A grant from Google to the Raspberry Pi Foundation will provide 15,000 Raspberry Pis to school children across the UK. It is hoped that the computers will encourage the children to develop their programming skills and become more interested in coding.

Almost a million of the machines have been sold since their launch in March 2012. A group of students received the first set of free Raspberry Pis at Chesterton Community College in Cambridge yesterday.

The other machines will be distributed by six educational partners (CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First, and OCR), who will identify the children who could benefit the most from them.

Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton said the collaboration with Google could help increase applications to computer science courses. He commented:

There’s no lack of interest in technology, but there’s a barrier between being a user and becoming a producer of content… Hopefully the partnership with Google will allow us to broaden our reach. We’re particularly keen to get machines into disadvantaged schools and to introduce more girls to coding.

Raspberry Pi Foundation