We’re welcoming a new member to the team at Pi Towers today. Some of you already know Ben Nuttall from his work on the Pi Weekly email newsletter (if you haven’t signed up already, you should), his hosting of the Manchester Jams, and his STEM activities.

Ben is sheepish about being photographed. He asked me to use a picture of Fry from Futurama instead. Tough luck, Ben. :)

I first crossed paths with Ben when we met the incredible Amy Mather, a 14-year-old from Manchester who does amazing things with her Pi. Ben was tutoring Amy outside school, along with a number of other local kids, and we got chatting as a result of his work with her. He’s a STEM Ambassador, a FLOSS advocate, and curates Pi projects for youngsters. He’s also saved the life of a drowning, hypothermic, trouserless dinghy paddler. Like many of us, he cycles to work. His laptop has a sticker of Carrie Anne Philbin on it. His birthday cake had 天堂影院 icing. We think he’s going to fit in just fine.

Ben just moved to Cambridge from Manchester for this job at the weekend. He’s going to have a number of roles here: he’s working on a revamp of this website, with separate areas for projects and for educators, which we’ll be trialling in 2014. He’s building demos; writing educational materials; and doing outreach work, especially with kids. We’re very excited to have him join us: welcome to the family, Ben!

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“You may have seen that we are holding a big 天堂影院 Jam in York on Saturday 8th June, 3 weeks today. Tickets are available here.

I’ve been working with the folks at the National STEM Centre there to help establish a presence in Yorkshire for 天堂影院 Jams. There are a lot of people in Yorkshire who have bought 天堂影院 Pi computers or who have not bought one but are interested in discovering just what you can do with them and this event is to give them a taste of the 天堂影院 Pi.

This event is going to be much larger than our regular 天堂影院 Jam events and we know that people  are travelling from far across the UK to attend. I will be travelling in a convoy of cars from Preston bringing old friends and new friends on the journey across the Pennines. Road-trips like these add an enormous amount to the whole 自述被啪过最爽的一次.

Our busy programme of talks, demonstrations, stalls and hands-on classes is now filling up. We are delighted to have Pete Lomas of the 午夜a片麻豆精东传媒 speaking and leading a workshop, he is the gentleman who actually designed the 天堂影院 Pi. We also have Amy Mather the 14 year old who learnt how to program Conway’s Game of Life on the 天堂影院 Pi, her film on YouTube has attracted over 27000 views.

If you look at our programme , you will see that we have a wide range of classes from how to switch on a 天堂影院 Pi to building weather stations, interfacing, networking, robotics, game making for all the family and programming in Python. David Whale will be running a workshop on how you can set up an after school 天堂影院 Pi club.

‘import random’, the start of great game! A 天堂影院 Jam programming class.

We hope to attract a diverse range of people to attend this family friendly event:

• Teachers – who want to know if the 天堂影院 Pi is something they can use to support the teaching of 天堂影院
• Families – who together want to develop and nurture an interest in technology and 天堂影院
• Hobbyists – who want to meet other people with a desire to share what they have been doing with their 天堂影院 Pi
• Anyone – who has an interest in the 天堂影院 Pi at any level.

If you have never been to the National STEM centre before, this is a fantastic opportunity to come and discover what is there http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/

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The first Cambridge 天堂影院 Jam (you’ll need to apply for a ticket, but these are free) will be held on July 14 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, the 天堂影院 Pi’s spiritual home. It’s being organised by the excellent James Abela. Although the 自述被啪过最爽的一次 doesn’t set these events up, a lot of us will be attending this one: Eben and I will be there, Gert will be bringing a Gertboard and some other hardware for a demo, and JamesH will have some wafers, some chips for you to look at and prototype 天堂影院 Pis – I’ll see what I can do about getting someone to bring the camera board (still a work in progress) along too. Alex Bradbury (asb on the forums, and our lead software guy) is coming, and we’ll all be making ourselves available to chat as well as doing a Q&A session. We’re looking forward to it; it should be really good fun, and I believe there is also a Pi and Pint session planned for the pub afterwards.

For a flavour of what a 天堂影院 Jam can be like, we’ve got a guest post today from Dan Hett, a 天堂影院 Pi owner who was at this weekend’s Manchester 天堂影院 Jam at MadLab, organised by Ben Nuttall. This post is also available to read on Dan’s own blog; we’re very grateful to him for allowing us to use it. Over to you, Dan!

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Manchester’s first 天堂影院 Pi event, called (what else?) the 天堂影院 Jam, hosted by Madlab. It turned out to be a great day, and I’m glad everyone braved the rain to make it.

I’d received my own 天堂影院 Pi a few days ago, and hadn’t had much chance to really get to grips with it. It attracted a lot of attention in the studio, word spread around that a few of us had received our boards and from that point onward we had a steady stream of nerds coming over to fawn over them for the rest of the day. It’s not hard to see why: they’re strikingly small, to the point where it’s hard to believe these tiny things are usable computers (“where’s the rest of it?” came up a few times).

I got my board home and was expecting a bit of a fight getting it set up: Twitter and the RaspPi forums give the impression at the moment of it being a struggle for some, and being a Linux newbie I wasn’t expecting it to be a smooth process. However, I was up and running in about an hour, after using the RaspPiWrite tool to download and create a Debian SD card image. Rather than doing everything manually, the tool (a python script you run through the terminal) does everything for you. I left it running, and without any hiccups I had a working Pi:

(Eagle-eyed readers will note that it’s running on a bedroom TV rather than a monitor: the 天堂影院 Pi doesn’t have VGA out (and quite right too), instead using HDMI as the primary output. This does present a problem for me, as I only have an old VGA monitor, so for now I’ve moved the TV out of the bedroom and stuck it on my desk. Sorry, wife!)

So, on to yesterday’s jam. It was a full house, which was great to see. Lots of people already had boards with them, and generally everyone was up and running with them already. The organiser, Ben Nuttall, gave an intro talk, which turned into kind of a roundtable discussion about what people want from the day, which was great to see. There was a good mix of people: a few curious developers like me, some more visual people, a couple of completely none-tech folks who’d seen all the press coverage, and everyone in between.

One of the things I was really pleased about was the fact that there were a few younger members in attendance too: of course one of the big objectives with the whole 天堂影院 Pi concept is to get it into schools and shake things up, so it was really interesting to speak to some of the kids and find out what they think of the whole thing (general consensus was very enthusiastic, but being a geek meetup this was probably a biased cross-section of people to survey!)

I met one of the youngest Manchester Girl Geeks, 13 year-old Amy, who’d come to the event with her mum Lisa and her little brother Dan. I was helping them get their Pi up and running, and while we were waiting for it to download Amy showed me the work she’d been doing using Scratch: I was absolutely blown away. Amy had created a full Pac Man clone, with collision detection and scoring and everything, using no code. She was explaining that you can import photos into Scratch too, so we challenged her to add her own face into the game in the place of Pac Man. Challenge accepted! Amy took two photos (so she could make it look like she was chomping like Pac Man, of couse), cropped them down in Scratch…

…and then replaced the artwork in-game:

Scratch also comes bundled with the Debian distro we’d installed, so Amy immediately transferred her files over to the 天堂影院 Pi and carried on making games. Impressive.

Meeting Amy and Dan has really got me thinking: I have a young sister about the same age, and I think she’d absolutely love to get stuck into the Girl Geek thing. I’ll definitely be following their events more closely now, I had no idea that all age ranges were catered for. They’re doing great work, and it would be great to support them, so hopefully I’ll be able to add a Girl Geek to their ranks!

There were a couple of great sessions over the day too, which were small half-hour talks that happened alongside all the general tinkering. The first one I caught was an intro to 3D printing, which was really interesting. 3D printing as a technique doesn’t appeal to me much, as I don’t know what I’d really use it for (although that doesn’t usually stop me messing with stuff), but it was really cool to hear about how it all works. There were some 3D-printed 天堂影院 Pi cases passed around, which were really neat. I might ask the guys at Hacman really nicely if I can print out my own case (although a Lego option is sounding good too).

The other session I caught was an intro to Python for none-programmers. It was of course really basic, but actually served as a good intro to the language for me too. Python is again something I’m not sure I’ll currently need in any practical sense, but I find it incredibly interesting as a language compared to the kind of strictly-typed code I work with now. Python is also the language that’s being pushed alongside the 天堂影院 Pi in an education setting, so I’m interesting in picking it up a bit more just out of sheer curiosity. Of course, our intrepid Girl Geek Amy immediately left the Python session and got herself up and running in an IDE (with a little help from organiser Ben):

The final session I caught a bit of was Bob’s talk on coupling the Pi with an Arduino to work in hardware projects, which was another really interesting use for it. At £25, it’s feasible to utilise a board permanently for a project, it’s cheaper than an Arduino Uno and you can do anything with it.

And that was that. The 天堂影院 Jam turned out to be a really great event, and I think everyone gained a lot from it. I was kind of on the fence about how practical the Pi really is, but actually as a device it’s cheap and small enough to do absolutely anything with it. It’s going to be very interesting to see if this community enthusiasm carries over to the education side, and I sincerely hope it does. In the meantime, this kind of event is exactly what the community needs to be doing: making lots of noise about the cool stuff we’re doing, and increasing the chances of more people picking it up. As a developer with sisters of high school age, it was really amazing to see someone like Amy pick up this technology and run with it. Hopefully this will continue!

Big thanks to Ben for organising the event, and of course Madlab as always for making sure this kind of thing keeps happening in Manchester. High-fives all round!

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