Richard Wentk - Raspberry Pi For Kids For Dummies

Raspberry Pi For Kids For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941231

ISBN 978-1-119-04951-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-04982-1 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-04949-4 (ePub)

1. Table of Contents

How much do you know about computers? Most people can play games, watch videos, listen to music, and explore the Internet without knowing much at all. The computer just works, and thats all they care about.

Do you want to know more? What really happens when you click a mouse, press a key on a keyboard, click a link on a website, or launch an app?

And more how do you make a website? How do you make an app? Or a game?

Are these interesting questions? If not, thats totally fine. Not everyone gets excited about making things.

But if you do, heres a bigger question: How can you find the answers? A book like this one can help you get started, but figuring out how to find your own answers will get you further than reading someone elses ideas.

Understanding computers teaches you that its good to be able to solve puzzles, understand math, write code, and build things that are clever and useful. But its even better for helping you to know that you can learn how to do all these things.

Even if you dont really care about code, you can use coding as a way to check how good you are at learning something new.

Being able to find answers is more than half the problem. After youve researched a problem, you can add something of your own to the work everyone else has done. Sharing what you make helps everyone else, too.

Dont think of this book as a set of school problems. Its not about passing or failing. A lot of the projects are suggestions and ideas to get you started. Theyre not so much like step-by-step guides you can follow without understanding whats happening. For some of them, you need to break out of the book and find your own answers online.

Some of the projects are hard. If theyre too hard for you, its fine to think of simpler projects of your own and maybe come back to the hard projects later.

Or not. It doesnt matter as long as you are having fun and doing stuff you think is cool. Especially if you surprise yourself with what you can do.

So dont give up when you find something hard or decide youre stupid and should be doing something else. Heres a big secret: Everyone who writes code feels like that at least some of the time. No exceptions.

And heres another big secret: When you discover you can do something amazing, its totally worth it.

Raspberry Pi For Kids For Dummies introduces you to the world of the tiny Raspberry Pi computer.

Some people will tell you the Raspberry Pi was designed for kids and is easy to use. This isnt untrue, but its not totally true, either. In some ways, the Pi is very easy to use. In others, it can be harder than a Mac or a PC.

But the Pi is really good for learning how computers work on the inside and for building simple software and hardware projects. Its also good for learning more about learning, which means finding out how to do your own research on the Internet.

With this book as your guide, you will discover

• What a Raspberry Pi is
• How the different versions of the Pi have changed over time
• What extra parts you need and how much they cost
• Where to find the extra parts if you dont already have them
• How to connect them to your Pi
• What to do to download and install the latest software for a Pi
• How to power up a Pi
• Everything about working with the most important settings
• Why you need to power down a Pi safely
• The ins and outs of the Linux operating system
• How to use the Pis Linux desktop
• How to find files using the desktop File Manager
• What the different Linux directories do
• The difference between an ordinary user and the Linux god-user
• How to type Linux commands from the keyboard
• What you can do with Scratch, a simple programming system
• How to start creating a simple game in Scratch