Raspberry Pico Discovery Kit

Sanjeeeva Karunaratne, CAS Community Leader and Head of Computer Science and Newent Community School has been working with the Raspberry Pi Pico with students.

The Kitronik Discovery Kit for Raspberry Pi Pico is an excellent piece of kit to get students started using the Pico microcontroller.  At £14.50 ex VAT, getting cheaper the more you buy and it includes a standard Pico. 

The kit has 10mm LEDs, male to male jumper wire, a prototype breadboard, 330Ω Resistors, Piezo buzzer and push buttons.  Kitronik provide 7 experiments from beginners, flashing the LED light on the Pico to using the dual core to run two processes at once.   I thought this would be great for physical computing and luckily with some funding available from summer school, I purchased a class set. 

We used Raspberry Pi 3B computers running Thonny (a python editor) which allowed us to program the Pico using micro python and then flash the code to the Pico.  Kitronik provide all the code for each experiment, all coming in a small booklet. 

I found it easy to choose a few experiments for the Year 6 coming up to Year 7 at our summer school and create them myself in advance so that I could make sure it all worked and allow students to look at a completed one as they created their own.  There is plenty of challenge there and some students needed more support of others, as students came from a wide variety of feeder primary schools, which all have differing levels of Computer Science in their curriculum.   

We started off with the basic one, flashing the LED on the Pico, to more advance using different LEDs, resistors and the Piezo buzzer. It allowed the children to see the code run on a physical system to give a great understanding of how coding works in the ‘real’ world rather then running programs in IDLE. 

My advice is to buy one kit and test it out, trial it with a few students before adding to the purchase or buying in bulk.  It really depends on your department budget, if you have one and whether you will get full use of them.  Recently, I have bought more LEDs and other bits, as no matter how much you try, some pieces are always going to get lost in a school environment. 

Again, these replacement bits are easily bought online. 

Could you buy all the bits separately to make your own version of the Kitronik kit?  You could, but what you are paying for in the Kitronik kit are ready to go lessons/ experiments to engage your students with. 

I think they have been well worth the money and you can even buy a kit without a Pico, if you happen to have one or more lying around.

You can get the Discovery Kit at - https://kitronik.co.uk/products/5325-the-kitronik-discovery-kit-for-raspberry-pi-pico-included?_pos=1&_sid=803de135a&_ss=r