Well, it happened – we held the first Raspberry Jam conference in Manchester on Saturday 9th March 2013.  Event details here for reference and you can look at our conference programme here. There were two principal aims of the conference, but with more emphasis on the first aim:

1. One year on since the general release of the Raspberry Pi computer, we planned to identify successful examples of how it is changing computing education for the better. We particularly encouraged those with an interest in education to attend.

2. We also shared successful Jam-making practice. As Raspberry Jams continue to spread far around the World, we shared what a successful Raspberry Jam tastes like, the most successful recipes and the best ingredients so you can have a wonderful Jam in your area.

In this film from our closing Key Note, 13 year old Amy describes her passion for programming, she then explains how she met up with Ben Nuttall, a software developer and organiser of our Manchester Raspberry Jam and with his support she created a simulation of Conway’s Game of Life.

In this film recorded at the Jamboree, teacher Carrie Anne Philbin explains how attending the London Raspberry Jam helped her to see what kind of projects people are developing for their Raspberry Pi computers and in turn led to her developing some resources for teaching computing in her own classroom. .

A total of 365 people attended our Raspberry Jamboree, some of them travelling from across Europe and the Middle East and 140 registered for our webcast with about 50 – 80 people watching throughout the day. The webcast and recordings were provided by GloCast and I will be releasing these on YouTube over the next few days. Just some of the talks are here on this site, but more will be available on my Teknoteacher YouTube channel. This is a link to my photographs from the day, but there are many more elsewhere too.

Many people have written their own blog posts about the event and there was a double page article in the Times Educational Supplement on 15/3/2013, I recommend you read the following blog posts by Developer Nick Tollervey, Guardian Developer Blog, Enthusiast Jason Barnett, 11 year old Amy Appler’s blogpost, Computer Scientist Duncan Hull, Teacher Carrie Anne Philbin, Developer Gordon Henderson and Jon Archer. We also have some recordings from the livestream video cast of our ‘Slices of Pi’ room kindly managed by Digital Tree streaming.

Next year we are planning to hold an even bigger event over 3 days from Thursday 27th February to Saturday 1st March 2014 with many more ‘hands-on’ classes. Sometime between Friday 28th Feb and Saturday 1st March we will be celebrating the 2nd Birthday of the Raspberry Pi. Put it in your diary now.

Our graphics were created by the wonderful Peter Blatchford of LimeKnight & London Raspberry Jam

Alan O’Donohoe @teknoteacher writes: Around 70 children, parents and teachers had a great time at the London Raspberry Jam organised by parent Paul Evans on Thursday 3rd January. In the few days before Christmas, Paul imagined that there would be many Raspberry Pi computers in Christmas stockings leaving the recipients of these gifts a little puzzled.

It had always been my aim with Raspberry Jam to encourage a broad range of ages and expertise to attend these events, so I was especially keen to support Paul with the organisation of this event. Many of the previous events have taken place on school nights, which makes the events less accessible to children.

We started the event with an ice breaker devised by Paul. He had commisioned some specially designed badges to help people identify their roles, eg. ‘noob’, ‘iTeach’, ‘hacker inside’, ‘only here because somebody forced me’.

There were three workshops on offer for everyone. Rob Bishop of the Raspberry Pi Foundation entertained our audience with ideas for projects and encouraged people to go out and build stuff.

Andrew Robinson brought his Pi Face hardware controller project. As well as running a workshop demonstrating hardware control using Scratch, he demonstrated how you could use a Raspberry Pi to control the lights on the Mozilla Christmas tree.

I (Alan O’Donohoe) ran a tutorial for families showing how to create quizes and random games with their Rasberry Pi using Python one of the programming languages supported.

One challenge we faced was having enough displays for everyone to enjoy a ‘hands on’ experience. It takes a certain amount of dedication to carry a TV in a box 500 miles and across London using only public transport. Luckily, as well as all the Raspberry Pi computers, we also had a number of other computers we were able to make use of.

There is an album of photos from the day here for you to view. If you are considering organising a Raspberry Jam event or you are a teacher who wants to know more about how to use the Raspberry Pi computer, I recommend you read about our Raspberry Jamboree event in March.

We are grateful to all our event sponsors Twilio, the Python Software Foundation and Mozilla our host and all those who supported our event by attending or contributing.

Alan O’Donohoe writes: Regularly you will hear me cry “Let’s spread this Jam”, so you can imagine I was over the moon this morning to hear from Masafumi Ohta that there is now a Raspberry Jam Tokyo group. They last met on 29th December and plan to meet every two months.

That’s certainly an interesting WiFi password on the board. There is a set of photos on Flickr, including this nifty little display unit that I imagine many people are going to want.

There are plenty of mouth watering photos of the amazing Raspberry themed refreshments they provided as well.

Providing refreshments is always a good idea to attract younger members along to Raspberry Jam events.

If you want to know more about the Raspberry Jam in Tokyo, you can reply to Masafumi Ohta’s message on the Raspberry Pi forum and Google Group for Japanese Pi owners.

Mohammed writes about Coventry Raspberry Jam, 22nd Sept. “Participants came early and enjoyed light refreshments including Samosas, Crisps, biscuits, chocolates and drinks were served and made available throughout the event.

We started the event with introduction of myself and our host and sponsor, Matt and CoventryPrinting.com. We went round the room introducing each person and answering why were here and what we would like to achieve today.

We had an interesting crowd of people. A couple and their kids who teach music education in a secondary school, a programmer with 20 years Microsoft experience and a retired ex-army engineer.

Initially, Matt introduced the Pi and went through the Raspi’s ports and how to get the basics setup of the Pi to get to a GUI stage. He discussed the various programming languages it supports and the difference between the server version of Linux and the GUI. All parties were highly interested in understanding the Terminal and not just the GUI side of Linux.

I then discussed my personal experience with the Pi, the various issues I had, installing Linux and getting the group to understand the Asterisk Open Source Telephony System.

I then went ahead and demonstrated some basic home automation, controlling lighting using a simple web page as seen in my blog (moishtech.blogspot.com). For the second part of the demonstration, I displayed Asterisk running on the PI and went ahead to show the group how I simply control home lighting using the Telephony Application using just the PI and a simple relay circuit.

One of the group members had their PI with them and wanted to understand how to set up the SD card using a Apple iMac. A set of instructions were given to all users on how to get started with the PI and getting the image on to an SD card using a Mac. We then split the group up. Matt took a couple into his office where an install and setup of the SD image was done using an iMac whilst I discussed with the more technical people the working of server based Linux.

The event started at 4:30pm although people arrived and snacked earlier. We left an open time to end and people chose to leave at different times, the last two people left around 7pm.

All in all, it was a fantastic experience and having a small group of people in this initial event allowed us to understand how to handle the diverse requirements of people getting hold of the Raspi and will allow us going forward to manage a larger groups expectations.

On Wednesday 12th September, Durham Johnstone school hosted the first Durham RaspberryJam event. Mark Thornber a teacher at the school has written a review of the evening here. They are planning to host the next one on Wednesday 14th November.

Mark was a little nervous about hosting the event in the first place. Mark says “A very informal event seemed to go smoothly.  We had about 45 in attendance at the peak with a wide variety of expertise and experience. Lots of contacts were made and there were opportunities to experiment with some kit already set up and swap tips in between some (slightly) more formal presentations.”

This is a lovely account by Liz Hannaford, describing how she went to a RaspberryJam, not exactly sure what to expect and was pleasantly surprised. Please read Liz’s blog post here.

Oh, we had a blast at Bristol RaspberryJam on Monday. Unfortunately, geeks in the West Country were forced to choose between our jam or the opportunity to watch Doctor Who being recorded in Bristol city.

Now, thanks to the marathon efforts of Matt Hawkins of RaspberryPi-Spy, we have an HD recording of the Jam (not Dr Who). The video shows the entire talks session and obviously does not include the ‘jam spreading’ sessions at the beginning and end of the evening or the demonstration suite. Trevor’s blog post published before the evening started explains what to expect, but his post RaspberryJam post is much more comprehensive and concise, highly recommended reading. It also suggests the next steps forward.

If you’re looking for an entertaining highlight, click here to listen to George, 9 years old asking Rob Bishop of Raspberry Pi a tricky question. The book that Rob refers to is a free download from here, and for those who still want to know, the technical answer is here. George has now started his own blog.

Speakers in rough order of appearance :
0:00:00 Alan O’Donohoe & Richard Pitkin (Innovation Centre Director)
0:06:50 Richard Horne (Heber & X10i)
0:16:00 Keith Dunlop (RISC OS)
0:28:40 Gordon (Basic)
0:40:50 Arthur Amarra (Robot Arm)
0:48:30 Rob Voisey (Pi + Imp)
1:02:00 Paul Hallett (DJangoPi Project)
1:12:30 Rob Bishop (Raspberry Pi Foundation)
1:23:00 Alan O’Donohoe

Here is a link here to one of our final talks, Paul Hallett and his Django Pi project. Click on the image below to watch this segment of the video. He has only 10 days to go for funding this project, he explains he has exceeded his target but hopes to attract more to extend the reach of the project, please support him.

There are some photos taken by John Honniball here and photos by BBSP here. Blog posts by Gordon Henderson and Paul Hallett. This is Bristol wrote a piece about the event.

You can listen to Monique Gionet explain why she came to the event and in this interview with Bonnie Dean and Richard Pitkin they describe what BBSP is and why they are proud to host the RaspberyJam.
Thanks to our sponsors BBSP, Heber and Broadcom

Peter Onion, a volunteer at The National Museum of Computing hosted a Raspberry Jam at the museum on Sunday 19th August. Mark Wilson has written a blogpost here for you to read all about it.

Mark also wrote a blogpost about the London RaspberryJam on 20th June that previously snook under my radar. I recommend you have a read of this too. It’s great when people blog, tweet, take photos and record talks at the RaspberryJam events because it helps to spread the jam. If you’re heading to a RaspberryJam, perhaps you would consider sharing the experience. If you don’t have the time to write, record an Audioboo

Alan

We held the second London RaspberryJam at the Mozilla space on 25th July.

It was interesting for all sorts of reasons. Luckily, I have managed to recruit a crew of bloggers, tweeters, photographers, video bloggers so that all I need to do is direct you to their pages and you can see what all the discussion was about.

The Scientific Moustache writes about the talks with lots of links to follow

Tom Hannen’s blog features videos of the talks

Miss Philbin’s blog writes her opinions as a teacher and asks for support

Connected Digital World contains photos and comments

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