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Like many of my colleagues here at Raspberry Pi, I am a child of the 1980s home computer revolution. My BBC Micro, with its 32K of RAM and BASIC interpreter, provided me with my first exposure to computer programming, and to engineering more broadly: the idea that a large problem could be decomposed into small problems; that those problems could be solved; and that the small solutions could be composed to solve the original problem.

But long before I bought my own BBC Micro, and even before I typed a first tentative two-line BASIC program into the shared BBC Micro in the corner of my school classroom, I’d already had some experience with computer programming. Many of you will remember the series of illustrated computer books produced by Usborne in the 1980s. In one of these I found instructions for building a limerick generator: a cardboard spinner to generate random numbers, a set of lookup tables, a short program to be copied onto a long strip of paper, and a cardboard slider to mark the current position in the program. I remember offering to build copies for my classmates: “Give me a pound and I’ll give you a computer!”


Hands-on learning
So, when I first met Hannah Hagon at the Cambridge Raspberry Pi Jam in 2023, her Unplugged Tots material — offline educational activities that set the stage for future programming — seemed very natural to me.

As I watched my own children, Aphra and Kit, working their way through the activities with Hannah’s girls, Charlotte and Emily, I recognised a dawning understanding of the same basic principles — sequencing, iteration, conditionals — that I had learnt from that Usborne book four decades earlier. And when the opportunity arose for Raspberry Pi Press to publish the first Unplugged Tots book, I jumped at it.


Screen-free activities
The activities in Unplugged Tots form part of a tradition that stretches back, past the home computer revolution, to a time when computers were so rare, and computing time so expensive, that even university students and professional engineers were encouraged to mentally simulate their programs offline before submitting them to be run as batch jobs. They remain highly relevant, even in an era of AI-assisted vibe coding, and of $4 Raspberry Pi Pico computers running high-level languages like MicroPython.



As I know from personal experience, they provide children with a lower first rung on the ladder, reducing the conceptual leap when they encounter “real” programming environments. They offer accessible, easy-to-deploy experiences that teachers, parents, and club leaders can leverage to introduce large numbers of children to programming, without the hassle of setting up and tearing down rooms full of computers. And, perhaps most importantly, because they exist in the physical world, these experiences don’t need to compete for a child’s attention on a minute-by-minute basis with the myriad entertainment activities available in the virtual one.

Raspberry Pi Press has always provided us with new ways to pursue the Raspberry Pi mission, beyond the provision of affordable hardware and software. Hannah, Jack, Mark, Sam, Sarah, Brian and I have had a blast bringing this first Unplugged Tots book to life. We hope you’ll have as much fun with these activities as we have, and that your children will look back on this book with the same affection that we have for the computer books of our childhoods.

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Get your copy today
Unplugged Tots is now available at our online store — and in the offline store — for £19.99. You can also find it on Amazon UK or Amazon US.

The post New from Raspberry Pi Press: Unplugged Tots appeared first on Raspberry Pi.


Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-fr ... gged-tots/