Raspberry Pi
Our partnership with Raspberry Pi will help young people develop skills in problem-solving, resilience and creativity, alongside key digital skills essential for today and tomorrow.
Raspberry Pi are passionate about inspiring and supporting your interest in digital making.
Sharing their skills and knowledge, Raspberry Pi will support you to develop your digital making skills. Making things with technology can help young people learn how to solve problems, build resilience, help their communities and express themselves.
Raspberry Pi has created a suite of resources to guide you through digital making.
Upcoming Digital Maker 'Train the Trainer' events
Volunteers are invited to join Raspberry Pi for Digital Maker introductory sessions going through all the steps you need to get started in coding and delivering the badge by completing one of our Scouts activities. The sessions are aimed at Scout leaders with absolutely no prior knowledge of coding - join us to find out more!
Next date: Wednesday 27 November 2024
This session will have a 'festive card' codealong, showing you how easy it is for you and your Scouts to create a digital card
Time: 7pm to 8pm
Sign up online here: Scouts Event registration (raspberrypi.org)
(Please note: these sections are for leaders rather than young people, and will be recorded for pre-registered attendees)
Badge and resources
We have been working hard to make sure that the badge is relevant and accessible. The activities presented here are relevant to Scouting, and we'll continue to release new activities that support the badge over the coming months. We are working to make the Digital Maker Staged Activity Badge accessible by providing every Scout leader with the confidence, support, and kit that enables you to offer the badge to your young people.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is committed to making the Digital Maker Staged Activity badge accessible, so you are able to complete the majority of our recommended resources using any desktop or laptop computer and without any specialist equipment (eg Raspberry Pi computers). You are also able to complete our "unplugged" resources without using any technology at all.
Keen to get stuck in?
Activities for Digital Maker
Get your Digital Maker Activity Badges
Visit Scout StoreAlternative ways to access equipment
If your group doesn't have access to Raspberry Pis or any of the kit needed to run the activities there are a number of places you can speak to:
- Schools and libraries - your local school or library may have a computer suite you can take your group to, or equipment you can borrow.
- Code Club and CoderDojo - these free local programming clubs already work with Scout groups across the UK to help run the Digital Maker programme.
These are great ways to run activities and get young people engaged in digital making.
Information guides
A lot of our activities use Scratch, a programming, or coding, tool designed for children. You can use it to create games, stories and animations and program with art, music and sound. If you don’t have access to the internet in your meeting place, you’ll need to do a small amount of preparation with the laptops you’ll be using. Full instructions are included in each activity, but you need to download Scratch from the Scratch download page.
You can read more in our How to use Scratch guide, but the best way to understand it is to try it!
Stage 2 and 3 introduce the use of Micro:bit for several activities, you can read our How to use the Micro:bit guide for help!
We also have a guide to setting up the Raspberry Pi.
Leader training livestream
To watch in full screen, double click the video
We have a lot more planned for our partnership with the Scout Association, including supporting leaders at events, finding more ways to help you all get access to exciting kit, and building confidence with specialist volunteers.
If there are any questions in the meantime, please email scouts@raspberrypi.org.
About Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi Foundation works to put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world. Making things with technology can help young people learn how to solve problems, build resilience, help their communities and express themselves. The Raspberry Pi Foundation now runs the world’s largest network of volunteer-led computing clubs (Code Clubs and CoderDojos) and creates free educational resources that are used by millions of young people all over the world to learn how to create with digital technologies.