Adruino >> Raspberry Pi

Being the somewhat curious dude that I am, I have purchased both a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. They share some common purposes and both seem like they would be a welcome addition to a high school classroom. However, I’m here to tell you today that the Arduino should be much more welcomed.

Okay, I just have to get this off my chest. The Raspberry Pi kind of bites. I actually don’t have a clear idea on who in North America would want one. Maybe it has some niche uses but I don’t think education is one of them. Here are some of the cans and can’ts of the Raspberry Pi: CAN run a browser CAN interface with some limited I/O CAN be used for programming in Scratch and Python

CAN’T run anything of interest on the web CAN’T run java simulations/applets CAN’T run Flash CAN’T run Scratch 2 (no Flash) CAN’T run any decent course offered on Moodle because of flash, java, etc

If I’m going to round up an LCD monitor, HDMI cable, keyboad/mouse combo, WiFi, etc, I might as well try to get an inexpensive laptop, chromebook or similar.

The Arduino on the other hand doesn’t come with crippling compromises. I suppose that if you’re looking for a high powered microcontroller you might consider the Arduino to be crippled, but clearly the Arduino can do a TON as it is. Conversely, I really don’t know if the Raspberry Pi can do anything interesting. It should be able to do a few cool things but I don’t know what those things are.  I was really hoping to get the raspi working ok with my Moodle site, so I could have 1/2 dozen workstations on the go in my classroom.  Alas, it was not to be.