Cyber Scouts and Raspberry PI

I have been involved in a small cyber scout troop for the past year. The aim of this blog post is to explain just what exactly cyber scouts is, and to show a few of the projects we have been working on. Cyber Scouts is a grass roots organization riding the makers popularity wave. Its basically a computer club for kids to teach them about technology today. I am involved with a small troop based out of Franklin. Its a mainly family group consisting of my father, a couple cousins, my nephew a few of their friends and myself.

The inaugural meeting started with everyone receiving a Raspberry PI which if your not familiar is "The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games." ~www.raspberrypi.org.

Over the past year we have done alot with the PI teaching the kids and sometimes myself different aspects of computing. Not all meetings were incredibly tech heavy however, one of my favorite meetings was when we busted out the leggos and had some of our scouts make cases for their PI's

Another project we brought to fruition was creating a minecraft server for the kids to play with each other on. For this we used Digital Ocean which I highly recommend to anyone looking to build a low cost cloud server. Another project we worked on was creating tech fashion, in this case wiring up a hat with programmable  LED lights with literally thousands of different color and pulse choices.

I hope now that you have seen a little of what we've done in the last year you might be inspired to create your own chapter, or event just buy a PI they are only $35 and the possibilities are endless with these wonderful little machines. As we continue to do more projects in the future I plan to blog about them, untill then I'm the Inspector and I'm signing off.