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Raspberry Jamboree 2013

Manchester recently held the first ever Raspberry Pi conference – Raspberry Jamboree, held at Manchester Central. It’s been a year since the launch of the Pi, and this event was to review what we did in the last year, and look forward to what we’re going to do this year and in the future.

The day kicked off at 10.30 with an opening talk from organiser Alan O’Donahoe, followed by a wonderful keynote from BBC Micro pioneer Steve Furber. The first session of talks featured Andrew Robinson (creator of PiFace), Carrie Anne Philbin (from Geek Gurl Diaries) and CERN‘s William Bell (talking about MagPi). Meanwhile, in another conference track, a hands-on workshop was being led by Mike Hewitson (LateRooms) and Pete Lomas (Raspberry Pi Foundation).

Up next was a panel discussion with Raspberry Jam organisers and attendees – including Lisa Mather, Dawn Hewitson, Ben Smith, Jack Wearden and myself. We introduced ourselves and discussed what Jams are, how they work and what we think about them, and answered questions from the audience:

One of the things that came out of this was when asked where teachers and Jam organisers could get material from to teach coding or run activities, the panel suggested using existing online resources like Codecademy and asking for help on Twitter, and I said that between the community we should strive to make resources available for this kind of use. I suggested anyone interested get together with me to discuss creating a central repository for programming tools and exercises for the classroom, code clubs or for personal skills development – using GitHub as an example platform for how this could feasibly happen and have contributions of new projects and improvements of existing ones, and making it easy for teachers to download and use. Since the Jamboree I’ve been in talks with a few people regarding this. All I can say right now is watch this space – or, better – email me your thoughts if you’re interested.

After lunch I got to see Raspberry Pi Foundation evangelist Rob Bishop speak about what’s going on with them, which was fantastic. He’s a wonderful enthusiastic speaker and I really felt the energy of what this is all for. I got a bit carried away with this tweet:

Next up was Paul Hallet, whose project DjangoPi had caught my attention when it was announced last year. That’s one of the great thing about the Jamboree – we’d all heard of all these names but never met most of them, so it was amazing to have everyone all together in one room where you could put names to faces, shake a few hands and pat people on the back! Paul’s talk was on crowdsource funding for projects, and he went over the story of his projects such as DjangoPi and the coding club he ran in a local school. Great going for an undergraduate student! He already has a fantastic CV!

Following Rob and Paul was one of the Manchester Raspberry Jam regulars – a 13 year old who goes by the alias ‘Mini Girl Geek’. Amy Mather was asked to present a project she and I started at a Jam in December – Conway’s Game of Life. What began as a simple Python programming exercise turned in to a really interesting project involving pygame, Raspberry Pi, Arduino and an LED matrix display! Amy’s talk was extremely well received, she was praised by all and congratulated personally by the likes of Paul Beech, Rob Bishop and Pete Lomas! As one of the adults who has guided her along the way, I’m very proud of her for giving this talk and can say she did so professionally – a thoroughly enjoyable talk. Now watch it!

It’s since been featured on the Raspberry Pi blog and in the Pycoders Weekly newsletter!

A closing address from Alan rounded things up and a few of us headed to the nearby Pizza Express. After a mishap with their machine not accepting my (perfectly valid) card, Alan pulled a few strings and persuaded them to accept slightly less cash than than the value of the meal, we hastily moved on. Most of the group headed home but a few of us stayed out and proceeded to Brewdog where we later met up with Rob, Paul, Carrie Anne, Simon and Andrew and the others. We had a great night getting better acquainted with each other – as I said, many of us knew each other by online personalities only so it was interesting to speak in person for a change. We also dished out a few dozen Raspberry Pi coasters around the bar. I had a fantastic day and really enjoyed socialising in the evening. I tweeted this the following morning:

Thanks to Alan for organising the event, to Les & team for their work on getting the videos recorded (and live streamed!), to all speakers and attendees and to the sponsors for making the event possible – CPC, Bytemark, BCS Manchester, Frogtrade, OCR & PC Pro.

You can see all the videos from the day on Alan’s YouTube account (or download the video files from Bytemark Jamboree Download Centre)

Update: here’s a video summing up the Jamboree: