Affordable menu: Southampton¡¯s Simon Cox (and son James) with supercomputer

Turkey, cranberry sauce and Brussels sprouts may be more traditional, but thousands of households across the UK will be tucking into a serving of Raspberry Pi this Christmas, hoping to fill not their stomachs but their minds.

The Raspberry Pi is a programmable credit card-sized computer developed by scientists at the University of Cambridge, who were concerned about the year-on-year decline in the skills of A-level students applying for computer science courses at the institution.

It costs around ?20, making it a popular stocking filler for parents eager to equip their children with programming skills.

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¡°Our original aim was fairly parochial. We¡¯d noticed that the level of skill acquired by 18-year-olds was lower than it had been in the 1980s and 1990s, and our explicit aim was to improve the quality of applicants to our courses,¡± said Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and former director of studies in computer science at St John¡¯s College, Cambridge.

¡°We were planning on giving the device to sixth-formers [at] open days so that when they came in for interviews, we could find out what they had done with it.¡±

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However, in practice the project has captured the wider imagination: around 800,000 Raspberry Pi units have been acquired by people of all ages looking to boost their skills.

Hands-on hardware

Meanwhile, universities across the country have used the devices to give their undergraduates the opportunity to gain hands-on experience of projects they might expect to encounter in industry.

At the University of Glasgow, for example, academics connected 64 Raspberry Pis together to show students how data centres work (see box below).

¡°A real data centre would have hundreds of computers and cost millions, and the companies that own them are reluctant to let non-employees in to see them,¡± said Jeremy Singer, a lecturer in Glasgow¡¯s School of Computing Science.

¡°Ours fits on a desk, but the processes and software involved are exactly the same, so it gives students a realistic experience.¡±

At the University of Southampton, researchers have constructed a Raspberry Pi supercomputer and used it to calculate the value of the mathematical constant pi.

Simon Cox, professor of computational methods at Southampton, led the team, and his six-year-old son James, pictured, assisted by producing a specially designed Lego case for the technology and helping to test the device.

¡°To build a supercomputer¡­costs tens of thousands of pounds, but to teach the basics using four Raspberry Pis costs about ?100,¡± Professor Cox said.

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¡°It¡¯s the first time it is conceivable for students entering university to already have experience of supercomputing.

¡°Schools can¡¯t afford thousands, but ?100? They can raise that with a cake sale.¡±

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Professor Cox added that he believed the device could do far more than simply encourage the next generation of computer science students.

¡°More than 50 per cent of the research across our engineering school relies on computing, so the impact of improving these programming skills could be huge, not just for computer science but also for all scientists, electronics students, civil engineers and mechanical engineers,¡± he said.

¡°All of these need computing skills just as much.¡±

chris.parr@tsleducation.com.