Page 68 - Raspberry Pi as a Foundation for Boosting Computer and Technology Literacy

5 Raspberry Pi usage
to be simple and instruction-led. They also found that the manage-
ment and tech support of Raspberry Pi computers was often the re-
sponsibility of teachers, not technicians.

Tertiary education
Many HEIs provide curricula and project repositories that are val-
uable for education purposes and often incorporate complex and
specialized uses of the Raspberry Pi in different academic fields. The
 Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre was established
as a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the Rasp-
berry Pi Foundation with the aim of increasing their understanding
of teaching and learning computing, computer science, and associated
subjects.
Limbo, Nhinda and Sverdlik (2017) proposed replacing desk-
top-based instruction in university-level introductory programming
classes with the Raspberry Pi, stating that the small and cheap SoC is
important as a microprocessor-based embedded system.
Many researchers see the following advantages of using Raspberry
Pi in their research over available commercial solutions:

• Large processing power on a compact board
• Large number of dedicated interfaces (UART, I2C, SPI, I2S, CSI,
DSI) to connect a wide range of sensors and electrical components
• High connectivity (HDMI, USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth)
• Reasonable price, ranging from as little as €5 (RPi Zero; €90 for
the RPi 5, 8 GB)
• High ease of use with a huge user community, extensive resourc-
es, and easy-to-understand tutorials
• Works both headless and as a full desktop computer
• Is open source
• Is being constantly improved and does not become obsolete
• No extensive programming experience is required and it has a
short learning curve, but some trial-and-error can be expected
• Easy to deploy and highly portable due to its size
• Long-term automated image and video recording with high cus-
tomization
• Built-in HDMI capable graphics (up to two times 4K for latest
models)

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