The Beginning

Picture the scene, it’s July 2014, and in three days we had a Primary School Computing day planned, we knew we wanted to use the Raspberry Pi, and finally settled on the Jelly Baby experiment, although we quickly realised, we’d have to re-image 19 SD cards, without one of those fancy replicators.

It was at this moment that I remembered a talk I’d watched online about booting a Raspberry Pi off a 128Mb SD card, storing the main operating system on a remote server. We’d found our solution. Our computing lab is the kind that most people would want in their school. It’s full of bit’s of old computers that we reuse to make our own machines, so we quickly got to work building our own server for the Pi’s. We then got round to configuring the Server, installing the Raspi-LTSP software developed by Andrew Mulholland, and worked on adapting it to be compatible with our school’s systems. The Primary School day was a great success, with many of the Children asking where they could get a Raspberry Pi from — a great success.

Moving Forward

The new Ethernet Ports arrived in time for the start of the School year. Pi’s are connected to a seperate subnet (the blue cable)

After this day, I was asked by our Computing Teacher to roll the system out school-wide on a permanent basis. Extra ethernet ports were to be installed over the summer to facilitate this, and we would be given a Virtualised Server, hosted alongside the School’s Windows hardware.

So we arrived back in September and were greeted by some shiny new Ethernet ports that had been placed on their own subnet and a virtual server had been configured with 2GB of RAM and a 100GB HDD we were ready to go!

We set about installing Ubuntu Server on our new hardware and quickly had the server running. After installing a DHCP server for network configuration (the subnet didn’t have a router, the server assigns IP addresses and provides internet access to the Pi’s through the normal school network so we can use the existing Proxy Server in school) and configuring DNS servers we quickly had the Pi’s booting once more.

A couple of days later a delivery arrived, containing 20 brand new Raspberry Pi Model B+’s to kit out our computing room. We now have a fully featured Computing lab kitted out for less than the cost of 3 of the Windows PC’s you see sitting on the desk.

A video of our lab.

Students can now learn how to interact with the Linux shell, program in Python and interface using the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO ports, without having to wait up to 30 minutes to image an SD card, you just turn on the Pi and you’re live within 1–2 minutes. It’s easier for Teachers to manage as they have a dedicated interface for adding User accounts and as all of the files are stored on the server, you don’t need to remember who’s files are on which SD card. The school now has a club for those wishing to learn how to code in Python, using the Raspberry Pi’s, and the shared files function that is available using Raspi-LTSP helps Teachers to share code samples with students.

The best bit about the network? It’s completely managed by Sixth Form Students, like myself. We manage the updates, add new features and programs and deal with any problems should they arise, although nothing serious has yet! When the Year 13's leave in June, they’ll hand over to the Year 12's who will manage it for the next year.

We’ve just started adding our own customisations to the Raspi-LTSP code which you can view here, allowing us to change things like the desktop background, and to allow a deeper integration with our School’s network. We’re also looking forward to adding some more features, such as a GUI for teachers, so they don’t need to SSH into the server to add a user or install a program.