Starting up the Raspberry Pi

It’s alive!A week or so ago I ordered a Raspberry Pi (complete with an SD card with the NOOBS software preloaded), and after last weeks first foray into the ModLab I decided to take the Raspberry Pi to see if I could get it going.  My objective for the night:  get the Pi operating and write a classic hello world program, just to get back into programming.I am pleased to report success.  After rustling up a USB keyboard, USB mouse and a monitor that I could plug into HDMI from the various cupboards at ModLab, I was able to boot it up and run through the automated set up.  I chose Raspian for the operating system (you can chose different operating systems) and had it boot through to the GUI interface.Once I had a working Pi tho, I wasn’t really sure what to do with it.  I could open a Python command line terminal and tell it to print my name, but saving led to just a text record of the session, not the serious of commands I was writing for running another time.  This is not helpful if I want to write a longer piece of code to do something, and then be able to come back to it (and not need me to type in each line in order!).  After some help from ModLab member Wesley (who also advised on Python syntax), a work around was to write the short bit of code in the LeapPad text editor and save it as try.py, and then open a terminal and then run that program using python (type in the terminal: python try.py).  I had it ask for first and last names, and then print out “Welcome X Y”.
Now that I have a functioning Pi, the next steps are:First, I need to learn a little about Python and Python syntax so I can actually program somethingSecond, I need to learn how to have the Pi run a program, or if calling it from the terminal Third, I need a project.

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