Page 82 - Raspberry Pi as a Foundation for Boosting Computer and Technology Literacy

6 Programming on the Raspberry Pi
construct more complex programs. As a result, they can undertake a
wide array of tasks, ranging from animating sprites, playing sounds –
and, thus, creating games – to interfacing with GPIO pins. Moreover,
Scratch enables its users to share their projects online, subsequently
making them available for import and use by others.
Presently (i.e. in 2024), the most recent version of Scratch is Scratch
3, accessible both online and through an offline desktop client (Scratch
Foundation, n.d.-a). The Scratch 3 desktop application is official-
ly available on the majority of systems, with the exception of Linux
(Scratch Foundation, n.d.-c). However, due to the collaborative efforts
of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the Scratch Foundation, a version
of Scratch 3 has been developed specifically for the Raspberry Pi OS
(O’Hanlon 2019). Additionally, Raspberry Pi OS comes with the older
Scratch 1.4, which, however, lacks compatibility with the newer ver-
sion (Scratch Foundation, n.d.-b).

Mathematica
The non-exclusive license agreement between the Raspberry Pi Foun-
dation and Wolfram Research Inc. provides all Raspberry Pi users with
free access to a range of products for non-commercial purposes. As a
result, since 2013 the Raspberry Pi OS has been bundled with the Wolf-
ram programming language and Mathematica, creating a comprehen-
sive development environment (Wolfram 2013). Hence, Mathematica
(Wolfram, n.d.-a) serves as both a kernel and an IDE. It interprets and
returns the results of expressions in the Wolfram language (Wolfram
2017), a high-level programming language. However, in comparison to
all the aforementioned languages and tools, both Mathematica and its
language are entirely proprietary.
In general, Mathematica could be used for various technical appli-
cations, encompassing ‘neural networks, machine learning, image
processing, geometry, data science, visualizations and much more’
(Wolfram, n.d.-b). Additionally, the owners of Raspberry Pi devices are
presented with a selection of comprehensive projects available in tuto-
rial format (Raspberry Pi Foundation, n.d.-a).

Sonic Pi
Sonic Pi (Aaron 2020) is a music synthesizer software that, similarly to
Scratch and Mathematica, provides a live development environment
enabling users to write and execute code in real time. However, rath-

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