Raspberry Pi Certified Educators Survey 2016 published #picademy
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation I’m working to better understand computing and digital making education. With a large cohort of people who are part the Raspberry Pi Certified Educator programme, we wanted to get a better understanding of what they were doing and the challenges they are working through.
This took place last summer, in fact we’ve just finished running the second annual survey. It gave us so much interesting ideas to look at that we thought it was well worth sharing publicly. There was lots to do to set up a research publications initiative at the foundation, but now it’s up and running we will be sharing things much more regularly.
At the time we had a little over 800 educators in our network, and it’s testament to how committed and enthusiastic they are that we had a 60% return rate on a very detailed survey. It was fascinating to hear their feedback, including:
- They kinds of activities they are doing with computing and digital making in their schools, museums, libraries, youth clubs and other venues.
- The types of equipment they have available.
- How they rate their skills and what they are looking to develop.
- How enthusiastic the young people they work with are.
- How much they have managed to use from their Picademy training in their work.
- How many people are supported by their institutions to continue professional development and how many take it on personally.
- The barriers and challenges they face to doing physical computing and digital making in their work.
We’ve used these insights to influence what we do working with educators, and have since set up online training courses on FutureLearn and employed the fantastic Andrew Collins to lead the continued growth and development of educator training in the USA.
I’ve just finished running annual survey mark 2 for 2017, and I’m excited to get to analysing the data. Not least because it gives us two years worth now to begin to look at change over time a little.
You can read the in depth publication on the findings from this survey over at the Raspberry Pi website:
Originally published at Oliver Quinlan.
