At the beginning of the school year, Molly Plyler’s five- and seven-year-old daughters were asking for a new computer. So she gave them a Raspberry Pi, keyboard, and monitor and told them that if they could figure out how to put it together, it would be their school computer. In less than fifteen minutes, the seven-year-old had her computer running.

“It’s kind of a skill that’s lost,” said Plyler, who runs Dev Catalyst, theCO’s student program that aims to improve technology education. “If you go back to the 80s, when you were working with a computer, there was some command-line code that you were kind of used to because that’s how the computer worked, and now we give kids an iPad, and there’s very little understanding of how it works or what it looks like on the inside.”

Raspberry Pis are mini-computers that are relatively inexpensive, costing about $35. Dev Catalyst is currently offering workshops for middle and high school students that teach how to use a Raspberry Pi.