How’s this for a cool initiative? The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced on Tuesday that it will team up with Google (GOOG) to give 15,000 Raspberry Pi computers away to children in the United Kingdom to help them develop their programming skills. The foundation says that it and Google are “going to be working with Google and six U.K. educational partners to find the kids who we think will benefit from having their very own Raspberry Pi,” and will presumably target kids who have shown an aptitude for programming.
The Guardian notes that Google’s involvement in the initiative is particularly important because Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been a “vocal critic of the U.K.’s computing curriculum” and has “attacked the lack of attention paid to programming” in the past. The Raspberry Pi Foundation first launched the Raspberry Pi last year as a barebones Linux-based computer that cost only $35. Less than a year after its release, the Raspberry Pi has exceeded its creators’ expectations by selling more than 700,000 units.
