Building a Raspberry Pi computer lab

by Les Pounder

Busy day at the "office" today.

My good friend Tom Sale, from Mereside Primary School needed a hand building a Raspberry Pi powered computer lab.

Mereside Primary School are no stranger to the Raspberry Pi. They have recently taken part in the PA Consulting competition, coming second in their year group. Their project was a Pi powered radio transmitter, powered by a solar power charged battery. It's goal was to alert emergency services of survivors following a disaster.

Back to the lab

So today we recycled seven monitors, USB keyboards and mice and added them to our small collection of Raspberry Pi.

We wanted to enable the children to learn computing using a range of applications

  • Sonic Pi 2 - Learning to code using music
  • Scratch - Visual, block building programming
  • Scratch GPIO - Same as the above but works with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins

So, the SD cards that we had were REALLY old versions of Raspbian, so I took them home and made a custom Raspbian install image, based on NOOBS Lite, that comes with all of the software that the children will need.

Six hours later and all of the cards have been created and tested, ready for the class to use in their first Raspberry Pi powered lesson of the new school year.