Rasberry pi guide for dads

[Some Gump]

Hi forum,

My 10 year old son has decided the thing he wants more in the world is a rasberry pi. I am 10% educated here - I understand kind of what they are, but I’m not sure beyond that!

Is there such a thing as a foolproof kit aimed at kids? I’m sure I could gen up and do this with him, but being selfish - remember the days of sorting drivers, downloading bits and bars and trying to make them all work from DOS / early windows in my youth, and it’s pretty much the last thing I want to do on a weekend now!

I double don’t want to have to spend ages trawling the web before even embarking on a Linux learning curve..

So if I can find something he can be self sufficient on, then I might relent and let him get one. If not, there are a lot of other father son things I’d rather be doing

Thanks in advance..

[Austin_Metro]

I’m interested in this too. But in a similar position to Scrump but have about 1% ability. Not 10%. A good kit would be great.

[uknick]

I bought the Arduino version of this;

FREENOVE Ultimate Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi 4 B 3 B+ 400, 558-Page Detailed Tutorial, Python C Java Scratch Code, 223 Items, 104 Projects https://amzn.eu/d/gVPiBOA

I had some programming background, did BASIC Bach in the 80s bust still found the tutorials weren’t great as they made assumptions about your knowledge I found.

But there were loads of YouTube tutorials to help out

[camel_landy]

I've not played around with a Pi for ages but when I did, I got a couple of starter kits from Farnell:

https://uk.farnell.com/c/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi...

FWIW - I found documentation to be a bit crap, especially if you're starting from nothing but I'm hoping things have improved since. Your best bet is probably to pick a project and get stuck in.

M

[macstorm73]

Used to work in Edutech sector, we ended up pointing the teachers to resources such as https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects

It will give a good selection of projects which have different levels of skill required.

[Monsterlime]

This would be a good start - https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-... It will work out of the box, and then you can start learning. The important bit with this is the SD card is pre-loaded with an OS, so plug it in and you have a desktop and you don't have to start with searching for how to flash the OS to the SD Card (its very simple, but this is a good initial step IMO).

It is only an RPi4, but I am sure there will be or is already, a version for the 5.

Edit - this is similar for the Pi 5, but lacks the getting started book - https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-5-start... (and it is a pre-order). Again, SD Card is pre-flashed.

Edited by Monsterlime on Monday 27th November 10:10

[Mr Pointy]

The Pi Hut has numerous kits & bundles:

https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-kits...