6 ms·

This computer seems the least interesting if all computers I can think of. It's like they actually tried to make it not have exciting potential. You have to re

This computer seems the least interesting if all computers I can think of. It's like they actually tried to make it not have exciting potential. You have to really work to hobble a modern computer to remove the excitement factor but somehow the BBC rose to the challenge.

matthewwarren 9y ago
I'm not sure about that, of course it is limited compared to the Raspberry Pi. But, have you ever watched a kid use one and within 5 mins be able to have their name scroll across the screen or make a simple Paper/Scissors/Stone game using the accelerometer? They get pretty excited about it!
- hguhghuff 9y ago
  I've heard this before, but how can the appeal last longer than a few minutes? Seriously, a computer is about potential but the possibilities are so incredibly limited with this device that it's hard to see where to go after a few blinking lights. That's just not exciting. For an example of what the new BBC project should have been, look up littlebits - now there's potential and open ended creative possibility. A few blinking lights and that's the total potential? Meh.
  - matthewwarren 9y ago
    Well you can wire it up to eternal devices easily enough. Also take a look at some of the ideas on this page, http://microbit.org/ideas/projects/ http://microbit.org/ideas/projects/. (thanks for the info about 'littlebits', I'd not heard about that, taking a look now)
  - IanCal 9y ago
    Multiplayer rock paper scissors with radio communication based on shaking them? https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams Add on some motors and make a robot that hides from the light? Make a robot that can follow a path, or that drives based on true compass directions. Make a hide and seek with your microbit reporting hot/cold based on signal strength to other microbits? https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold Display the temperature? Send messages to people? Add on any other sensors? Connect to your phone and do something else (app driven robot maybe) Firefly synchronisation https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/fireflies https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/fireflies There's loads on that page and really you've got sensors and can control other things, and do distributed communication. There's lots of things you can do with a low powered processor, and it's not locked down to a few options. Edit - I've just found out you can play sounds with it too. Edit 2 - I'm now actually quite excited about this. I'm going to go out and buy one now.
    - hguhghuff 9y ago
      Sorry but for a modern kid, the sort of projects you are talking about sound like the sort of projects that an adult thinks kids would love, not what kids would actually love, which is screens, color, games, robotics and interaction. It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.
      - detaro 9y ago
        > It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port. Looking at what I see happening with the Raspberry Pi, I don't agree with that assertion. It's not been very important for making cooler projects with kids, it only made coding on it easier since it didn't come with a nice remote environment and you thus could use the Linux desktop on the Pi for coding. (It also opens up use cases like "media center", but those are not very relevant for education). Kids find going to hardware like the microbit/Pi/Arduino interesting because it is breaking out of the usual screen(+keyboard in case of a PC) environment, and you can do > games, robotics and interaction that's not limited to the screen. And nothing stops you to combine both, have the microbit talk to a PC/phone.
      - IanCal 9y ago
        > a modern kid I think it's a mistake to assume modern kids need high powered things to be interesting. I've been at a maker faire where the kids were amazed at seeing an old broadcast camera hooked up to a TV. All it was doing was recording and playing things back, but they liked it. I'm sure lots of them even had phones which would do the same thing but with higher quality. The local science museum always hads kids running about in the discovery section playing with things like pulleys and shouting into the long tube that creates a delay, or the glasses that turn things upside down. Kids still play with lego which has absolutely no moving parts or complex interaction. I'm sure if you start by telling kids it'll be boring they'll hate it. Otherwise kids seem to be able to have fun with anything as complex as a cardbox box upwards. > games, robotics and interaction. I mean, several of my examples are games, robots and involve interaction. I can easily see how to use two of these to make a robot wars robot, one for the controller (steer with tilting and a button for "go" and a button for "fire") and one for the robot. Don't tell me kids wouldn't be interested in making fighting robots. > It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port. I think it'd be a huge mistake to try and make something like the rPi. That already exists if you want to do stuff connected to a screen with a full OS and internet access. I doubt it would have fitted into the budget for production either, given that these needed to be given to every year 7 in the country. I think you're trying to make it boring, and have fun with that, I'm going to go and make a robot. Or maybe finally build the sensor to see how far my degu runs in a day on his wheel.
  - JBorrow 9y ago
    Littlebits is considerably more expensive than the micro:bit.
    - hguhghuff 9y ago
      Yes but the BBC would have been better not to commission a new computer, but to design a standard for connecting tiny cheap computing devices together and let industry build interesting BBC compatible things that could be hooked together, expanded, interfaced, with electronics, vision, sound, robotics, movement etc etc
      - zarify 9y ago
        You can hook up lots of the popular kit that works with Arduino to Microbits quite easily (servos, steppers, ultrasonic sensors, extended LED arrays, humidity and moisture sensors). Most of it will work with block code too.
      - Angostura 9y ago
        That's great - unless you mission is to quickly get cheap devices into classrooms
        matthewwarren 9y ago
        Yeah, I suspect the BBC had a very specific remit and they would've been in trouble if they'd got into too much competition with existing manufacturers/companies. They are very much a publicly funded corporation, so everything they do has to fit with that.
      - mavhc 9y ago
        It's not exactly a new computer, it's using ARM's mbed system, so that's a standard real world IoT platform, not a toy. You can drive larger displays https://github.com/carlosperate/awesome-microbit https://github.com/carlosperate/awesome-microbit Plus don't think it's the only computer they'll have, it's an IoT computer, it's supposed to not have a video out. I like that it's all in one, you can program it in 5 mins with a browser, and yet connects to real IO the same way real embedded computers do, you have to get a bit messy, you know it's not a toy.
  - zarify 9y ago
    I've been teaching using these for the last 9 months, using them for an introductory and tactile programming environment (being able to easily switch from block code to Python when they get the concepts is great), learning about how computers use a variety of external sensors, introducing some of the structure of wireless networking, congestion and attenuation and more. And that's without using any of the pins to hook up external gear. My kids have just started hooking up continuous servos and creating remote control buggies with them, learning about protocols in the meantime. They're probably one of the best pieces of kit I've used in 13 years of teaching (and cheap to boot). But feel free to keep rubbishing them, that's your prerogative :)
- IanCal 9y ago
  It has the advantage as well as coming with buttons and lights (as well as accelerometer, compass, light sensor, temperature sensor, bluetooth), so the time between 'open package' and see your code doing something is much smaller. At £15 for one with a battery pack, cables, tutorials, and all that, it sounds great. And apparently has a different radio too, to connect to other micro:bits? Multiplayer rock paper scissors: https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams I'll happily trade not having loads of ram for something a kid (or a big kid myself :) ) can pick up and just make something fun in almost no time.
  - mavhc 9y ago
    As I understand it it's using the bluetooth chip, but as it's actually a Software Defined Radio, they wrote simpler software that doesn't take up half the ram of the computer.
- doctornemo 9y ago
  A few weeks ago I saw dozens of Singaporean kids showing off projects they'd built with the Micro:bit. They learned a good deal, had been very creative, and were clearly interested in learning more. Sounds like a good outcome.
TickleSteve 9y ago
The constraints are a feature. The benefits of working within RAM and processing constraints teaches about those limits and you become more aware of the interaction between hardware and software. Too many softies these days are completely unaware of this interaction.... (to their deficit).
IanCal 9y ago
I just had a look to see how to build an android app to make a hot/cold beacon finder and where to buy beacons. You know what? I'm already bored. And that's before I've started trying to install eclipse and what sdks I need and whether to use kotlin and how to setup the right things. I mean, I found the google docs and one of the first steps is > Request an OAuth 2.0 Client ID Great, going to get some young kids excited by explaining what oauth is and how to log into the google developers console. Next up, what XML you need to know to create an interface and add what threads are and ... Or: https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold Done.
- djaychela 9y ago
  I think that sums a lot of 'progress' up to me; I've had several abortive attempts to 'get into programming' over the last 20 years or so, and all of them have floundered early on on various pre-requisites which just seemed too much to deal with. I'm now persevering with Python (which seems in some way to suffer less that others, but also because I'm sticking at it this time as I want to change career), but I can remember giving up when it seemed I had to write about 50 lines of code just to get a window up with an OK button. I'm sure the same is true many multiples over with kids, and the micro:bit seems a good solution to that.
  - IanCal 9y ago
    If it helps, I've recently started adding more UIs to things and the main way I'm doing it is with web pages. Easy to make, lots of tutorials, requires another language unfortunately but still a useful skill. Not always applicable, but can be a good approach. Best of luck, I know there are some hard steps to take (particularly the stage of "ok I can write code but what can I actually do with it"), but things really build after a while. Oh, and I've been coding for maybe 17 years and 1. I keep writing code that's wrong 2. I get basic things wrong all the time 3. I still have to regularly look things up My wife is learning to code, and I think she felt these things meant she wasn't doing well at it, but it's really common. I'm just used to it and have more experience finding my mistakes because I've made them so much. > and the micro:bit seems a good solution to that. I think so. I think there's a huge step forwards when you can get something working quickly, then build from there.
djaychela 9y ago
I'd have to completely disagree there. I recently went round a new (high) school with my youngest step-son (who is 11, so year 6 in the UK). He's not really that impressed by most computer stuff which is at a level he'd actually be able to understand/program. While he's shown some aptitude in scratch, etc., I think the problem is that everything that's exciting to him is light years away from whatever he can actually do. However, he and his friends all spent some time on the open evening looking at the micro:bits that were on display which were set up to do various simple things - detect touches or switch presses and change LEDs, etc. His elder sister is of the age that was supposed to get a free Micro:bit, but that didn't happen.... I think I'll have to buy one and have a play!
technomalogical 9y ago
I'll add my anecdote: my family and I visited friends in California this past summer for vacation. We visited the local Fry's and I saw these and picked up a pair. Our friends' oldest son was mildly interested, but didn't see the appeal. We looked at the peripherals on the boards and decided to make a remote sensing thermometer that we'd put in the freezer. Literally 15 minutes later, we had built working code in the block editor for both components (the broadcasting thermometer, sending the latest temperature once a second, and the receiver which showed the data) We popped it in the freezer and watched as the temperature slowly creeped down to below freezing. He was amazed that we could build something like that so quickly. Our friends went out and purchased their own micro:bits the next day :)

matthewwarren 9y ago

I'm not sure about that, of course it is limited compared to the Raspberry Pi. But, have you ever watched a kid use one and within 5 mins be able to have their name scroll across the screen or make a simple Paper/Scissors/Stone game using the accelerometer? They get pretty excited about it!

hguhghuff 9y ago
I've heard this before, but how can the appeal last longer than a few minutes? Seriously, a computer is about potential but the possibilities are so incredibly limited with this device that it's hard to see where to go after a few blinking lights. That's just not exciting. For an example of what the new BBC project should have been, look up littlebits - now there's potential and open ended creative possibility. A few blinking lights and that's the total potential? Meh.
- matthewwarren 9y ago
  Well you can wire it up to eternal devices easily enough. Also take a look at some of the ideas on this page, http://microbit.org/ideas/projects/ http://microbit.org/ideas/projects/. (thanks for the info about 'littlebits', I'd not heard about that, taking a look now)
- IanCal 9y ago
  Multiplayer rock paper scissors with radio communication based on shaking them? https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams Add on some motors and make a robot that hides from the light? Make a robot that can follow a path, or that drives based on true compass directions. Make a hide and seek with your microbit reporting hot/cold based on signal strength to other microbits? https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold Display the temperature? Send messages to people? Add on any other sensors? Connect to your phone and do something else (app driven robot maybe) Firefly synchronisation https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/fireflies https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/fireflies There's loads on that page and really you've got sensors and can control other things, and do distributed communication. There's lots of things you can do with a low powered processor, and it's not locked down to a few options. Edit - I've just found out you can play sounds with it too. Edit 2 - I'm now actually quite excited about this. I'm going to go out and buy one now.
  - hguhghuff 9y ago
    Sorry but for a modern kid, the sort of projects you are talking about sound like the sort of projects that an adult thinks kids would love, not what kids would actually love, which is screens, color, games, robotics and interaction. It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.
    - detaro 9y ago
      > It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port. Looking at what I see happening with the Raspberry Pi, I don't agree with that assertion. It's not been very important for making cooler projects with kids, it only made coding on it easier since it didn't come with a nice remote environment and you thus could use the Linux desktop on the Pi for coding. (It also opens up use cases like "media center", but those are not very relevant for education). Kids find going to hardware like the microbit/Pi/Arduino interesting because it is breaking out of the usual screen(+keyboard in case of a PC) environment, and you can do > games, robotics and interaction that's not limited to the screen. And nothing stops you to combine both, have the microbit talk to a PC/phone.
    - IanCal 9y ago
      > a modern kid I think it's a mistake to assume modern kids need high powered things to be interesting. I've been at a maker faire where the kids were amazed at seeing an old broadcast camera hooked up to a TV. All it was doing was recording and playing things back, but they liked it. I'm sure lots of them even had phones which would do the same thing but with higher quality. The local science museum always hads kids running about in the discovery section playing with things like pulleys and shouting into the long tube that creates a delay, or the glasses that turn things upside down. Kids still play with lego which has absolutely no moving parts or complex interaction. I'm sure if you start by telling kids it'll be boring they'll hate it. Otherwise kids seem to be able to have fun with anything as complex as a cardbox box upwards. > games, robotics and interaction. I mean, several of my examples are games, robots and involve interaction. I can easily see how to use two of these to make a robot wars robot, one for the controller (steer with tilting and a button for "go" and a button for "fire") and one for the robot. Don't tell me kids wouldn't be interested in making fighting robots. > It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port. I think it'd be a huge mistake to try and make something like the rPi. That already exists if you want to do stuff connected to a screen with a full OS and internet access. I doubt it would have fitted into the budget for production either, given that these needed to be given to every year 7 in the country. I think you're trying to make it boring, and have fun with that, I'm going to go and make a robot. Or maybe finally build the sensor to see how far my degu runs in a day on his wheel.
- JBorrow 9y ago
  Littlebits is considerably more expensive than the micro:bit.
  - hguhghuff 9y ago
    Yes but the BBC would have been better not to commission a new computer, but to design a standard for connecting tiny cheap computing devices together and let industry build interesting BBC compatible things that could be hooked together, expanded, interfaced, with electronics, vision, sound, robotics, movement etc etc
    - zarify 9y ago
      You can hook up lots of the popular kit that works with Arduino to Microbits quite easily (servos, steppers, ultrasonic sensors, extended LED arrays, humidity and moisture sensors). Most of it will work with block code too.
    - Angostura 9y ago
      That's great - unless you mission is to quickly get cheap devices into classrooms
      - matthewwarren 9y ago
        Yeah, I suspect the BBC had a very specific remit and they would've been in trouble if they'd got into too much competition with existing manufacturers/companies. They are very much a publicly funded corporation, so everything they do has to fit with that.
    - mavhc 9y ago
      It's not exactly a new computer, it's using ARM's mbed system, so that's a standard real world IoT platform, not a toy. You can drive larger displays https://github.com/carlosperate/awesome-microbit https://github.com/carlosperate/awesome-microbit Plus don't think it's the only computer they'll have, it's an IoT computer, it's supposed to not have a video out. I like that it's all in one, you can program it in 5 mins with a browser, and yet connects to real IO the same way real embedded computers do, you have to get a bit messy, you know it's not a toy.
- zarify 9y ago
  I've been teaching using these for the last 9 months, using them for an introductory and tactile programming environment (being able to easily switch from block code to Python when they get the concepts is great), learning about how computers use a variety of external sensors, introducing some of the structure of wireless networking, congestion and attenuation and more. And that's without using any of the pins to hook up external gear. My kids have just started hooking up continuous servos and creating remote control buggies with them, learning about protocols in the meantime. They're probably one of the best pieces of kit I've used in 13 years of teaching (and cheap to boot). But feel free to keep rubbishing them, that's your prerogative :)
IanCal 9y ago
It has the advantage as well as coming with buttons and lights (as well as accelerometer, compass, light sensor, temperature sensor, bluetooth), so the time between 'open package' and see your code doing something is much smaller. At £15 for one with a battery pack, cables, tutorials, and all that, it sounds great. And apparently has a different radio too, to connect to other micro:bits? Multiplayer rock paper scissors: https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams I'll happily trade not having loads of ram for something a kid (or a big kid myself :) ) can pick up and just make something fun in almost no time.
- mavhc 9y ago
  As I understand it it's using the bluetooth chip, but as it's actually a Software Defined Radio, they wrote simpler software that doesn't take up half the ram of the computer.
doctornemo 9y ago
A few weeks ago I saw dozens of Singaporean kids showing off projects they'd built with the Micro:bit. They learned a good deal, had been very creative, and were clearly interested in learning more. Sounds like a good outcome.

TickleSteve 9y ago

The constraints are a feature. The benefits of working within RAM and processing constraints teaches about those limits and you become more aware of the interaction between hardware and software. Too many softies these days are completely unaware of this interaction.... (to their deficit).

IanCal 9y ago

I just had a look to see how to build an android app to make a hot/cold beacon finder and where to buy beacons. You know what? I'm already bored. And that's before I've started trying to install eclipse and what sdks I need and whether to use kotlin and how to setup the right things. I mean, I found the google docs and one of the first steps is > Request an OAuth 2.0 Client ID Great, going to get some young kids excited by explaining what oauth is and how to log into the google developers console. Next up, what XML you need to know to create an interface and add what threads are and ... Or: https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold Done.

djaychela 9y ago
I think that sums a lot of 'progress' up to me; I've had several abortive attempts to 'get into programming' over the last 20 years or so, and all of them have floundered early on on various pre-requisites which just seemed too much to deal with. I'm now persevering with Python (which seems in some way to suffer less that others, but also because I'm sticking at it this time as I want to change career), but I can remember giving up when it seemed I had to write about 50 lines of code just to get a window up with an OK button. I'm sure the same is true many multiples over with kids, and the micro:bit seems a good solution to that.
- IanCal 9y ago
  If it helps, I've recently started adding more UIs to things and the main way I'm doing it is with web pages. Easy to make, lots of tutorials, requires another language unfortunately but still a useful skill. Not always applicable, but can be a good approach. Best of luck, I know there are some hard steps to take (particularly the stage of "ok I can write code but what can I actually do with it"), but things really build after a while. Oh, and I've been coding for maybe 17 years and 1. I keep writing code that's wrong 2. I get basic things wrong all the time 3. I still have to regularly look things up My wife is learning to code, and I think she felt these things meant she wasn't doing well at it, but it's really common. I'm just used to it and have more experience finding my mistakes because I've made them so much. > and the micro:bit seems a good solution to that. I think so. I think there's a huge step forwards when you can get something working quickly, then build from there.

djaychela 9y ago

I'd have to completely disagree there. I recently went round a new (high) school with my youngest step-son (who is 11, so year 6 in the UK). He's not really that impressed by most computer stuff which is at a level he'd actually be able to understand/program. While he's shown some aptitude in scratch, etc., I think the problem is that everything that's exciting to him is light years away from whatever he can actually do. However, he and his friends all spent some time on the open evening looking at the micro:bits that were on display which were set up to do various simple things - detect touches or switch presses and change LEDs, etc. His elder sister is of the age that was supposed to get a free Micro:bit, but that didn't happen.... I think I'll have to buy one and have a play!

technomalogical 9y ago

I'll add my anecdote: my family and I visited friends in California this past summer for vacation. We visited the local Fry's and I saw these and picked up a pair. Our friends' oldest son was mildly interested, but didn't see the appeal. We looked at the peripherals on the boards and decided to make a remote sensing thermometer that we'd put in the freezer. Literally 15 minutes later, we had built working code in the block editor for both components (the broadcasting thermometer, sending the latest temperature once a second, and the receiver which showed the data) We popped it in the freezer and watched as the temperature slowly creeped down to below freezing. He was amazed that we could build something like that so quickly. Our friends went out and purchased their own micro:bits the next day :)