Raspberry Pi’s are full fledged small, low cost computers. They run many different versions of Linux. Pi’s are valuable to our students because they have GPIO Pins that allow you to get inputs from sensors, and send signals to external devices like you do with an Arduino. The difference is that since it’s a real computer you can store files, have a local database, connect to API’s or do most anything else you could do with a “regular” computer/ server.
To code for the Pi students will learn Python, and then to be able to process and store data they will learn MySQL as a Database, and PHP/HTML and CSS to build dynamic websites.