Celebrate Pi Day by supporting the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Today is officially Pi Day.
While 14 March is an opportunity for our American friends to celebrate the mathematical constant Pi, we are also very happy to make this day a chance to say a massive thank you to everyone who supports the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s work through their generous donations.
More than computers
You may know that the Raspberry Pi story started in Cambridge, UK, in 2008 when a group of engineers-cum-entrepreneurs set out to improve computing education by inventing a programmable computer for the price of a textbook.
Fast forward 15 years and there are almost 50 million Raspberry Pi computers in the wild, being used to revolutionise education and industry alike. Removing price as a barrier for anyone to own a powerful, general-purpose computer will always be an important part of our mission to democratise access to computing.
What we’ve learned over the years is that access to low-cost, high-quality hardware is essential, but not sufficient.
If we want all young people to be able to take advantage of the potential offered by technological innovation, then we also need to support teachers to introduce computing in schools, find ways to inspire young people to learn outside of their formal education, and make sure that everything we do is informed by rigorous research.
That’s the focus of our educational mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and we couldn’t do this work without your support.
What we achieve for young people thanks to your support
We are fortunate that a large and growing community of people, corporations, trusts, and foundations makes very generous donations to support our educational mission. It’s thanks to you that we are able to achieve what we do for young people and educators:
- In 2022 alone, over 3.54m people engaged with our free online learning resources for young people, including brand-new pathways of projects for HTML/CSS, Python, and Raspberry Pi Pico.
- Supported by us, more than 4500 Code Club and CoderDojos are running in 103 countries, and an additional 2891 clubs that were disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic tell us that they are actively planning to start running sessions for young people again soon.
- We engaged over 30,000 young people in challenges such as Astro Pi and Coolest Projects, enabling them to showcase their skills, think about how to solve problems using technology, and connect with like-minded peers.
- We have supported tens of thousands of computing teachers through our curriculum, resources, and online training. For example, The Computing Curriculum, which we developed as part of the National Centre for Computing Education in England, is now being used by educators all over the world, with 1.7m global downloads in 2022.
- We completed and published the findings of the world’s largest-ever research programme testing how to improve the gender balance in computing. We are now working on integrating the insights from the programme into our own work and making them accessible and actionable for practitioners.
Trust me when I say this is just a small selection of highlights, all of which are made possible by our amazing supporters. Thank you, and I hope that we made you proud.
Get involved today
If you haven’t yet made a donation to our Pi Day campaign, it’s not too late to get involved. Your donation will help inspire the next generation of digital makers.
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