This conversation was recorded on September 9, 2025.
Dale Dougherty: Welcome to Make:cast. I'm Dale Dougherty. Eben Upton, the founder of Raspberry Pi, wrote the forward to the book that we will be talking about today, Unplugged Tots by Hannah Hagan, which is published by Raspberry Pi Press..
I wanted to quote Eben.
When I met Hannah at the Cambridge Raspberry Pi Jam in 2023, the idea of using offline educational activities to set the stage for future programming seemed very natural to me as I watched my own children, Afra and Kit, working their way through the cloud dough and colorful foam squares activities with Hannah's girls, Charlotte and Emily, I recognized a dawning understanding of the same basic principles --sequencing, iteration, conditionals --that I'd learnt from a series of illustrated computer books by Usborn four decades earlier.
Exercises like those you'll find in this book form part of a tradition that [00:01:00] stretches even further back past the home computer revolution to a time when computers were so rare and computing time so expensive that even university students and professional engineers were encouraged to mentally simulate their programs offline before submitting them to be run as batch jobs. They remain highly relevant, even in an era of AI assisted vibe coding, and of $4 Raspberry Pi Pico computers running high level languages like Micro Python.
Dale Dougherty: I am joined today by Hannah Hagon who is the author of a new book called Unplugged Tots. And an old colleague of mine, Brian Jepsen, who is publisher at Raspberry Pi.
And, we will have a nice talk about raising kids in an era of technological complexity that in some ways they don't really get introduced to. Welcome, Hannah.
Nice to see you.
Hannah Hagon: Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
Dale Dougherty: Welcome Brian.
Brian Jepson: Nice to see you.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah. So Hannah, why don't you give us some background on yourself and we'll maybe start there.
Hannah Hagon: I'm a mom of two girls who are currently nine and 11, and I started Unplugged Tots because of them basically. So at the time this seed was planted, they were two and four. My family and I and the girls were at a Raspberry Pi Festival and we were looking at all the wonderful things, the robots and the 3D printers and all the things that they're doing in Cambridge, in the UK to do with Raspberry PIs. And then we got to a different room and they found some computers with Scratch on it.
And they was like mom, can you help me with this? Can you help me with this? I was like yeah, sure.
And they obviously, at two and four, they couldn't read, they couldn't write, they [00:03:00] couldn't follow instructions. They couldn't do what they were trying to do. They were trying to learn, they were trying to create, this kind of whole new world for themselves.
I was frustrated on their behalf. I felt that they needed a bridge to get them from the point of not knowing, to the point of having this wonderful world of technology open to them and that is the kind of background to Unplugged Tots. I've built the bridge between children having this lack of knowledge or awareness to some understanding of computational thinking themes through the power of play and craft and music and movement.
Dale Dougherty: So I think the big surprise to someone is there's no Scratch in this book. There's no Raspberry Pi in this book. There's no log on and get an account anywhere. It's the stuff of puzzles and rainbows.
Hannah Hagon: Yeah.
Dale Dougherty: Activities you can do with kids to make them aware of-- we call it computational thinking, but in some ways it's just logical thinking. This [00:04:00] is not a book that a person who doesn't know computing is gonna find intimidating. They're gonna find it pretty friendly.
Hannah Hagon: Yeah, I hope so. And it's designed to be a book that can grow with the child as well. So it starts from two and a half and goes all the way upwards really. But it's designed so that the activities are using equipment that you would have in a typical home. Everyone's got socks and one of the activities it's about pairing socks. You're just looking for patterns in socks or items of clothing and things. I think that's the beauty of the activities that I've got is there's no barriers to the children and the families learning together. There's no tech required; there's no kind of financial barriers that are potentially limiting some children to getting into technology. It's a really easy route to that first step on the pathway of technology.
Dale Dougherty: So it's really just a general awareness of these modes of [00:05:00] thinking in, in how they apply in everyday life. Your socks is one example. I think you have a thing on sequencing. These sound like fancy words, algorithms and sequencing and pattern matching. We do them, we did them before computers were around. and we adapt them to computers. Do you wanna give us an example from the book of one of the activities you have?
Hannah Hagon: My favorite one is probably the biscuit one, where we are following an algorithm and we are looking at how we decorate and ice biscuits because as a mom, whenever I was doing anything to do with food, that always appealed to my children. One of the things that the designers did at Raspberry Pi was turn my ideas into like actual works of art.
Dale Dougherty: It's a very visual book. Very colorful, very friendly. But tell us more about the biscuit.
Hannah Hagon: So the biscuit, so the idea of the biscuit is the children have to follow a set [00:06:00] sequence. So we want to put some icing sugar and some water into a bowl. But if you haven't had that experience before of making icing, then you don't know what you don't know.
And I think for some families, sometimes things like that can potentially be quite messy, can be quite daunting. And I'm trying to break down a lot of these barriers and show families that some of these skills don't have to be daunting. If you approach it in a slightly different way, you can actually teach children more than just making icing. You can teach 'em about a whole load of other skills such as following an algorithm, such as following the algorithm in a sequence, such as problem solving when the icing doesn't quite work out.
One of the things that I do in like my afterschool clubs is make the icing too stiff and I have to get the children to problem solve. If it's too stiff, what do we need to do? What do we need to add to make it more liquidy?
And so they try and I try and lead them to the answer, [00:07:00] as in, let's add more water. There's another example where I did Rudolph biscuits. So what's the sequence of adding the cherry for the nose of Rudolph? Do you add it before you put icing on, or do you add it at the end. It's getting the children to think about the order that they do things. So we're putting a bit more agency on the children to think for themselves and then problem solve for themselves. So the book is just a kind of starting point for this and for children.
Dale Dougherty: It's sometimes called meta skills or metacognition.
Hannah Hagon: Metacognition meta thinking about thinking. Yeah. Biscuit
Brian Jepson: And for the benefit of americans viewing this biscuit is another word for cookie. Probably figured it out by context with the fact that there's icing involved.
Dale Dougherty: One of the observations I have of talking about making to parents, the kids that grow up making things, the ones that do really well have parents that recognize what's going on and help them understand what they're doing.
I remember at a conference and I was talking about kids who take things [00:08:00] apart and how that was a natural way to learn what's inside something. Someone who is actually like a monitor in the room came up and said, my son takes things apart all the time, and I scold him 'cause I think he's being destructive. But now you made me think that he's actually learning something. And I go, of course. And I think these things like cooking, like a lot of arts and crafts, I've always felt like the procedures-- you might call procedural thinking from here's a recipe, or here's how to build something, learning to follow those steps in some sequence is very akin to writing a program. There's a set of rules for something that you follow. But you can, you can also start to say why is that rule there, like with icing. If it's not working out right, you need to tinker with it a bit to get it to work properly.
Brian Jepson: Yeah. I think that maps over really well to robot building. I remember probably 10 years ago putting together a humanoid robot kit and I had [00:09:00] attached the hips backwards and just had to go through that process of "what did I do wrong?"
Dale Dougherty: It's really great to help kids become aware of the process and what they're doing. Again, the biscuits is the outcome, but that's a transferrable skillset to move from to what you learn in one process to another.
Hannah Hagon: I think also it's giving children, a space to fail forward as well. I was guilty this when my girls were younger but stepping in whenever they had a problem and not letting them have the kind of safe space to explore for themselves, how to fix it themselves. And I think that as a world, we need to give our children the space to be the problem solvers of tomorrow, and we need allow them opportunity to fix things now.
Dale Dougherty: You used the word play in the book quite a bit. Understanding the nature of play as opposed to work or school is key [00:10:00] to this. You do fail in play. It's not fatal. It actually is another step in the process. Parents can learn a lot from thinking about how to turn things into play, even cooking, to enjoy the play as opposed to I won.
Hannah Hagon: I think a lot of it is we're living in this world of social media and everything's gotta be insta perfect. I say to all of the parents that I work with we are just celebrating the actual journey rather than the end result. The end result doesn't have to be insta perfection. It can just be the joy of time with your children.
Dale Dougherty: Even if we weren't thinking that kids need to learn computers, this is not that far off of some conventional things that kids should learn regardless of what their,
Hannah Hagon: absolutely
Dale Dougherty: their outcome is. I sometimes have a problem with learn to code stuff. It's so narrow in focus and it's basically teaching syntax and [00:11:00] not about discovery, exploration or fun. It's you got it wrong or you got it right. And then go to the next step. And I think this is broader, how kids learn and how adults can facilitate that learning. That's the power of this, right?.
Hannah Hagon: You've hit the nail on the head there, Dale, because I wanted to celebrate the holistic set of skills that children will need in this world rather than simply learning to code. The world as we know, is just drastically changing and transforming. We have no idea what our children will end up doing when they reach adulthood.
What I feel we need to do is equip them with a multitude, a whole kind of toolkit of skills that will facilitate whatever they end up choosing. And I think computational thinking is crucial to that.
Dale Dougherty: I think that speaks to the moment for this book too. Parents also find themselves in this position. They don't know where their kids are [00:12:00] gonna end up. They also might feel that their schools are not giving them the kind of skills that they need. I find that often the curriculum looks backward looking to me rather than future looking.
And so kids aren't getting exposed. They're basically getting more and more memorization but breaking down into patterns of learning, I think it's one of the things you've done here in, in very simple ways. And also gets to act active learning rather than, just being talked to just being told that you're learning.
Anyway, I think parents are struggling with this right now and this book is especially, you have a nice niche here of maybe the under 10 audience or maybe even younger, certainly the, daughter, your daughter's original ages of, what was it, four and two or something?
Hannah Hagon: Four and two and a half.
Dale Dougherty: So there isn't a lot out there speaking to those ages.
Hannah Hagon: No there's [00:13:00] not. So I do quite a lot of academic research as well, and my first academic article that I had published was about the question can we teach two and a half year olds coding. The answer is absolutely we can. We just need to marry it up with their interests and marry it up with what they are capable of doing. We can't teach someone to code if you're expecting them to read something. We just need to tailor the mode. And that's basically what I've done. But that said, Dale, I have had adults my age enjoy some of my activities as well.
Dale Dougherty: What I kind of worry when you said teaching coding at two and a half, I worry that parents that are obsessed with teaching their kids to read by the time they're three are just gonna, now they have to learn to code and they have to learn Mandarin and there's all these other things, and it's force feeding, which is not really what I think you're trying to get here.
It's really exposure and experiences and like I said earlier, awareness that you're using your mind to figure these things [00:14:00] out.
Hannah Hagon: I think a lot of it is about connection and working together and building kind of stronger family bonds as well, so that children have that space to try things out and if they don't work, they don't work. But it's that safe space and that will hopefully filter through the kind of the social and emotional wellbeing will filter through later until life.
Dale Dougherty: That actually brings up an interesting point too , I've heard this in the past about STEM and science. And parents don't feel comfortable with those subjects. They don't wanna engage their kids in it.
And I think one of the leaps that your book makes is this should be pretty comfortable to most people. It's not like you're studying computer science in order to teach your kids coding. Actually thinking about something like a puzzle or a drawing or, a recipe and you have a lens in looking at it maybe differently than you did previously and drawing out some observations [00:15:00] or interactions because of that.
Hannah Hagon: Absolutely. I think traditionally those kinds of subjects have been quite, not elitist, but that there's been quite a closed community. And I think we need break down a lot of barriers because we need these people, these children, to be in the STEAM sectors in their future. And so we have to be mindful that we need to build that pipeline, right. Not just filling their minds with the tech and the science and the math. It's also about the communication, the collaboration, the art of working together, because when you work together, you get more ideas and you have fun when you do it because you know what's life without a bit of fun.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah, exactly. Brian, let me ask why did Raspberry Pi and Eben want to publish this book?
Brian Jepson: Yeah, absolutely. Hannah and I have both had tables at the event called Cam Jam [00:16:00] and I think the one that we met at might have been the birthday Cam Jam. Is that right? Hannah? The one, raspberry Pi was born on a leap day. So our official birthdays are really only every four years. So is at one of those. But really where it comes in is, if you look at the history of Raspberry Pi, a lot of the inspiration comes from building that pipeline of computer science students in higher education. Eben introduced Hannah and me and what excited him and excited me was, okay, how do we help build a pipeline of kids who are ready to start with some of the most basic programming task can do on a Raspberry Pi such as Scratch, right? Like we can teach Scratch and we do in our beginner's books but how do you prepare kids for that? And both my wife Joan Peckham, [00:17:00] during her time at National Science Foundation here in the US, she worked on a lot of programs associated with computational thinking. And it's been part of her career as a computer scientist. So that sort of primed me. I was already, let's put it this way, I was already trained in the lingo that Hannah was using. Thanks to my wife, Joan.
Dale Dougherty: So Hannah, how do you get this book out to parents, to the people that need it? This is one of the challenges, of anything today is figuring out how to get it to the right people which is a lot of people ideally to pick it up and to begin learning with.
Hannah Hagon: I'm a parent and I'm there. I'm in the thick of it. I, I feel that I can speak on behalf of a lot of parents who are struggling with the screen use that we're having at home, demands of everything on our time. There's a changing tide of a desire to balance screen use at home with [00:18:00] this connection with our children and this time to have the bonding opportunities.
I hope that this book will facilitate a lot of parents and with families and also with educators and group leaders, librarians. 'cause it's not just limited to families.
Dale Dougherty: I do think parents are struggling with the screen time thing. What you would like to see where kids bring their imagination and skills to something and say, can I do that?
Hannah Hagon: I think one of the things that I really like about the activities in the book is that they're open-ended. It does give an option for children to have that kind of agency and that ownership over their own entertainment as well. So one of the activities is about pattern recognition with Lego blocks. And I think, I remember distinctly writing something along the lines of, if your child ends up making a Lego mansion or, whatever, then just go with it because you are, you're allowing that creative freedom. You're allowing their imagination to kind [00:19:00] of run riot, and that is what play in my opinion, is all about.
Dale Dougherty: Hannah, I wish you the best on your book here and more importantly on your mission to, to work with with parents. Is Unplugged Tots beyond the book an organization that you've set up?
Hannah Hagon: Yeah. Unplugged Tots is my company name as well.
Dale Dougherty: And what is its goal?
Hannah Hagon: To impact as many children I can to spread the joy of computational thinking through screen-free play-based activities.
Dale Dougherty: Screen free play-based activities. That's a good phrase.
Brian Jepson: A lot of your company activities are in-person event center, right?
Hannah Hagon: Yeah. I do a lot of in-person workshops, museum work, school work.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah. So hopefully you can get some folks in the US to carry the torch over here. Brian and Hannah, thank you for talking to me today.
Hannah Hagon: Thank you very much for having us.
Promo video:
Coming soon (preorders available):
