Students enjoy a slice of Pi

SANDPOINT — Raspberry Pi was served up in Dinah Gaddie's manufacturing and design II class at Sandpoint Middle School on Wednesday.

Some of the students may have been disappointed they were not getting raspberry pie, but they enjoyed celebrating Pi Day by learning to code on the credit card-sized computers nonetheless.

"We are learning to code basic trivia questions," said SMS eighth-grader Davis MacDonald. "It's pretty cool."

The Raspberry Pi computer is a small circuit board with and SD slot and USB ports with which the students were able to hook up monitors and keyboards. Davis and his partner, Gerrit Cox, explained how they were coding the trivia game to have different outcomes and provide feedback depending on the answer.

The students would put in questions and answers provided, such as, "In Python, what do you call a 'box' used to store data?" The answers for a, b and c included "text," "variable" and "shoe box." Davis and Gerrit, however, came up with a few of their own questions, including, "What type of shoes is Gerrit wearing today?" Their answers included, "black cement 3," "Air Force 1," and "baby blue Jordan 1." Air Force 1 was the correct answer.

Not all of the students had the best of luck with the program, though.

"I keep getting a syntax error, because  said a frustrated Michael Chapman, also an eighth-grader at SMS.

That is one of the more difficult parts of coding, said Morgan Gariepy, young adult services librarian for East Bonner County Library District, who partnered with Gaddie to teach the kids about coding with Raspberry Pi.

"A lot of the coding programs (the students) were used to before this were a graphical drag and drop, so for some, stepping into typing text, unless they have taken Mrs. Gaddie's 3D printing class, it is kind of new and a little daunting," he said. "A single missed parenthesis will break your entire code."

He said the goal at that point, he said, is to get the students to look at the error and what it says, determine what is wrong and fix it.

"Perseverance is the key," Gariepy said.

This is the first time Gariepy has taught kids using Raspberry Pi, he said, although teaching coding is not new to him. He has also has taught zero robotics and the Make It program at the library for several years, he said.

And Gariepy wasn't the only guest to join the class Wednesday. The SMS student media team also stopped by, interviewing students for some Pi Day coverage.

One question in which the answer eluded everyone in the classroom was, "Why is the computer called Raspberry Pi?"

"Because it's fun," Gaddie joked. "It makes everyone smile when they think about pie."

According to forums on rasberrypi.org and quora.com, "Raspberry" is a reference to a fruit naming tradition in the old days of microcomputers. Also, the founder was originally going to produce a computer that could only run the Python programming language, which is where the "Pi" reference comes from. Python is, in fact, the language the students were using on Wednesday. 

Pi, which is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, has been calculated to more than a trillion digits beyond its decimal point, but is typically rounded down to 3.14.

For this reason, Pi Day is celebrated in America each year on the fourteenth day of the third month. 

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.