Abstract:

The rapidly developing, ever-changing field of information technology often delivers new solutions to the public. The Raspberry Pi devices are frequently mentioned example of this phenomenon. With the ongoing miniaturization and affordable components engineers managed to design a low-cost, palm-sized computer with promising technical specs. These microcomputers are capable of fulfilling various tasks from industrial usage to home entertainment. The Raspberry Pi Foundation set the expectations even higher by challenging themselves to build a versatile device to further improve the quality of IT lessons. With the 4th generation available one may think they found the appropriate balance to satisfy wide spectrum of expectations at once. With the tools given it is the teachers’ turn to choose the right strategies and set interesting goals for their students. This paper is intended to demonstrate selected Raspberry Pi projects and support them with modern teaching methods like the problem- and project-based learning. In addition, through the descripted projects we want to encourage educators to compose and share other ways to involve this technology in classrooms. We believe that the right blend of methods, goals and tools (in this case the Raspberry Pi single-board computers) can result in an environment where learning is not a demanding effort but rather an entertaining experience.

Keywords:

Raspberry Pi, learning by doing, project-based learning, problem-based learning, innovations in education.