The two year project called Pi á la Code is the inspirational idea of Sonia Uppal, an exceptional high-school student from California.

After attending a school in Bangalore, India, Uppal moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011 where she participated in an App Design competition and dabbled with Balsamiq and Eclipse.

She stumbled upon the Raspberry Pi at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2012, and then raised money through GoFundMe.com to create ten Pi teaching sets with Raspberry Pis and peripherals.

Uppal developed her own Python curriculum by hand, after teaching herself how to code in Python. She returned to Kasuali and taught a class of 9th and 10th graders.

For me this represents the true value and power of the Raspberry Pi phenomenon. When Eben Upton and his colleagues in Cambridge dreamt up the idea of a computing module which was easy to program and very low cost they saw it first and foremost as a teaching aid for schools.

If every classroom was equipped with Raspberry Pis then pupils from the age of 12 years upwards would have a real opportunity to learn computer programming.

Arguably as important to them as reading writing in today’s world.

It was inevitable perhaps, that the Raspberry Pi would also be attractive to markers and even professional engineers for affordable prototype development. The Foundation would spawn a company.

That is all very well, but it is a project like Sonia Uppal’s which really represents what the Raspberry Pi and indeed the foundation behind it, are all about. We should not lose sight of that.