Honour for our Director of Engineering

At this summer’s Annual General Meeting of the Institute of Engineering Designers, Pete Lomas, Director of Engineering here at Norcott was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Institution in recognition of his work in establishing and developing the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

“I’m thrilled to receive this fellowship from the Institution” commented Pete.

He joins the ranks of other Honorary fellows including Sir James Dyson, Professor Amanda Chessell (IBM) and Ian Callum (Jaguar).

Pete continued, “over the last four years the Raspberry Pi educational activities have expanded significantly. We now have has over 40 full time staff and most of these are actively involved in educational outreach.

To date we have trained over 700 educators through our Picademy program and created educational support material that has been viewed over 6 million times. We have developed an outreach project with UKSpace and ESA to put UK schools coding projects on the International Space Station using AstroPi.   Perhaps the most striking event this year has been the merger with CodeClub that has now over 4000 regional clubs supporting children aged 9 – 11 in their first steps in coding.

We have also refined our mission: to put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world. Only by exposing children to STEM activities we can give them an opportunity to envision a potential future career path in science or engineering.”

In just four years over 8 Million Raspberry Pi computers have been shipped.  This positions it as the number one UK designed computer, eclipsing both Sinclair and Amstrad.

“Importantly our estimates indicate that over 33% of these units are in the hands of educationalists with the balance being used primarily by makers and industrial users.” concluded Pete.

Norcott is proud to be associated with such a great charitable project, from building the first Raspberry Pi prototypes through supporting Pete in his active role as a trustee of the foundation.

Institute of Engineering Designers – www.ied.org

Raspberry Pi – www.raspberrypi.org

Code Club – www.codeclub.org.uk

AstroPi – www.astro-pi.org