Thousands of children in the UK are to receive free Raspberry Pi computers to encourage them to develop programming skills.
A total of 15,000 of the credit card-sized, bare-bones systems will be given away in a collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google.
Speaking at Chesterton Community College in Cambridge, where a group of students received the first batch of free machines, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said he hoped the project would lead to more children and young people learning to write code.
"Britain's innovators and entrepreneurs have changed the world", he said. "The telephone, television and computers were all invented here. We've been working to encourage the next generation of computer scientists, and we hope that this donation of Raspberry Pis to British school pupils will help drive a new wave of innovation."
Schmidt, a vocal critic of the UK's computing curriculum, attacked the lack of attention paid to programming in his 2011 MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Tuesday's event saw him deliver a programming lesson to students alongside Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton.
Upton said the partnership with Google could reverse the decline in students applying to study computing science at British universities, where applications have dropped by almost a quarter in the last decade.
Source: The Guardian
