CODING FOR KIDS AND Pi PEDAGOGY
One aspect of Raspberry Pi that for us is a never-ending source of the warm and fuzzies is that it introduced a whole lot of youngsters to programming. The Scratch language in particular introduces decisionmaking logic (if this, then that) with a friendly, visual approach, where coloured blocks (representing variables, functions and relations) are dragged and stuck together. This obviously is much more accessible than trying to understand complex syntax when you’re young.
Much of music theory can be couched in the language of mathematics, though this is unlikely to help any aspiring musician understand it. The aptly named Sonic Pi goes one better, and enables users (armed with the obligatory credit-card size computer) to create music with code. Its creator, Dr Sam Aaron and his live coded musical jams, have proven to be quite the hit with audiences across the globe. Sonic Pi is based on Ruby and the Supercollider (another Sam Aaron project) musical synthesis engine.
If you’re more about voxels than musical notes then you probably know where we’re going next. Minecraft: Pi Edition includes a rich Python API that makes it easy to make programs to influence the blocky world in which Minecraft’s Steve is imprisoned. If you already understand Cartesian co-ordinates (x-, y- and z-axes), then you’ll figure it out in no time. If not, intuitively named functions like getBlock() and setBlock() will help you find your way, and you’ll soon get your head around thinking in three dimensional block space.