Other Arduino or Raspberry Pi for kids?

So, dual nerd household but as of yet nothing in the micro-controller space. My 8yo kids are learning scratch at school but we're wondering whether we should wet their interests with a little dev board of some sort. We're well geared up for introducing them to the highs and lows of coding but adding a hardware layer into the mix could spice things up a bit.

So raspberry pi or arduino? My thinking is they'll probably get more of a kick out of an arduino starter kit of some sort. Something with a few different methods of input / output?

Thoughts?

Any recommendations on an arduino 'starter kit' I could use with my 8yo kids?

I'm thinking we could start with a generic kit of some sort and once we/they had played with the basics we could try something like a gamebuino without it being a giant leap.

All opinions welcomed. Even the crazy ones from the crazy folk.

 

Its hard to say at that age I think. There's a huge amount of stuff you can do with the PI like make it into an old arcade machine, program using scratch, various server roles. Plus you have the camera that can be added into it as well. You can even turn it into a small version of a controller used to control real manufacturing equipment. The pi has its gpio as well so there's the possibility of interfacing to some hardware via some bridging electronics.

I don't have enough knowledge on arduinos to make a good case for them, but I think that you could make things like a wall following robot or some other mobile roboty/mobile electronics type thing a little easier on an arduino than you could with the raspberry pi. For versatility I would go for a pi but for messing about with pure hardware maybe the arduino is good. One case for the hardware control using the pi is that they should be able to use scratch to access the gpio, so you have the benefit of getting to hardware in a familiar language.

Its good to see kids learning programming at school. We just had an angry man teaching us how to use a word processor

Edit: There's probably pi to arduino interfaces so going with both is always an option

 

Robots! Can't go wrong with building a robot imo, and I think the adruino is better suited to that.

Possibly something like this from Oomlout would be a good place to start...

 

I'd probably go with the Raspberry Pi. Lots of input/output and the learning curve for using them is less than an Arduino.

Also means can just have multiple SD-Cards to swap between projects.

 

I'd say the Raspberry too, or maybe the Udoo, which is the merge of am RPi and an arduino. But less is better to begin with.

I've started to code at the age of 9, using Basic on my Amiga 2000. Then moved to assembly at the age of 14, still on Amiga. Properlly learnt C/C++/ASM at the univ then.

I'd say that teaching them to write pseudo-code / algorithm is a must have.

 

One more vote for Raspberry, since it was designed specifically to teach kids programming. Here you have a website that can help you: http://raspberry-pi-tutorial.com. Arduino is great also, incredible stuff for such a small amount of money.