Sometimes we get wonderful emails from people who were inspired to get into STEM by Raspberry Pi. We thought we’d share with all of you the story that proud dad Matt Appler recently shared with us.

In 2013 Matt’s daughter, Amy, won one of the first ever Raspberry Pi cameras. Nearly 700 people entered our competition, and only ten winners were chosen. Entrants had to come up with a project that would subject our as-yet-unreleased camera to what Liz called “extra-hard testing”, and Amy wanted to develop a bird detector. Her mum loves to go out and watch birds in the cove near their house; Amy’s invention would use Raspberry Pi to send a signal back to the house to notify when there are birds in the area.

Amy was eleven at the time, and although she never quite completed that first build, it sparked her passion for STEM. She went on to use the camera in lots of other projects, including 3D printer monitoring and timelapse photography of a snow storm (below).

You can scour Amy’s archive of Raspberry Pi-based projects dating all the way back to 2013.

Amy’s brother was also inspired to learn STEM skills with Raspberry Pi, and he even taught a workshop to his class in the hopes of sparking their interest too.

Studying STEM at university

Nearly ten years later, Amy is an electrical engineering student at Virginia Tech.  At the moment she is working on a drilling cobot — a collaborative robot designed to work hand-in-hand with human employees. You can keep up with her more recent projects on amy.appler.net.