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My organization is working with the BBC Microbit Foundation to make these devices more popular in the US education system. I find the Microbit to be far less intimidating than the Arduino, since the IDE is entirely web based and students can copy a program onto it just as they would copy a file onto an external USB drive. One feature that kills it in the classroom is the Microbit's built-in 5 x 5 LED matrix, which me…
I work for the micro:bit Foundation, who have taken ownership of the project on from the BBC - great to see some love on HN for this! There's more at http://microbit.org but for the Hacker News audience you're probably interested in http://tech.microbit.org though ;). There's even a reference design to make your own microbit-derived designs. We'll be hiring tech people again soon, so if you want to come and help us t…
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14208
One minor comment - the article really made me want one, and when I went to the home page, it took me around five or six clicks to get to a place where I can buy one! Finally I found it at the very bottom of the page under "About". And even then when I click on the adafruit one and it takes me to the adafruit homepage. Why not have a giant button on the homepage? Do you folks really not want people to buy your stuff? :-)
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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?
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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 ?
I have some experience of trying to teach kids how to use a Pi, and even simple Python part can be a nightmare. SVG is a non-starter.
Also, don't underestimate the fact that the LEDs feel physical while a screen feels virtual. The journey from a single light to an array of lights to shapes shown on the array to shapes shown on a screen is intuitive and fairly obvious.
If you start kids on a screen, even with a turtle, they miss the basics.
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Instead of lambasting it for a low number, perhaps you could tell us what you'd have a child do in 17KB that they couldn't do in 16KB? It's an educational device, and that education involves learning to write pieces of code for which industry users may well prefer to pull in large libraries. I'd be surprised if the target audience - 12-13 year olds - use all that; those that have a passion for it will of course end u…
Quoting from the fine article, which you clearly have not read: “Finally, the micro:bit’s 16 kB of RAM is quite limiting, at least when using the MicroPython runtime. While writing a moderate-size program I managed to repeatedly exhaust the SoC’s memory, resulting in difficult to debug MemoryExceptions. I can easily imagine intermediate users running up against and being confused by this limitation, and would welcome…
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> " ... easily imagine intermediate users running up against ... "
Something tells me the author isn't imagining the 12-13 year-old target audience when writing 'intermediate users'. There's nothing wrong with reviewing it from a different audience's perspective of course, but it doesn't do to ignore it if you're going to complain about the device's specification.
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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?
The BBC Micro cost £400 in 1981, which was £1400 in 2016, according to the Bank of England. I don't know if this includes monitors, presumably it doesn't include any software. From the other comment, you can double the price to add disc drives etc.
So, at least £400 for every 25 children. My primary school had one in every classroom, but I don't know if that was the standard, so it could be less.
A 10-pack of Micro:Bits with basic accessories come to £11 each, £275 for 25 children.
can you buy them from USA? any distributor or any in the pipeline to do that?
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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).