12 Years of Teaching with Pi

This is another one of those kinda fun failures… I’m putting the video behind the paywall because I think it’s actually of pretty limited interest, except possibly to fellow educators. Though apparently the presentation was not of that much to my fellow educators either.

In a conference where multiple presentations with “AI” in the title were “standing room only”, mine garnered a grand total of three participants, who trickled in piecemeal, so that I actually kinda got a chance to know each of them a little bit. The first was the guy who was the moderator of my session. He wasn’t actually going to stay, but he had a Raspberry Pi 3 at home that he didn’t really know what to do with, so he decided to stay and hear me out. The second guy who came in actually peeked in, I told him we were doing a session on Raspberry Pis, and he immediately responded that this wasn’t for him, then, as his district wouldn’t allow him to use Raspberry Pis. Curious, I asked him why, and he responded that the tech in his district didn’t want to use anything which didn’t run Windows, unless the devices were iPads. (I actually understand why districts do this: they’re expected to lock everything down, which the business administration tools that Microsoft provides allows them to do—both with Windows and with iOS.) And Raspberry Pis, of course, don’t run Windows. (They mostly use Linux.) When I thanked him for elaborating, he decided to stay! And, while I didn’t hear why the third person joined us, she asked some really good questions at the end of the session. So, it was very personal, and thus actually a lot more fun—for me, at least!

Anyhow, I’ve learned my lesson: My next presentation at an educational conference will definitely have “AI” in the title!

The presentation itself was fun, but was not my best-organized effort. I did get a compliment from the “crowd” that made my day, at the end: one of them said that I was obviously very passionate on the subject. But when I went back over the recording of the presentation, hoping to reorganize it into something a little more… well, organized, I quickly realized that it was actually too disorganized to do even that. And I was chagrined to discover, upon reviewing the presentation, a few of my usual bone-headed mistakes… the most annoying of which is me saying that my TRS-80 Color Computer ran at a clock-speed of 1Hz, when I know full well (or should, since I’ve made this mistake and then reviewed the data many times when I inevitably—and rightly—second-guessed myself) that its Motorola 6809E was actually clocked at 1MHz! (Well, technically, 0.895MHz, with a “turbo” mode that doubled that…)

All that being said, since it may be of some interest to those interested in educational technology and/or Raspberry Pis, I’ll make the video semi-available—or at least available to anyone who might be interested enough to get past my (now deeply discounted) paywall.