In the mid-2000s , several members of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge comment two perturbing tendency : Fewer students were seeking enrollment in the reckoner science ( CS ) program , and the ones who did apply had scant programming cognition compare to prospective students of the former decade . At best , these raw applicant might have done some entanglement ontogenesis , but programming experience was becoming rare .
What was the difference between the aspire CS majors of the 2000s versus those of the 1990s ? The Cambridge academics recognized several potential causes , including social issues involving education and the economy that would take monumental efforts to slump . One of the culprits , however , was something they thought a handful of people could tackle . Children and adolescents in early propagation had access to easily programmable abode computing machine that the novel applicants they were seeing did not .
This computer programming deficiency is beginning to move both the scholarly and the working human beings . student are come in with petty or no exposure to programme , requiring healing teaching efforts [ sources : Stross , Tucker ] . The U.K. , the U.S. and other land have report declining numbers pool of CS graduates over the 2000s , and shortages of qualified IT workers are occurring globally [ sources : Africa News , Devaney , Devlin ] . The U.K. , once a major contender in the gaming industry , is already falling behind in this sector , and the fear is that a continuing shortage will injure the country ’s competitiveness and future creation . This tendency will doubtless maintain true for other countries , too .
Despite a struggling cosmos thriftiness , demand for IT proletarian stay strong , and even greater requirement is likely as our appetite for technology increment . reckon a futurity with fewer of the digital services and ever - improving , calculator - driven convenience that we ’ve total to expect . Who will make the press cutting - edgevideo games , ego - push cars and housecleaning robots of the come long time ?
In an effort to lift the situation , Eben Upton ( then a member of the Cambridge Computer Science section ) ; Rob Mullins , Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft of Cambridge ; Pete Lomas of Norcott Technologies ; and David Braben , co - generator of the famous BBC Micro game Elite , teamed up in 2006 to found the Raspberry Pi Foundation . This kindly governing body ’s primary destination is to make low - toll , programmable computers and to get them into as many paw as potential , particularly those of children . Their price goal was $ 25 per gimmick ( around the price of a textbook ) , with the pick of a somewhat more expensive and enhanced mannequin .
In 2012 , the understructure ’s work came to fruition with the creation of theRaspberry Pi , a acknowledgment card - sized , low - toll but full useable and programmable computer with New in high spirits - definition multimedia system capableness . It may be the equipment that gets us back to computing basics .
