Larry.org

My son just turned 9 years old, and he’s using computers everyday at school. He’s not learning much about coding, and he hasn’t yet experienced the joy of making a computer he’s put together do something he wants it to do.

I want him to understand the power of computers truly lies in what you can create with them. But more than that I want him to experience the joy of making a computer do what he wants. The Raspberry Pi seems an ideal platform on which he can express himself with a computer. It’s both very low cost and highly configurable.

I also feel strongly that our children need to become familiar with programming at an early age. Many of the middle schools in our area, and they are excellent, get the kids started on computers very young. They don’t however get kids ‘under the hood’, tweaking the way the computer works.

So I’m starting an After School “Coding Club” here in Phoenix Arizona. Let me know, in the comments below if you’d be interested in attending our first meeting.

If you want to learn more about the Raspberry Pi check out the collection of links I’ve posted on Refer.ly. I’ll be updating this list of links as our journey progresses.

David got the Ninjago Epic Dragon Battle Set 9450 for Christmas this year so we built it today. As usual we did a time lapse video of the build process.

More info on this particular set is available here (Lego.com product page). David picked out the music this time. It’s Tick Tick Tick Boom by The Hives.

I’ve been playing with time lapse lego builds and this spring I created a new one.

More info on this particular set is available here (Lego.com product page). Songs: Meet me in the Basement by Broken Social Scene (used during the time lapse build) and Entrance Song by The Black Angels (used when showing the features of the model).