Raspberry Pi - retro computer of the future With sales in excess
of one million in its first year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation
hopes its low-cost computer will enthuse a new generation of
coders. It's a standard household scene. A 16-year-old computer
whizz (that is, when it comes to playing games) communicating
and doing eight things at once on the machine, hits a brick wall
when the computer starts to go wrong. Mum finds nothing on the
Internet but jargon. Dad, a former teacher, has no idea what to
do. Time to call in 'the geek'. Everyone knows one. In his
teens, he (they're usually blokes) spent hours taking computers
apart and reprogramming them. Now he's an IT guru. The rest of
us did ICT at school; some of us are good at typing. Things are
changing. This year, education secretary Michael Gove plans to
introduce a new IT curriculum that focuses more on computer
science and less on secretarial skills. The British education
system is notoriously slow to embrace change, though. Whether
it's today's children