Make space for the Pi

The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive computing system that can play an essential part of any computing curriculum. Since its release in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has been infiltrating K-12 education; it has the potential to make coding in K-12 schools as commonplace as textbooks. It has also changed the playing field for hobbyists by offering a low-priced general-purpose computing system that challenges the Arduino in terms of open source support. In this paper, we advocate using the Raspberry Pi (RPi) throughout the University computing curricula as well. Low-priced and portable, the RPi is an exposed hardware platform students can tinker with without fear of breaking. Properly used, it affords students the opportunity to experimentally discover many aspects of computing. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of the RPi that make it appropriate for a University computing curriculum. We describe our classroom experiences and laboratory best practices as well as survey the work of others involved in integrated the RPi into University curriculums.