Teach creative coding with Raspberry Pi’s Code Editor

Phil Howell explains how you can get your students’ programming skills off to a flying start…

30 Second Briefing

Tailored specifically to young people’s needs, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Code Editor helps make learning text-based programming simple and accessible for children aged nine and up. It’s safe, age-appropriate and suitable for use in the classroom through Code Editor for Education.

About me

Phil Howell

Phil is chief technology and product officer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

What is the Code Editor?

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Code Editor is a free online tool designed specifically for young people to learn text-based programming. Created with input from educators, the tool is informed by our understanding of pedagogy and computing education.

The integrated development environment (IDE) enables learners to get creative with code and design games, art and webpages using Python and HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

How did you develop the Code Editor for young learners?

We wanted young people to be able to use the Code Editor to write and run code in a web browser, without the need to install any additional software.

Safety is also very important to us, so new features are only made available once we have ensured they comply with our safeguarding policies and the Children’s code of the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Another key consideration is accessibility. We have made it easy to switch settings between light and dark modes, and between small, medium and large text sizes, and we continue to optimise the Editor for mobile and tablet use.

“The integrated development environment (IDE) enables learners to get creative with code and design games, art and webpages.”

Why did you add classroom management features?

The next step involved thinking about how the Code Editor could be used by educators to teach programming, and how we could build upon our simple and age-appropriate interface to better support learners in the classroom.

We carried out a survey and user testing to help us understand educators’ needs when teaching text-based programming.

Common requests included an easy-to-use editor with student-friendly error messages and classroom management features. These insights have helped to steer Editor developments.

How can schools use Code Editor for Education?

Schools can sign up for a free school account. Once verified, schools can invite teachers to join, add students and organise them into classes, and create coding projects to share with students.

We take safeguarding seriously, providing visibility of student work at all times.

What’s next for Code Editor for Education?

Informed by ongoing teacher feedback, we will continue to add new features over the coming months.

We will be enabling custom instructions to sit alongside starter code projects. We also want to provide teacher-to-student feedback capabilities.

To find out more and create a free school account, visit rpf.io/code-editor-teach.