User groups.................
Enthusiastic speeches from passionate makers.
Les Pounder looks forward to a new Raspberry Jamboree in 2017.
The Raspberry Jamboree was originally created by Alan “Teknoteacher” O’Donohoe, who started the Raspberry Jam revolution. But it had been left dormant for a few years and in that time the Raspberry Pi Foundation had founded their own annual event: The Raspberry Pi Party. But the Raspberry Jamboree returned in late May 2017 and found a new home, Manchester’s Central Library. This one-day unconference had two streams of talks, and in true unconference style the delegates were the ones talking about their projects, passions and problems.
The Raspberry Jamboree was well attended with over 120 people taking part, and only a few days after the Manchester terrorist attack.
There was also a single track of workshops, preselected and run by children and adults from the community. We saw workshops from popular presenters such as Martin O’Hanlon, who talked about writing object-oriented Python code, Katherine Childs, who talked about using the micro:bit to create a geocache hunt and Joshua Lowe who talked about his Python-based language Edublocks.
The quality of talks on offer was superb. We heard from children such as Elise and Cerys, who are leading the way creating groups and clubs for children to experience the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers. It’s great to see children taking charge of creating spaces for others to use: they are the next generation of makers, hackers and tinkerers who will one day be organising conferences and events.
The attendees enjoyed the Raspberry Jamboree, and there are already plans for it to return in 2018.