Google will provide 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs for schoolkids around the UK.

Funded by Google, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hopes the free devices will inspire children to take up coding. The foundation will be working with Google and six UK educational partners to find the kids who we think will benefit from having their very own Raspberry Pi.

CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR will each be helping the foundation identify those kids. OCR will also be creating 15,000 free teaching and learning packs to go with the Raspberry Pis.

The partnership was announced at Chesterton Community College in Cambridge, where children were given a coding lesson by Google's chairman Eric Schmidt and Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton.

"We hope that our new partnership with Google will be a significant moment in the development of computing education in the UK," said Mr. Upton.

"We believe that this can turn around the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skill sets of students applying to read computer science at university."