Carrie Anne Philbin

Philbin studied history at the University of Essex. She taught herself to program and manage computer systems after she graduated.^[4] She trained as a school computing teacher and worked in East London.^[when?][4] As of 2025^[update] she is doing a PhD supervised by Sue Sentance at the University of Cambridge.^[5]

Philbin has been responsible for teaching children and teachers how to code in Python programming language and the Scratch programming language.^[6] In 2014 she began to work at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.^[7] She is a Google Certified Teacher and was a Skype Movement Maker.^[8][9] Philbin leads strategy, continuing professional development (CPD) program and learning at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.^[10] She was an advisor to the Department for Education for the UK's first computing curriculum.^[11] In 2016 she was named as one of Computer Weeklys most influential women rising stars.^[12] She chairs the Computing At School diversity and inclusion program and was a member of the board of directors at Python Software Foundation until 2017.^[13] She was appointed a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation and named Computer Weekly's third most influential woman in IT in 2017.^[14][15] She is a founder member of CasInclude an organisation supporting diversity in computing, for children in school. She won the 2018 FDM Group Everywoman Tech Digital Star Award.^[16]

Philbin is a regular speaker at conferences like the British Educational Training and Technology Show (BETT), Raspberry Jams,^[17] International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference^[10] and Python conferences PyCon AU,^[18] EuroPython^[19] and PyCon UK.^[20]

In 2019, Philbin was 17th in Computer Weekly's 50 'Most Influential Women in UK Tech' shortlist for her role as Director of Education at the Raspberry Pi Foundation^[21]

Geek Gurl Diaries was created by Philbin in 2012 to communicate to young people how exciting and creative science and engineering are.^[22] It has 34,000 subscribers on YouTube.^[23] It won the TalkTalk Digital Heroes award in 2013.^[24]

Adventures in Raspberry Pi first published in 2013 with subsequent editions published in 2014, 2015 and 2016.^[1][25][26] It contains an introduction to programming as well as 10 projects and instructional videos.

In 2017 Philbin partnered with Crash Course to create a series of videos explaining the origins of modern computing.^[27] The series consists of 41 videos, with between 177,000 and 3,200,000 viewers.^[28][29]

She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to education.^[30][31]