Oracle giving away 1,000 Raspberry Pi computers to students

Oracle and the Raspberry Pi Foundation want to encourage students to take up coding and close the alarming skills gap that is afflicting the IT sector globally through a new program.

The Oracle Academy Raspberry Pi Weather Station initiative for schools is committed to giving away 1,000 free Raspberry Pi hardware kits to schools globally in order to let them learn how code while at the same time gain skills in meteorology and geography.

Students between the ages of 11 and 16 are the main target of the initiative that asks them to build a weather station before developing apps to collect data from the instrument and feed all this into a cloud database hosted by Oracle.

"Our goal with the Oracle Raspberry Pi Weather Station project is not only to show students how computer science can help them measure, interrogate and understand the world better, but also to give them hands-on opportunities to develop these skills. We believe this is one of the best ways to inspire the next generation to take up the computer science roles that economies around the world need filled," said Jane Richardson, EMEA director at the Oracle Academy.

Closing the skills gap

Raspberry Pi has become an incredibly popular and important school for students across the planet that is teaching them to code and build the gaming titles of the future that will eventually close an acute skills gap being felt globally.

A similar scheme unveiled by the BBC back in March will provide a similar coding device to every child in year 7 free of charge to address the UK's own gap in skills that will total around 1.4 million over the coming five years.

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