Using a Raspberry Pi 4 or 400 for School

in this video we're going to talk about the raspberry pi computer system and how it can help us in education and i'm a big fan of raspberry pi so i'm going to be a little bit positive i'm going to be pretty gushing about these systems and i'm assuming that you're interested in raspberry pi maybe you've heard of them before or maybe you're even an expert in raspberry pi's and just want to see what this video is all about it's about using raspberry pi's in school so feel free to check out the comments down below and help answer any questions if you have a lot of experience with these devices so you'll notice first of all that i have two boxes in front of me so let's have a look at what a raspberry pi is let's look at a couple of options we have for buying a raspberry pi then let's take a look at how we might be able to use them in a school environment we'll talk about some of the limitations of a raspberry pi but we're going to mostly talk about how they can be beneficial so i have two boxes in front of me you'll notice a small box in a big box there's no tricks here but what's the difference between them i guess first of all the raspberry pi is really just a circuit board so these are two exactly the same computers this is a four gigabyte raspberry pi this is a four gigabyte raspberry pi this one is called the raspberry pi 4 and this one is called the raspberry pi 400. the big difference between these two is that this one here does not include a keyboard or a mouse this one's built into a keyboard and includes a mouse so they're the exact same computer from a functional standpoint this one just is a little bit more of a complete computer kit where it includes a keyboard and includes a mouse but for all intents and purposes they're the same system they have the same functionality now these kits here that don't include the keyboard you can also get an 8 gig version of the raspberry pi which a lot of people that are enthusiasts around raspberry pi will get the 8 gig version uh this one here that option is not available maybe there'll be a new version that comes out that does offer an 8 gig with the integrated keyboard but for now they're they're separate and that's one of the advantages of of this kit now i picked up an old keyboard i was able to pick this up for about twenty dollars canadian fifteen dollars us i picked up a keyboard of course i had an old mouse lying around in my box of things i should have recycled but one day i would need them this is that day so i have an old keyboard i have an old mouse that i can use with this raspberry pi kit i can also with a monitor these connect up to a television anything with an hdmi port you will find that you know those can be very inexpensive especially if you get a smaller dimension monitor or television you can actually find those sometimes at secondhand shops or if you have pawn shops in your area just look for a smaller one something that's 17 or 20 inches can be very very reasonable both of these systems will require you to get that television you may already already you might already have that television so what's the difference between the two and how can we buy them i'll put a link to a kit i'm not going to put a link to this particular kit because i found this was a little bit overpriced and their 8 gig kit is actually kind of ridiculously priced at least on amazon up here in canada this one here is very reasonable it's about a hundred and forty dollars for this one it's about a hundred and twenty dollars canadian for these so the price would be a little bit less in the us but you can get this under a hundred dollars u.s right around of a hundred dollars us for this one here let's take a look at what's in each of these kits so let's take a look at this particular little kit now this is the first time that i bought a kit by this particular manufacturer there are a number of different companies that will package together these little kits and i may have bought it from a reseller off amazon i don't know it was a little more expensive than i would like anyways but i could check out their website maybe but if i look at it you'll notice that i have this little box here when we open up the top here you'll see i can already see that i've got the computer itself and i've got the case here so let's take out the case first so if i take out the case you can see it's a very nice little case this one here is a logo so it's red and white the colors of the of the the pi itself so we got the red and white you'll notice that there are slots in the case for different ports so i'll have the micro sd card here i will have the back end ports i'll have an ethernet port gigabit ethernet port usb 3 usb 2 and i'll have slots for hdmi and for audio video and for power so nice little case i like the case quite a bit but there is something i don't like about this case that's coming up and then we'll have the cord here so this particular cord again it's branded raspberry pi cord it's a micro hdmi to hdmi cable no sense taking that out of the plastic we'll have the computer itself so this is my little raspberry pi 4 model b 4 gigs of ram and inside is the circuit board we'll have a look at that in just a moment then i'll have another cable in here this is a power cable so this power cable is nice actually because it has a little switch in there that's going to allow me to switch it on and off without having to plug and unplug it it also comes with a little micro sd card and the adapter so micro sd to sd card and if i look here it's actually a little card here you can see it's a little there's a little tiny 32 gig card that'll have the operating system already pre-installed for me it'll be this card that goes into the raspberry pi but you want to hang on to this because if you ever need to reinstall the operating system you can use this with another computer and you can download a little utility that will allow you to install other operating systems including things like gaming operating systems and then we go in here reach into my little box here it's very exciting oh we have a raspberry pi case fan it's just a case fan so i'm not going to open that up any further and then we have the raspberry pi power supply it's the official power supply again it's really nice because it's on brand so you can see here that it's got the raspberry pi logo on it and it's white so i have a nice little kit here let's have a look at the raspberry pi which is actually this is the board itself so you can pick up if you just want the board itself and you don't want any of these accruaments maybe it's the second or third or fourth raspberry pi you're buying you already have all this stuff you just want to get a circuit board and so if i open up the board here so let's get that opened up you'll see here that i have the raspberry pi itself and a little bit of documentation how to work with it so a little raspberry pi safety and user guide and a little part of how to work with it not not a lot of documentation now here we have the ports the usb the us usb usb 3 the ethernet port so that'll fit in the case audio again the same ports here is that gpio port so this is a whole bunch of pins that allow me to do things like control robots do all sorts of neat things but that's where this case comes into play this case will not expose these pins these pins will be buried inside the case so if i'm just using it as a general purpose computer that's great but if i want to do any type of electronics work where i want to connect into the gpio then that's going to require me to open the case you can i see a lot of folks that will actually run the case just like this so they'll put the raspberry pi into the case and then they'll they'll just just run it like this so you can pop it on and off quite easily work with those different pins there but it can be a little bit of a challenge so just something to bear in mind but again you can also get the eight gig version which is uh just a few dollars more but a little bit more powerful and for a lot of people that are you know doing hobbies like working with uh actuators and all that sort of fun stuff they're going to they're going to put they're going to mount that might mount that into their project mount that onto mounted onto a lot of things very powerful little computer so that's uh that's this case here that's this kit here okay so let's take a look at the 400 this is a little bit of a nicer kit i really do prefer this one especially if i'm giving this to somebody so we'll take out the outer sleeve and we'll open up the kit itself so on the kit here when you first open it up it's going to be the keyboard so this is your computer this particular keyboard if you look at the back here let's just turn it around a little easier to see you'll see that all of my gpio ports are exposed i really like that you'll see that my micro sd card is already inserted so it's just ready to be connected up and powered on i have two hdmi mini hdmi ports just a quick note you want to connect to the first one first and the second one second first one being the one closest uh sorry other way around first one being the one closest to the power supply second one being furthest away from the power supply connector there's the power supply connector usb 3 usb 2 gigabit ethernet i really like this for a lot of reasons one it looks great but also the gpio is exposed so you can sit there and this this will become your computer it's actually a nice keyboard it's actually quite a nice keyboard to work with now inside of the kit besides that we have a couple of other important elements we have the raspberry pi power supply so this is going to be similar to the other kit in fact it's the exact same power supply so you can see here exact same power supply that we saw in the other kit maybe a little bit of a different box there we also have the raspberry pi official mouse so it's a cute little mouse oh it's sealed up so we're gonna have to grab a pair of scissors here so we're just gonna cut the plastic on there and so the mouse is a little red and white mouse here it's quite nice you know it's a comfortable little mouse it's not you know some lightweight gaming mouse but usb mouse and that'll be nice to have as our pointing device and a white and red mouse there and then this always comes out it's supposed to be sitting in here but it always comes out this is just the micro sd to sd adapter it's not populated there's nothing in there because it's already as i showed you a few moments ago that card is already in the raspberry pi and then underneath this if i pull this out is i slide it out here is a power okay or sorry a video cable so this here is uh again the micro hdmi to hdmi and then also with this one you get a very nice book so we have this book so this is a very nice book it's the official raspberry pi beginner's guide it is the fourth edition which is for the 400 and the whole first part of this book just talks about raspberry pi's gives you a lot of information on them this is great for somebody that's just getting well getting started with the raspberry pi talks about what you can expect notice that the case here is actually the case that came in the other kit but it talks about the raspberry pi 400 setup talks about working with the software talks about some of the things that you can do here some little projects that you can do some programming projects talks about electronic projects you can do you would have to buy the little leds and the resistors in order to do this but those are also available and fairly inexpensive so this here if if somebody was to get a raspberry pi 400 and work through this book they would actually know an awful lot about computers they would be in really good shape they'd be doing some fun fun things so there's a lot of different things you can do this is a great read and i recommend that for anybody who gets the beautiful raspberry pi 4. so now that we know what comes with each of these kits and how they're basically equivalent let's have a little bit of a look at what exactly we can do with a raspberry pi now when it comes to these systems i think what we really need to do is is change from a hardware specifications mindset into a functional specification mindset so if we have a younger learner or even a learner that's a little bit older what do they actually use a computer for and in a school setting it's actually not that much they use the computers in order to learn how to create documents you can do that with a raspberry pi how to create maybe presentations you can do that with a raspberry pi to go on to the internet to research different subjects across the you can do that with a raspberry pi to take notes you can do that with a raspberry i'm just i'm not going to say you can do that with a raspberry pi all of these things you can do with a raspberry pi you can program learn how to program in multiple different languages using these devices you can you can do some things with raspberry pi's that you can't do very easily with a traditional desktop or laptop system they have a gpio general purpose input output port on here where you can actually go in and connect up to motors actuators sensors you can connect up to a number of different devices so you can use these as as the heart of a iot internet of things project maker projects robotic projects you could build weather stations by connecting to weather sensors motion detectors there's so many things you can do with these that are they're really good learning activities for for kids but the basics you know creating documents going onto the internet watching educational videos you can do all of these things with the raspberry pi another great advantage of the low cost is that you're also able to give more people access to a resource on a more frequent basis so instead of having to share a single expensive resource you can give students their own resource so that you can have concurrent access to say an online course you don't have to wait until somebody else is finished with the resource you can have that resource dedicated just to you now one of the things you're not really going to do with a raspberry pi is use it as a modern gaming system or use it as a video editing suite or use it as uh you know music editing there are limitations related to graphics and raw processing power however you can play games you can play minecraft natively within the operating system you can also install a whole new operating system called retropie which will allow you to play arcade games and console games from the 80s 90s early 2000s the nice thing about that is because they have a micro sd card slot you can put that operating system on a micro sd card turn off the system put in that operating system slot or put in the micro sd card boot the system and it boots right into that operating system so it's very easy to switch out between different operating systems and there are several for the raspberry pi now you might say well you know my students need to be able to work on microsoft office not a problem you can use the online version of microsoft office connect through a web interface works just fine using raspberry pi you're not going to install office natively on the raspberry pi but you can still access the web version which is pretty full featured some people will say well i need to be able to connect up to a specific windows program you can use the raspberry pi to connect up to something like office 3 or microsoft windows 365 so as you can see i was able to take control of a windows 365 pc do whatever i needed to do without having to go out and buy an expensive machine for that connection now that being said it is important to be aware of windows 365 the system i was connecting to is pretty much monthly the same cost as buying a raspberry pi board so if it's provided by your employer or if it's provided by the school that can be a really great way to give somebody an inexpensive computer and allow them to connect up to a more powerful windows system that's controlled by the it department one of the things i like about the 400 and it kind of doesn't get said as much i don't think is that they're beautifully packaged they're a really nice package you can give this to someone a child as a gift as their first computer and they're going to feel good about this system they're gonna be like this is my computer this is my own computer you know i now have a system of my own that i can use i can learn i can program i can do things i can play minecraft and it's a sense of ownership and a sense of pride that i think has value it's a confidence it sounds crazy i know i don't want to go too far into this this is a confidence building gift this is something you can give to a child and it builds confidence because it's not terribly expensive but it's exceptionally functional and it's powerful in that regard so i i think that's a good thing i hope you found that interesting but i'm interested in you are you using a raspberry pi right now what are you using it for are you planning on getting one what would you like to use it for comment down below and maybe we can as a community talk a little bit about how raspberry pi's might be a useful tool within existing classrooms or to get people into a computing environment at a low cost thank you so much for watching we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Learning and Technology with Frank

Views: 3,029

Keywords: edtech, education, raspberry pi, raspberry pi 4, raspberry pi 400, frank bergdoll, back to school, edtech classroom, raspberry pi 4 windows 365

Id: QL01fVCGIs8

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021