The Raspberry Jam movement was initially created to foster a community, one that had just found the Raspberry Pi and wanted to learn more about it. In the early days, it was somewhere you could actually get your hands on a Raspberry Pi. The original shortage was due to many thousands of eager makers wanting one of the first 10,000 boards. Back then, I remember learning about the Raspberry Pi and over time I learned enough to teach others. One of those was a young person called Josh Lowe.
Their first project was an operating system emulator in Scratch, then they started to learn Python and it snowballed from there. In a few years, they went from young coder to creating Edublocks (https:// edublocks.org), a block-based coding platform that creates Python code using blocks. It wasn’t limited to just a Pi; it would also work with Adafruit boards and the BBC micro:bit. After being used in schools across the world, Edublocks has become a promising tool for educators and those looking to learn coding – without the scary typing bit.
Fast-forward to 2023 and Lowe is now a senior software engineer and Edublocks has been acquired by Anaconda, a Python/R platform for data science, machine learning and AI. Did I mention that Lowe is only 19? This goes to show that learning to code, learning to think creatively and not giving up can be the best decisions you ever make.