News Cluster of 32 Raspberry Pis Powers Coding Class

[Admin]

Mike Reed has created a Raspberry Pi cluster using over 30 boards total for his students to connect to during class.

Cluster of 32 Raspberry Pis Powers Coding Class : Read more

 

[bit_user]

What'd be much more interesting is to share a smaller set of Pi's among a larger group of students. There are cluster management tools for doing that sort of thing, letting you queue up a job and it just gets run by whatever machine has capacity.

One Pi per student might be simple, but it's also a bit boring and more expensive than it really needs to be, if they don't need to run interactive graphical programs on them (which they probably do).

 

[Co BIY]

Neat set up.

Hello World - Reminds me of fun times learning using Apple Logo.

 

[bit_user]

Hello World - Reminds me of fun times learning using Apple Logo.

Logo was a waste of time, for me. They never connected it to real programming or algorithms, so it ended up being pointless.

I also didn't get why they called the cursor a "turtle". That was just confusing, for little kids, as it looked nothing like one - it was just an isosceles triangle.

Maybe, if they'd shown us how to solve problems using Logo, I would've appreciated it more.

 

[blitz120]

One Pi per student might be simple, but it's also a bit boring and more expensive than it really needs to be, if they don't need to run interactive graphical programs on them (which they probably do).

It also provides a degree of isolation for the students; should one student generate problems on their node other students remain unaffected. In addition, it simplifies how the teacher addresses problems; a student with a question has a known environment for the teacher to locate and examine.

 

[bit_user]

It also provides a degree of isolation for the students; should one student generate problems on their node other students remain unaffected.

Well, Pi runs Linux. Linux provides a wealth of mechanisms to reduce friction between users.

I'm not arguing that 1 pi per student isn't the simplest solution - just that it's the least technically interesting one. Also, not great for cost-effectiveness. If you could use a cluster of 8 Pi's for a class of 32 students, that works out to 1 core per student, and it'd be a lot more cost-effective. In a wealthy American school district, perhaps the cost of a Pi per student isn't significant, but you can't argue the same is true around the world.

One thing that bugs me is how we see articles trumpeting "Pi clusters", yet they almost never seem to involve any clustering technologies. It's merely a collection of independent Pi's that are physically racked or stacked together. I guess if you just like building physical enclosures, that might be interesting to you. However, it's not acting as a cluster.

Computer cluster - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In addition, it simplifies how the teacher addresses problems; a student with a question has a known environment for the teacher to locate and examine.

You mean by connecting to their desktop session? I guess that's simpler than having the teacher connect to their terminal device, assuming those might be personal devices the teacher doesn't control.

 

[Wol_]

I also didn't get why they called the cursor a "turtle". That was just confusing, for little kids, as it looked nothing like one - it was just an isosceles triangle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(robot) it was based around the turtle robot. I always loved it at school when they brought that thing out and had it scooting around the classroom where you'd program it on the computer at the time!

In a wealthy American school district, perhaps the cost of a Pi per student isn't significant, but you can't argue the same is true around the world.

Even more so when they're using an iMac + iPad to access a rPi. Seems a bit overkill considering the amount of computing power they've got on their desks to then just use it to remote into a raspberry Pi!

 

[bit_user]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(robot) it was based around the turtle robot.

That doesn't help, when you've never seen nor heard of such a robot.

 

[DanUK]

If you're using this setup like a mainframe I wonder if there is OS that lends itself to handling concurrent users? It seems like a waste to make a cluster where ratio of devices to students is still 1:1

 

[bit_user]

If you're using this setup like a mainframe I wonder if there is OS that lends itself to handling concurrent users? It seems like a waste to make a cluster where ratio of devices to students is still 1:1

My dream would be to do something like using GlusterFS to create a distributed filesystem across them, so you have a large, scalable, fault-tolerant filesystem that's accessible from all the nodes.

Then, use something like OpenPBS to dispatch jobs to whichever node has free compute resources. That should work best with non-graphical, compute-oriented jobs. Probably not ideal for kids in grade school (or primary school, in UK?).