If your kid isn't tooling around with Raspberry Pi, are you even a homeschooler?
We finally joined the world of homeschoolers who tool around with Raspberry Pi thanks to this Kano computer kit:
We've actually had it for ages, with Syd, especially, eager to unbox it and play, but dang, did her public school schedule leave zero time for any extracurricular educational fun! This summer, though, I've been taking both kids through the Girl Scout CSA Introduction to Programming Journey--Syd needs a Journey under her belt so she can start thinking about Gold, and Will, as usual, wants to Summit at the Ambassador level. Even though the Intro to Programming Journey is more about learning and utilizing the logical, step-by-step, user-centered problem-solving sequence that programmers use than about actual, literal computer programming, you know I had to sneak in the actual, literal computer programming.
Starting with putting together your own computer!
The manual is super cute and perfectly suited to walking even young kids through assembling the computer parts while explaining what each part is, what it does, and how it works with the other parts:
And when you're finished, you hook it up to the TV, which the kids thought was exceptionally fun and charming:
The little games and apps that are already installed on the Kano are below the kids' interest and experience level, unfortunately, although they did play around with them a bit. What we're most looking forward, to, though, is playing around more with that Raspberry Pi! I have requested just about every iteration of Raspberry Pi for Dummy Idiot Kids books for us from the library, and I hope that soon the Raspberry Pi programming experimentation will commence!
