YouTube creator and science educator Carrie Anne Philbin, aka Geek Gurl, guides young viewers through coding music on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

With all the attention to online video's frivolous and darker sides - from daft memes and relentless celebrity gossip to trolling, conspiracy theories, fake news and much, much worse - it's easy to forget just how much of it can be not just generous but fundamentally practical.

Want to change a fuse, carve a perfect dovetail joint, learn to screenprint or solder? There'll be a YouTube video or Facebook reel for that - or more likely hundreds of thousands of them, in any language, for all skills and abilities. This was one of a many forms of online video to unconsciously revive earlier film genres: in this case, the 'instructional', which taught skills like how to use a telephone or how to file to grateful audiences from the 1900s until at least the television era.

Carrie Ann Philbin launched her YouTube channel Geek Gurl Diaries in 2012, driven to inspire more young girls to learn about technology, so that future female tech workers wouldn't, as she did, keep finding themselves 'the only girl on the team'. The channel offered simple, fun and easy-to-follow PowerPoint-style tutorials on computing, coding, electronics, robotics and more. Each video presented practical applications to suit her teen and pre-teen audience: fun Minecraft hacks, making an HTML comic strip. This example is one of a number of tutorials on coding with simple one-board minicomputer Raspberry Pi.

In 2017, Philbin retired Geek Gurl Diaries and embarked on a 40-part introduction to computer science, in partnership with the YouTube channel CrashCourse.

Geek Gurl Diaries won Philbin the mobile network Talk Talk's 'Internet Heroes' award in 2013; the same year she published her first book, Adventures in Raspberry Pi. She has been Executive Director of Learning and Advancement at the Institute of Imagination, and Director of Educator Support at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. She is now studying for a PhD at the University of Cambridge on physical computing approaches to teaching computer science.