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Google Giving donates 15K Raspberry Pi micro computers to UK students

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Google Giving has granted the United Kingdom’s Raspberry Pi Foundation with 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model B micro computers.

The foundation announced the award in a blog post today and detailed how Google chairman Eric Schmidt visited Chesterton Community College to give the news and teach kids how to code:

Today’s been a bit unlike most Tuesdays at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Today we’re the recipients of a very generous grant from Google Giving, which will provide 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs for schoolkids around the UK. Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, has just been to visit Cambridge, and he and Eben have been teaching a classroom of local kids to code all morning. Lucky kids.

We’re going to be working with Google and six UK educational partners to find the kids who we think will benefit from having their very own Raspberry Pi. CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR will each be helping us identify those kids, and will also be helping us work with them. You’ll already have seen the Raspberry Pi teaching materials from Computing at Schools; OCR will also be creating 15,000 free teaching and learning packs to go with the Raspberry Pis.

One microcomputer costs $35, but today’s announcement did not reveal the grant’s total amount. TechCrunch claimed it is worth $1 million, though, due to the cost of the devices, support, and teaching materials.

Google Giving is Google’s philanthropy project. It gave $100 million to various organizations around the world in 2011 alone, as well as $40 million in grants toward science, technology, engineering, math, and fighting human trafficking and modern-day slavery.

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