes do they know so I have a clue what technical terms they will understand and whose definition thereof are they assuming?

Teaching is communicating and the sooner I know what OS “language” they know, the sooner we can connect.

So, I’ll use the Raspberry Pi to begin the process of finding common ground. I’ll pass it around to each person and ask a series of questions. When everyone is done, I can then examine the results, all on the Raspberry Pi. Surveys and results will upload and download by a web (network) interface but, in the classroom and for what I teach, cruder will be better. (But if I can display the results on the classroom projector via the web interface, that’d be cool, too. Hmmm.)

With a simple LCD and ten-key pad, it’ll be crude. I’ll leave all the parts and wires exposed. I want it to say, “This guy is a geek.”