Mr. Heise
Hacking and learning some Python
After a few weeks setting up and learning the Raspberry Pis, they are coming alive and I want to give the students a little more independent control over them. Until now, I've been logging into students' devices remotely from my computer and typing the code snippets that students write on their behalf—like a 1960's secretary at IBM carrying the punch cards down to the mainframe in the basement for the programmers. But this week, I set up a terminal on the student computers so students can log in and remotely program their own Pis from school computers. They quickly figured out how to do the whole process on their own and edit Python files remotely to control the lights on their Pi, print outputs to the screen, etc. The first act of business was to change the default display for each Pi to jokes—"My name is bob" etc. A little goofy, but doing this involves writing and running 10 lines of code so it's not a bad exercise! Note to the parents—dust off those wifi routers because students will be asking you for the home wifi name and password to link their Pis to home networks.