Review: Raspberry Pi Projects for Kids

Here are my thoughts on Raspberry Pi Projects for Kids by Daniel Bates

Raspberry Pi Projects for your Kids_Mini_Cover

I am not a kid, but I do own a Raspberry Pi and have a childlike curiosity over things so I guess I am as qualified as anyone to review this book!

Raspberry Pi Projects for kids is a short book written by Daniel Bates and is available on the Packt website and on Amazon. I am sure you can guess the content of the book!

Without going into extraneous detail Daniel has managed to pack a fair amount in, covering the basics like setting up the Pi and what peripherals you may need to what you can start to do with the Pi.

The first project looks at creating an Angry Birds clone using the kid friendly IDE Scratch. I haven't used Scratch before but I have heard plenty about it and was able to understand everything that was mentioned. Daniel has done a good job with explaining concepts that might not be obvious to non-programmers.

The second project gets physical! Daniel guides us through making a physical reaction game including an entry level introduction to the GPIO pins and some Python goodness to make it all work.

With the third and final project we stay in Python land to create an interactive map using a GUI library called Tkinter. As the target audience is for kids and parents I am not going to be too harsh on the code quality, needless to say they haven't bothered with a comprehensive test suite! I will say that I am not sure how fun a younger person might find this task compared to the two before it.

One thing I noticed is it doesn't really target a particular age range for the child, I guess different children develop at different ages but I wonder if that might put people off.

It was an enjoyable read, not too many actionable takeaways personally but I think for the right audience it would be great and I will be recommending it to any parents I know.


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