Is Google’s Raspberry Pi Donation Really an Investment?

Though some are suspect of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) intended donation to schools around the U.K., the tech giant’s motives seem pretty clear, even if somewhat selfish.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has developed some rather interesting, small, basic computers. A key aspect of the computers is that they are cheap, costing between $25 and $35. Their price may not have been a significant deciding factor, but it surely helped when Google decided it would arrange for the donation of 15,000 Raspberry Pi computers to schools in the U.K..

Google’s reasoning behind the charitable act is that the computers could help spark an interest in computer science among today’s youth. The number of students in undergraduate and graduate level computer science in the U.K. has dropped 23 percent and 34 percent, respectively, and Google hopes to tackle that issue by making computers more readily available in schools…