Easy as pi

Education secretary Michael Gove plans to introduce a new IT curriculum that focuses more on computer science and less on secretarial skills. The British education system is notoriously slow to embrace change, though. Whether it's today's children who will benefit or the children of future generations remains to be seen. Something that may speed things up, though, is the new computer that looks like the sort of thing the geek might keep in his den, but sounds like something served up in the school canteen. The Raspberry Pi is an uncased, credit-card sized computer that can run off the mains or from a portable battery. Developer the Raspberry Pi Foundation says that it is individual children, not their schools, who will be given the computers. At schools, or at home, the kids will be able to use the Raspberry Pi like a desktop PC for gaming, spreadsheets, word-processing and to play videos. Also like a desktop, their new machine will connect to TVs, games consoles and keyboards.