The CamJam EduKit – basic electronics for £5!

Liz: I wasn’t at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam this weekend: I was working in Manchester on Friday, and then became an aunt that evening (congrats Katie and Ben!). It meant I missed a special announcement: so I’ve asked Mike Horne, king of the CamJam organisers, to fill everyone in with this guest post. Over to you, Mike! From little acorns… We realised after the May Cambridge Raspberry Jam that we now had a good stock of workshop material, and began to think of ways to use the material away from the Jam. After all, educational material isn’t much good if it isn’t in the hands of people who might use it. Liz sells Pis at a previous CamJam. If you want to meet people from the Foundation, the CamJams are the place to be. At the May Jam, we ran a basic electronics workshop – you know the sort of thing: LEDs, switches and buzzers…and we wondered if we could create a kit with the necessary bits and bobs. People could buy the kits, then download the worksheets and teach themselves. Around that time, Jamie Mann from The Pi Hut came to us with the exact same idea – use the CamJam material as the basis for kits. And so, a partnership was formed to bring the idea to fruition. Jamie was in charge of procurement and assembling the kits, Tim would write the worksheets and Mike would test them out. Eventually, we came up with a name and the “CamJam EduKit” was born. The CamJam EduKit is priced at £5 and comes with everything you need to have fun with basic electronics projects, including a project tin to keep it all in! We hope that this low price point will allow the kit to appeal to both families and education. If it is successful, there will be more kits, the first of which is likely to use sensors to detect temperature, light levels and movement. We hope that the CamJam EduKits will be used to further the Raspberry Pi Foundation's educational aims and to get kids started not only with electronics but with Python programming as well. Profits from the kits are going to be donated to the Cambridge Raspberry Jam, so we can continue to develop our educational programme. You can buy the EduKit from The Pi Hut via the CamJam site, and you’ll find the accompanying educational material on the same page. All the material is free to download, so if you want to take a look at it beforehand, go right ahead! Michael Horne (@recantha), Tim Richardson (@geeky_tim) & Jamie Mann (@ThePiHut)

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/the-camjam-edukit-basic-electronics-for-5/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-camjam-edukit-basic-electronics-for-5