Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In love with the BBC micro:bit

markshroyer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 82 posts

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#61

Post by clort »

askvictor wrote: post #50
toyg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Botched...?

The delay in shipping meant they didn't arrive until well into the school semester, meaning teachers didn't get sufficient time to play and incorporate them into the curriculum. I have also heard that due to insufficient teacher training (and play time) that a lot of them are sitting unused. Certainly some teachers are doing awesome things, and the resources and community building behind the project are great, but th…

I work in a school, and I know at least the teachers did get hold of a few before the students did though I don't know what has been done with them so far as I'm not near the ICT dept -- its worth noting that the ones that were given away to the year 7 students were theirs for their own use and do not belong to the school. This meant that the school had to buy some if they needed them for classroom work, since the students might play with their own at home, but could not be guaranteed to bring them in. For the teachers to incorporate that into their curriculum, they are going to need to budget for 30 at least probably a few more for spares.

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#62

Post by ntoll »

askvictor wrote: post #51
pjmlp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to MicroPython adoption rate, I see it as the BASIC of IoT. :) Nice work.

Unfortunately there is a lack of easy to use tooling... Mu for the microbit is nice, but other platforms don't have an easy to use editor and file uploader

Do you mean other hardware platforms upon which MicroPython runs, or other software platforms that target the micro:bit? If the former, work is in progress on that front (I am the maintainer of Mu).

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#63

Post by ntoll »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #42
ntoll wrote: post #39

Yay... great to see MicroPython on the micro:bit getting some love. In case you're interested, here are the docs for MicroPython on the board -- you can do a remarkable amount on such a small device: https://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (Caveat - I was involved in the MicroPython side of things. So good to see the other dev environments represented in the comments here.) Hurrah! :-)

I wonder whether it would be possible to make MicroPython functional on an original 1980s BBC Micro, which has a 6502 and a whole 32K of RAM. The "beeb" stores interpreters on pluggable 32K ROMs.

Cute idea. Care to suggest a URL of two about pluggable ROMs for interpreters?

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#64

Post by stinos »

viubui wrote: post #59

I must be missing something. Why would a kid get excited about making a 5x5 array of LEDs to blink when they can easily program a ~2000x1000 array of lights (their laptop/phone/tablet screen) using their browser ?

they can easily program a ~2000x1000 array of lights

Easy for you doesn't mean easy for a 6 year old. Is there really easy pixel-by-pixel programming on any of the devices you mention? As simple as entering few lines of python code and pressing 1 single button? Let alone with direct full-screen access? (I'm really curious, maybe there is).

Also check the example: like 15 lines of Python which make the device play a tone based on the compass. Again: I'm really curious if there are alternatives which achieve this is such an easy way (IIRC even the simplest Arduino style boards I tried required installing an IDE, fiddling with some settings, and the code wasn't nearly as easy as Python). And I'm also not sure if laptop/phone would be amongst those alternatives.

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#65

Post by clort »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #29
Avshalom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if you let them have good graphics their artskills start getting in the way of the programming.

We do things like scroll your name - one character at a time is rubbish. Then we do a digital pet (think tamagotchi) and again, with a low pixel count this is crap. They want to draw unicorns or fish or bunnies. None of this is possible. After that they want it to beep when the pet is hungry. No can do. All pretty basic stuff.

you can't wire a speaker to an output pin?

if I recall on the Apple II, the speaker was a single bit on/off .. I played games that had music playing concurrently with the onscreen action and even speech!

I understand about the pictures though and I can understand if they kept it simple on purpose to prevent them from being able to download a picture and show it.. I work in a school and while we have a 3d printer on loan from a local company, in the main kids want to print a Voldemort, not something they made themselves..

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#66

Post by clort »

monocasa wrote: post #21
Symbiote wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did put a BBC Micro in every school though.

So that means that they distributed, what, two or three orders of magnitude more micro:bits?

Yes - there are about 160 kids per year group in my school, and I think all year 7's got one (for themselves, not the school)

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#67

Post by clort »

mbrookes wrote: post #30
monocasa wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the British government didn't give a Commodore 64 to every British child for free.

Not every child - every Year-7 (11-12 year old) child, whose school had a teacher interested enough to apply for them. My child's DT teacher did, but they used it for one lesson, then were given it to bring home. It's now in a drawer somewhere. That was last year. I haven't heard of any plans to repeat the exercise.

As I understand it, it was not the DT teacher -- the government gave one to every year 7 child for themselves to keep and use however they wish. This is nice in a way but the teachers at my school bemoaned that they couldn't really use them in the class, since the students could not really be counted on to bring them in when required. If you think that the school would benefit from them, then contact the PTA or the school governers and get them to ask parents to donate unused micro:bits to the school?

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#68

Post by LeoPanthera »

ntoll wrote: post #63
LeoPanthera wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether it would be possible to make MicroPython functional on an original 1980s BBC Micro, which has a 6502 and a whole 32K of RAM. The "beeb" stores interpreters on pluggable 32K ROMs.

Cute idea. Care to suggest a URL of two about pluggable ROMs for interpreters?

In the 80s they were called "language ROMs"

There's some high-level stuff here http://beebwiki.mdfs.net/Paged_ROM (see "Languages") and I have asked my BBC Micro developer friends to send me some more useful docs, which I'll forward to you as soon as I get them.

Edit: Actually that page has some pretty low-level stuff on it as well, which may keep you busy for a while.

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#69

Post by abritinthebay »

viubui wrote: post #59

I must be missing something. Why would a kid get excited about making a 5x5 array of LEDs to blink when they can easily program a ~2000x1000 array of lights (their laptop/phone/tablet screen) using their browser ?

You certainly are missing many things.

What you describe is several orders of magnitude more complex to do for a child.

It's like saying "why would they build a 2d game with Scratch when they could build a 3D FPS in C++?"

Re: In love with the BBC micro:bit

#70

Post by viubui »

abritinthebay wrote: post #69
viubui wrote: post #59

I must be missing something. Why would a kid get excited about making a 5x5 array of LEDs to blink when they can easily program a ~2000x1000 array of lights (their laptop/phone/tablet screen) using their browser ?

You certainly are missing many things. What you describe is several orders of magnitude more complex to do for a child. It's like saying "why would they build a 2d game with Scratch when they could build a 3D FPS in C++?"

actually I was going to suggest Scratch as the sensible alternative! Or Logo or Smalltalk

but is drawing shapes with Canvas or SVG really more difficult than blinking an LED with Python ?

Post reply on HN