Super interesting post from Ben Nuttall, via raspberrypipod.
For about the last 3 years, the de-facto method of accessing physical components via the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins has been a Python library called RPi.GPIO, created by Ben Croston, who originally built it to control his beer brewing process. Despite its humble beginnings in a personal hobby project, it’s ended up being used in projects of all shapes and sizes by users around the world, and it has a big presence in education. In the Foundation, we’ve used it in many of our learning resources, and we use it at Picademy, our teacher training course.
Physical computing is one of the most engaging activities for teaching computing, and has plenty of scope in computational thinking, programming skills and logic as well as projects being more relevant to young people (think build a robot vs. sorting arbitrary lists).
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