What’s the big idea?

The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost credit-card-sized computer designed to promote computer skills in schools. More than two million units have been sold globally.

Why we like Eben

Dr Eben Upton is a prominent technologist encouraging young people to experiment with programming.

He co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation in response to the declining computing skills of A-level students, but soon realised that the affordable device could be extended to other school levels and to communities that can’t afford traditional computers.

Eben is executive director of the foundation and is responsible for the device’s overall software and hardware architecture. He also works as an ASIC architect for the Fortune 500 communications company, Broadcom.

Before Raspberry Pi, he founded two successful digital games companies, Ideaworks3D and Podfun, and served as Director of Studies for Computer Science at St John’s College, University of Cambridge.

Follow him here: @EbenUpton

Photo, right: Eben Upton. Credit: PopTech. Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Photo, left: Raspberry Pi. Credit: DannyChamorro. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.