This one would be embarrassed but it can't remember what it idid last night.

Yes but I never thought the Raspberry Pi would make a very good physical computing resource for classrooms, for hackers yes, kids not so much. The Arduino and clones provide analogue in, PWM for servo etc. and most importantly buffered i/o ( I think the Beagle Bone Black also does all this ). Speaking as someone who made magic smoke from a BBC Micro RS232 board while at school, I think it would be just too easy to kill the Raspberry PI with its 3v3 logic ( TTL would kill it, off course ), max 50ma out and i/o unbuffered to the SOC. Just wiring up an LED without a ballast resitor might do it, how many times would that happen in class.

I think what would suit schools even better would be a virtualised x86 version of the Raspberry Pi distribution ( raspbian ). That way they wouldn't need to buy new hardware or replace their PCs windows operating systems. The virtualised Pi would have a low memory, disk and cpu footprint so would sit confortably on the often old PCs I have seen in secondary schools. Programming could be done in the virtualised Pi but the PC would still be available for other classes to run Photoshop or MATLAB, Pro Tools or whatever.

Kids could transfer their work from a Rasperry pi at home to the virtualised one at school. The only sticking points would be anyone starting to use Open GL / open GL ES could run into problems.

I think a lot of the motivation for these changes comes from the criticism of the existing ICT course from Ofsted the education regulator but probably more from the speech Eric Schmidt made about the UK throwing away it's engineering legacy. He said "I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools"

OK, I think they made another appearance in July 2011. This was around two weeks after a report of a NATO missile killing children in Libya. The British public were not keen on another war in the middle east. Then this appeared in the Telegraph. The strange thing is that this village is neither on the Heathrow nor Gatwick flight paths. I know the area quite well and there are no low flying aircraft there, no wonder the villagers were amazed, it was all arranged for the national press. Here is a good analysis of the story.

A few years ago the UK government leaked the story that there was a crack team of Islamic terrorists equipped with surface to air missiles ready to launch a "spectacular" attack. These extremists had based themselves in west London near Heathrow airport and were planning an imminent attack. In response the government sent 400 troops and tanks to the airport. Strangely no arrests were ever made and no missiles were ever recovered and the whole event was quickly forgotten. When did this happen ? about 5 weeks before the invasion of Iraq.