In love with the BBC micro:bit
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In love with the BBC micro:bit
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Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#2We've been doing outreach work teaching 11-13 year olds to program microbits with Python. It's been a great tool and allowing the kids to see their code running on such a simple device turns out to be a great motivator.
I also think a shout out to https://create.withcode.uk/ is worthwhile. They've got a nice little microbit emulator for trying things out before downloading onto the microbit.
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#3I helped test the microbit and I wrote a small program for pedagogical purposes. The hardware was very neat and I liked the leds on the back.
Originally there was going to be a coin cell battery but they removed it because children might eat it. Also there is a Bluetooth radio on the microbit but the runtime was 12k and there wasn't enough space to load micropython and Bluetooth at the same time .
A link to the example is here https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython/blob/master/examp... .
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#4As a CS student normally working with lower level languages and IoT devices using Arduino I was a bit skeptical when first trying out this. I've tried MicroPython based devices before but they have left a bad taste in my mouth with their need to have Python on a device that I'm probably only going to start once and then leave indefinitely for a task. But I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised by the MicroBit. I participated at a mini-hackathon with Zach Shelby at the University of Tromsø and I ended up using almost exclusively the JavaScript drag-and-drop stuff. Mostly to try it out and see how much you could do with it, and it actually worked really well. Teaching kids to program without having them worrying over missed commas or mismatched brackets is certainly something that would be beneficial. And it really didn't put as many limits on what I wanted to do as I expected either. Only time I dropped down to code was when I wanted to start organising my program for reuse. And Zach was very friendly and talked about how the devices worked under the hood and explained how the compilation was done in the browser so the only thing you load over is a hex of precomplied code. This allows you to really utilise all of the hardware for the device and even means that they could update things on their end which would make your experience smoother without having to upgrade the device.
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#516 KB of memory?
The “64” in “Commodore 64”, the name of a computer introduced in 1982, stands for 64 KB of memory. (A 128 KB version followed 3 years later.) It is now 35 years since 1982…
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#616 KB of memory? The “64” in “Commodore 64”, the name of a computer introduced in 1982, stands for 64 KB of memory. (A 128 KB version followed 3 years later.) It is now 35 years since 1982…
To be fair, the British government didn't give a Commodore 64 to every British child for free.
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#7We use it to teach kids to code. It's OK, but the screen is way too limited for it to be much fun. It is crying out for a good colour screen that can show more than one character at a time. Also, debugging is a pain. They need some sort of event log that can be inspected on the pc
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#816 KB of memory? The “64” in “Commodore 64”, the name of a computer introduced in 1982, stands for 64 KB of memory. (A 128 KB version followed 3 years later.) It is now 35 years since 1982…
To be fair, the British government didn't give a Commodore 64 to every British child for free.
If only! I could have played Granny's Garden at home then.
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#916 KB of memory? The “64” in “Commodore 64”, the name of a computer introduced in 1982, stands for 64 KB of memory. (A 128 KB version followed 3 years later.) It is now 35 years since 1982…
It's got 256KBytes of ROM. If that's memory-mapped, the 16KBytes of RAM is much less of a limitation. Most data and virtually all code - especially on ARM - is read-only.
Python might not be the easiest way of working with this setup though...
Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit
#10There is actually a C/C++ layer that supports the higher level languages known as the micro:bit runtime[0], which means you can also program the device using C/C++... Another level of progression for children.