Hooray! We’re celebrating our third season leading educator training in North America. That’s 20 Picademy workshops in 11 cities with 791 happy teachers graduating as Raspberry Pi Certified Educators. This summer was particularly rich with successes, challenges, and lessons learned — let’s take a closer look:
Andrew Collins on Twitter
That’s a wrap on #Picademy North America 2018! We welcomed over 300 educators in Denver, Jersey City, Atlanta and Seattle to the @Raspberry_Pi community. Congrats and go forth on your digital making journey! 😀🙌 https://t.co/aMyHr2KkuL
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Picademy North America
Picademy is a free, two-day training program that helps educators jump start their digital making journey. On day one, educators explore digital making with the Raspberry Pi computer: blinking LEDs, taking pictures, making motors spin, sensing their environment, and composing music. On day two, they take what they’ve learned from these experiences and collaborate with a team to design and build their own real world project.
Picademy at Liberty Science Center (June 18, 2018 – June 22, 2018)
A total of 80 educators from all over the globe visited Liberty Science Center the week of June 18 – 22 to learn coding and technology skills as part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Picademy program. The week of learning culminated in a programming design challenge where the participants created projects using their new skills via the Raspberry Pi computer.
Big interest
We received over 1400 applications for this year’s program, a 40% increase from last year. This enormous interest came from educators in North America and across the globe; we received applications from 49 different U.S. States and 20 countries. And it’s not just classroom teachers either. More than half of our applicants worked outside of a traditional classroom environment, as librarians, after-school providers, teacher trainers, museum educators, and technology coordinators. Out of this pool, we accepted 313 educators to our Picademy 2018 workshops in Denver, Jersey City, Atlanta, and Seattle.
Big impact
We want to make sure that the work we do is having the impact we we intend, so we ask educators who come to Picademy about their skills, experience, and confidence before they participate in the program and afterwards. Before Picademy, only 13% said they felt confident using using a Raspberry Pi computer. After attending, this number rose significantly, with 78% now confident using Raspberry Pi. This increase in confidence matched their sense of professional growth: the majority of educators said that learning new content and gaining new skills were the most memorable parts of their Picademy experience.
We also had 100% of attendees indicate that they would recommend Picademy to a colleague, and 70% report that they are very likely to share their learnings with fellow educators. This means an even greater number of educators, those who work alongside Raspberry Pi Certified Educators, will hopefully be impacted by Picademy workshop offerings.
“Picademy was such an engaging and hands-on experience. Every workshop and project was practical, tangible and most importantly, fun” — Amanda Valledor, Boston, MA
Next steps
What do educators go on to accomplish after Picademy? We’re actively gathering this data as we follow up with our certified educators, but based on feedback surveys we know that 58% of this season’s attendees are interested in starting a Code Club or CoderDojo in their community. We also saw that over 70% of educators are interested in leading a Raspberry Pi event or training; this could mean a Raspberry Jam, an educator workshop, or a Raspberry Pi-themed summer camp. Our team will continue to support each and every Raspberry Pi Certified Educator as they continue on their digital making journey.
Carrie Northcott on Twitter
Thank you @Raspberry_Pi for allowing each of us to come and get “debugged”, rewrite our “code”, and “program” our future moves as educators! #picademy #raspberrypi #picademyseattle #edtech @iluvteaching72 @MrsNatto https://t.co/37jMYDZThF
Special thanks to Dana and everyone else who helped to lead an awesome Picademy program this season. If you’d like to take a deeper dive, feel free to explore all of our data and findings in the Picademy North America 2018 Report.
Website: LINK
