The Pi club at Hollydale Primary School is going from strength to strength. The children are all confident setting up the Pis and have started exploring the possibilities offered by the GPIO pins. We started simply using one of the projects in Carrie Anne Philbin’s wonderful book Adventures in Rapsberry Pi. 
We plugged an LED into the 3v with a resistor attached and the short leg into the ground. Lots of ohhs and ahhs when it lit up. We moved on to controlling the power to the LED by attaching it to a numbered GPIO pin (via the relevant resistor) and used the GPIOZero Python library to turn the LED on and off this soon led (excuse the pun) to questions such as can we
make it flash etc. Whereupon the python coding the children had all ready experienced in hacking Minecraft (Adventures in Minecraft) came into play. The children used while True: loops to get the LED’s flashing. One wonderful child (you know who you are!) created so many flashing LED’s connected to the Pi she ran out of ground pins and we had to start a conversation about shared grounds and larger standard breadboards! See the Video.
Next we will be exploring some of the excellent Monk Makes 
kits. I have already whetted my appetite by playing with the RGB LED that comes with the Raspberry Pi Electronics Starter Kit.
