In this era of rapid advancement who doesn’t want their children to be on par with the latest tech, if not being tech-savvy themselves. The solution is simple ; just let your kids play around with the basic tech themselves figuring and discovering new stuff on their own. For this, the Pi-Top laptop offers the perfect opportunity for your child to play around safely.
Launched by a leading manufacturer in Education Technology, Pi-Top, the company has managed to package a modular laptop which runs on Raspberry Pi. For those who aren’t acquainted with what Raspberry Pi is, it is a fairly inexpensive , business card sized circuit board.
To put it simple, you can slide off the keyboard to unleash the circuit board beneath and then monkey around as you wish. Remember, how LEGO used to be the thing in those good old day? You can easily see the LEGO being forgotten in the near future.
After sliding the keyboard panel down, the Raspberry Pi gets exposed, and along with it a Cooling Bridge and a modular track, on which other ‘parts’ can be plugged into. These parts or ‘elements’ including ‘Pulse’ which is basically a unit, comprising of a speaker, a microphone and an LED pad, thus rendering your laptop into a complete Alexa compatible device.
Following the same LEGO idea, you build up a computer yourself as you wish, using the Inventor’s Kit (which is included along),by just using a handful of parts. The kit includes LEDs, motion sensors and buttons.
Not only this but there also is an instruction kit which can be used to create robots, lighting arrays and synthesizers. You can easily use these to finish up projects related to topics like space and music.
Basically everything is there to get a complete hand-on experience at a beginner’s level about computer science. Following the theme of education, the laptop also offers built in apps like Minecraft which is all about creativity and design. About this, the Pi-Top CEO Jesse Lozano added that “You can watch someone swimming on YouTube all you want, if you jump into a lake, you won’t know how to swim.”
According to Lozano, “ We’re offering learning beyond the screen and keyboard, enabling wider exploration of computer science and basic electronics, ensuring that young learners have the opportunity to be inspired by a world of STEAM-based learning”.
He further added, “When you go into an English literature class they give you Shakespeare. When you go into a history class, you get the top-40 hits of everything that’s happened over the last thousand years, it’s incredibly interesting” Apart from this he also stated that “Then you go into computer science, and if you’re lucky you’ll change some colors on a screen using Javascript, or you’ll print ‘Hello world’ and frankly it’s not up to par with the other subjects.”
The laptop has a 14” full HD LCD screen with a 1920×1080 resolution with a 180 degrees screen angle range. Furthermore, it is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad core arm cortex arm. Along with 4 USB ports, there is also an HDMI port and a micro SD card slot as well. Furthermore the laptop supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as well and also has an audio jack and an Ethernet port. The battery life is around 6-8 hours which is enough for casual everyday use.
As far as the price is concerned, the laptop is available for a mere $319 with the Pi included and for $284.99 without Raspberry Pi. The only color choice is green one though. The best thing is you can always replace your Raspberry Pi, when a new one comes out without having to change the laptop itself!