Tag Archives: Foundation

Our new theory of change

Post Syndicated from Ben Durbin original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/theory-of-change-2024/

One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s core values is our focus on impact. This means that we are committed to learning from the best available evidence, and to being rigorous and transparent about the difference we’re making.

A smiling girl holding a robot buggy in her lap

Like many charities, an important part of our approach to achieving and measuring our impact is our theory of change. We are excited to launch a newly refreshed theory of change that reflects our mission and strategy to ensure that young people can realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.

Read our theory of change

What is a theory of change?

A theory of change describes the difference an organisation aims to make in the world, the actions it takes to achieve this, and the underlying assumptions about how its actions will create change.

Two learners sharing a laptop in a coding session.

It’s like a good cake recipe. It describes the ingredients and tools that are required, how these are combined, and what the results should be. But a theory of change goes further: it also addresses why you need the cake in the first place, and the reasons why the recipe will produce such a good cake if you follow it correctly!

What is the change we want to make?

Our theory of change begins with a statement of the problem that needs solving: too many young people are missing out on the enormous opportunities from digital technologies, and access to opportunities to learn depends too much on who you are and where you were born.

We want to see a world where young people can take advantage of the opportunities that computers and digital technologies offer to transform their own lives and communities, to contribute to society, and to help address the world’s challenges.

Learners in a computing classroom.

To help us empower young people to do this, we have identified three broad sets of outcomes that we should target, measure, and hold ourselves accountable for. These map roughly to the COM-B model of behaviour change. This model suggests that for change to be achieved, people need a combination of capabilities, opportunities, and motivation.

Our identified outcomes are that we support young people to:

  1. Build knowledge and skills in computing
  2. Understand the opportunities and risks associated with new technologies
  3. Develop the mindsets to confidently engage with technological change

How do we make a difference?

We work at multiple levels throughout education systems and society, which together will achieve deep and long-lasting change for young people. We design learning experiences and initiatives that are fun and engaging, including hundreds of free coding and computing projects, the Coolest Projects showcase for young tech creators, and the European Astro Pi Challenge, which gives young people the chance to run their computer programs in space.

Three learners working at laptops.

We also support teachers, youth workers, volunteers, and parents to develop their skills and knowledge, and equip them to inspire young people and help them learn. For example, The Computing Curriculum provides a complete bank of free lesson plans and other resources, and Experience AI is our educational programme that includes everything teachers need to deliver lessons on artificial intelligence and machine learning in secondary schools.

Finally, we aim to elevate the state of computing education globally by advocating for policy and systems change, and undertaking our own original research to deepen our understanding of how young people learn about computing.

How will we use our theory of change?

Our theory of change is an important part of our approach to evaluating the impact of our resources and programmes, and it informs all our monitoring and evaluation plans. These plans identify the questions we want to answer, key metrics to monitor, and the data sources we use to understand the impact we’re having and to gather feedback to improve our impact in future.

An educator teaches students to create with technology.

The theory of change also informs a shared outcomes framework that we are applying consistently across all of our products. This framework supports planning and helps keep us focused as we consider new opportunities to further our mission.

A final role our theory of change plays is to help communicate our mission to other stakeholders, and explain how we can work with our partners and communities to achieve change.

You can read our new theory of change here and if you have any questions or feedback on it, please do get in touch.

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The four elements of our focus on impact

Post Syndicated from Ben Durbin original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/our-focus-on-impact/

The mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation is to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. That’s what we say in our 2025 strategy. But how can we be sure we’re succeeding?

Learners at a CoderDojo coding club.
Participants at a CoderDojo in England.

In our strategy we also identify one of our values as being ‘focussed on impact’. This means that we are committed to learning from the best available evidence, and to being rigorous and transparent about the difference we’re making.

Children in a Code Club in India.
Participants at a Code Club in India.

Like all our values, our focus on impact infuses all of our work, and it is led by a dedicated impact team. This blog outlines four ways in which we put this value into practice in pursuit of our mission.

1. Do the right things

It doesn’t matter how fast you run, if you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’ll never get to your destination. We use data to prioritise our resources where we can make the biggest difference for young people.

For example, we use national statistics from the UK to assess how many of the Code Clubs and CoderDojos we support in the UK run in places where they can reach young people facing educational disadvantage, so that we can adopt an evidence-based approach to better serving these young people.

A child at a laptop in a classroom in rural Kenya.
Learners in a classroom in Kenya.

And we know many of the young people who face the greatest barriers to accessing computing education and developing new skills and confidence live in countries with low- and middle-income economies. That’s why we are building new partnerships in India, Kenya, and South Africa and adapting our resources and programmes for the contexts of educators and learners living there.

2. Measure what matters

We’re really excited that we’ll soon be publishing an updated Theory of Change, which captures how we make an impact. This will be the foundation for Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) plans for all of our initiatives, where we specify their goals and set down what kinds of data we will collect to make sure we have the measure of whether the initiatives are succeeding.

A learner and a faciliator in a classroom learning digital skills.
A learner and facilitator in a classroom in Kakuma refugee camp.

Strong M&E is equally important for our established programmes and our new pilot initiatives. Code Club, the worldwide network of free, after-school coding clubs for 9- to 13-year-olds we support, has been growing for more than 10 years. Durham University’s Evidence Centre for Education is currently conducting an independent evaluation of UK-based Code Clubs to help us understand how to better support Code Club volunteers and learners around the world. We ourselves recently evaluated the pilot of a new programme we designed in partnership with Amala Education to deliver a vocational skills course for displaced learners aged 16 to 25 in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

3. Keep getting better

Data is only useful if it’s translated into insights that are acted upon. We use the findings from evaluations to inform the design and continual improvement of all our initiatives.

Teachers in Code Club training in Odisha, India.
Teachers in Code Club training in India.

For example, the evaluation of our pilot vocational skills training in Kakuma refugee camp provided insights that have helped us adapt the programme for a second cohort of young people. The same was true of the M&E insights we gained from our partnership with Mo Schools in Odisha, India, where we have provided training and support to 1075 teachers to establish Code Clubs. Informed by survey data and informal feedback each step of the way, we are now gradually scaling up our support towards launching a more intensive computing and coding programme in 2000 schools in Odisha this year.

Young learners at computers in a classroom.
Learners in a UK primary school classroom.

Side by side with our M&E results, we also rely on the latest computing education research, conducted at the Foundation, in the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and by academic researchers around the world. Our groundbreaking research programme on gender balance in computing, and our ongoing research on culturally relevant pedagogy, are shaping the way we work to enable all young people to achieve their full potential in computing.

4. Tell people about it

We are proud of the difference we are making. We want everyone to hear about it and feel inspired to get involved in our vital mission for young people. Our annual reviews are packed full of statistics and overviews of the difference we’re making, and we’re creating a growing video series of unique stories from people in the community we support. Watch this space for news about our updated Theory of Change, our next annual review, and more blogs about our impact.

A learner and a volunteer at a CoderDojo coding club.
A participant and a volunteer at a CoderDojo in England.

By doing these four things well, we can be confident that we are enabling young people to achieve their potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.

If you share our passion for impact and think our mission is important, why not get involved today? You can:

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Test our new Code Editor for young people

Post Syndicated from Phil Howell original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/code-editor-beta-testing/

We are building a new online text-based Code Editor to help young people aged 7 and older learn to write code. It’s free and designed for young people who attend Code Clubs and CoderDojos, students in schools, and learners at home.

The interface of the beta version of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Code Editor.
The Code Editor interface

At this stage of development, the Code Editor enables learners to:

  • Write and run Python code right in their browser, with no setup required. The interface is simple and intuitive, which makes getting started with text-based coding easier.
  • Save their code using their Raspberry Pi Foundation account. We want learners to easily build on projects they start in the classroom at home, or bring a project they’ve started at home to their coding club.
A young person at a CoderDojo uses the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Code Editor.

We’ve chosen Python as the first programming language our Code Editor supports because it is popular in schools, CoderDojos, and Code Clubs. Many educators and young people like Python because they see it as similar to the English language. It is often the text-based language young people learn when they take their first steps away from a block-based programming environment, such as Scratch. 

Python is also widely used by professional programmers and usually tops at least one of the industry-standard indexes that ranks programming languages.

Start coding in Python

We will be adding support for web development languages (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) to the Editor in the near future.

We’re also planning to add features such as project sharing and collaboration, which we know young people will love. We want the Editor to be safe, accessible, and age-appropriate. As safeguarding is always at the core of what we do, we’ll only make new features available once we’ve ensured they comply with the ICO’s age-appropriate design code and our safeguarding policies.

Test the Code Editor and tell us what you think

We are inviting you to test the Code Editor as part of what we call the beta phase of development. As the Editor is still in development, some things might not look or work as well as we’d like — and this is why we need your help. 

A text output in the beta version of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Code Editor.
Text output in the Code Editor

We’d love you to try the Editor out and let us know what worked well for you, what didn’t work well, and what you’d like to see next.

You can now try out the Code Editor in the first two projects of our ‘Intro to Python’ path. We’ve included a feedback form for you to let us know which project you tried, and what you think of the Editor. We’d love to hear from you.

I want to try the Code Editor

Your feedback helps us decide what to do next. Based on what learners, educators, volunteers, teachers, and parents tell us, we will make the improvements to the Editor that matter most to the young people we aim to support.

Where next for the Code Editor?

One of our long-term goals is to engage millions of young people in learning about computing and how to create with digital technologies. We’re developing the Code Editor with three main aims in mind.

1. Supporting young people’s learning journeys

We aim to build the Code Editor so it:

  • Suits beginners and also supports them as their confidence and independence grows, so they can take on their own coding projects in a familiar environment
  • Helps learners to transition from block-based to text-based, informed by our deep understanding of pedagogy and computing education
  • Brings together projects instructions and code editing into a single interface so that young people do not have to switch screens, which makes coding easier

2. Removing barriers to accessing computing education

Our work on the Code Editor will:

  • Ensure it works well on mobile and tablet devices, and low-cost computers including the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB
  • Support localisation and translation, so we can tailor the Editor for the needs of young people all over the world

3. Making learning to program engaging for more young people

We want to offer a Code Editor that:

  • Enables young people to build a vast variety of projects because it supports graphic user interface output and supplies images and sprites for use in multimedia projects

We’re also planning on making the Editor available as an open source project so that other projects and organisations focussed on helping people learn to code can benefit. More on this soon.

Our work on the Code Editor has been generously funded by the Algorand Foundation and Endless, and we thank them for their generous support. If you are interested in partnering with us to fund this key work, please reach out to us via email.

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Introducing raspberrypi.com

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/introducing-raspberrypicom/

I am delighted to announce the launch of raspberrypi.com — a new website dedicated to Raspberry Pi computers and associated technologies. Head on over to find all about our low-cost, high-performance PCs, add-on boards or HATs, microcontrollers, accessories, and much more. 

As well as being able to learn about and purchase the full range of hardware products, on the new website you can download our latest software, find detailed technical documentation, connect with the community on the forums, and read the latest news about Raspberry Pi technologies and how they’re being used to change the world. 

What’s changing at raspberrypi.org

This website (raspberrypi.org) will continue to be the home for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and all of our educational initiatives to help young people learn about computers and how to create with digital technologies.

That includes online resources to help young people learn how to code, information about our networks of Code Clubs and CoderDojos, training and support for teachers and other educators, and access to the world’s leading-edge research into computing education.

You’ll still be able to find loads of resources about Raspberry Pi computers in education, and cool opportunities for young people to learn how to code and create with Raspberry Pi technologies, whether that’s our space programme Astro Pi, or building robots with Raspberry Pi Pico.

Why the change?

When raspberrypi.org was first launched as a WordPress blog in 2011, we were talking about a low-cost, programmable computer that was being designed for education. 

Fast-forward a decade, and we are now speaking about an increasingly broad range of technology and education products and services to industry, hobbyists, educators, researchers, and young people. While there is lots of overlap between those communities and their interests, it is becoming increasingly difficult to address everyone’s needs on one website. So this change is really all about making life easier for you. 

We will continue to provide lots of links and connections between the two sites to make sure that you can easily find what you’re looking for. As ever, we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below. 

Connect with us on our new social media channels

Alongside the changes to the websites, we’re also launching new social channels that are focused on the Foundation’s educational initiatives. We look forward to seeing you there.

Twitter
Instagram
Facebook
LinkedIn

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Celebrating the community: Yolanda

Post Syndicated from Katie Gouskos original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/community-stories-yolanda-payne-educator-equity/

So far in our series of community stories, we’ve collaborated with young people from the UK, India, and Romania who are getting creative with technology to change the world around them.

Yolanda Payne.

Our next community story comes from a highly regarded community member who has been connecting young people with opportunities to learn and create with technology throughout her career. A US-based educator with over twenty years of experience, Yolanda Payne shares our mission to put computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.

“The biggest reason I’m so invested in technology is because people invested in me.”

Yolanda Payne

Meet Yolanda

Yolanda Payne is an educator you might recognise from our online courses. Based in Atlanta, Georgia in the USA, she’s passionate about making technology accessible to all and helping young people become technology creators.

Join us in celebrating Yolanda by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook! 

Yolanda says, “The biggest reason I’m so invested in technology is because people invested in me. They saw something that I was good at, showed me opportunities, and so in turn, that was my philosophy in teaching.” 

Yolanda got her first computer at a young age and was hooked instantly: it opened up many new opportunities and led her to choosing a career in education. She says, “The computer gives me the tools to be an artist, it gives me the tools to create things, and if it does that for me, then just imagine what it will do for kids!”

“If you give a teacher a Raspberry Pi and show them these resources, they’re going to be hooked.”

Yolanda Payne

Yolanda has spent her entire professional life dedicated to education. She gained a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Mississippi University for Women; a master’s degree in Instructional Technology from Mississippi State University; and Educational Specialist degrees from the University of Florida and the University of Georgia in Curriculum and Instruction, and in Language and Literacy.

A female computing educator with three female students at laptops in a classroom.

Throughout her twenty-one years as a classroom teacher and her time running Code Clubs, Yolanda found joy in supporting students who have multiple challenges or complex needs, and in seeing them thrive in the subject of computer science. Yolanda points out, “I worked with both students that were considered to be in special education and students that were gifted. And one of the biggest things that I saw that I don’t think people realise, especially about students in special education: they are used to solving problems. […] You’d be very surprised at how real-life problem-solving skills flow very easily into computer science.”

Yolanda now works as a Research Associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We are tremendously thankful for her contributions as an educator and an advocate for technology and young people. 

Please join us in celebrating her story by sharing it on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook! 

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