The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched a $1,000 Summer Code contest for children and teenagers to create software using its microcomputer.

The Contest is open only to individuals who are 18 years of age or under on the date of entry, and who are in full-time education on that date. Otherwise the rules are fairly minimal:

• Two age categories, 13 and under, and 14 to 18.
• A $1,000 first prize and five $200 runner-up prizes in each category.
• The aim is simple: we want you to impress the judges with a piece of software you’ve written for the Raspberry Pi.

The contest is still open If you don’t own a Raspberry Pi. Instead you can use the open source emulator, QEMU, to emulate the Raspberry Pi in Windows.

As the whole point of the Raspberry Pi is to get kids programming with the enthusiasm we used to see back in the heyday of the Commodore 64, the Atari and the BBC Micro, the idea of having such a contest seems to be a move in the right direction .

The first competition runs for two months, but in the future the Pi foundation intends to run weekly contests.