BBC micro:bit
BBC micro:bit - the learning tool of the future
With the digital age largely upon us, it is time to embrace it and make sure our children, the future generation, understand it enough to be able to pursue their chosen careers. CIE editor, Amy Wallington, spoke to Richard Curtin, strategic alliance director, Premier Farnell, to find out about the BBC’s ‘Make it Digital’ initiative and the introduction of the BBC micro:bit
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per cent of children in primary school will be working in jobs that do not exist yet and, in
today’s age, most of those jobs will have some sort of technology involvement. Many companies are recognising this and have decided that it is time to bring a more technical education to the school curriculum. The BBC is one company that is embracing this through their ‘Make it Digital’ initiative, creating a device called the BBC micro:bit to help children learn how to code. With the help of many electronics companies, this device has been manufactured and distributed to one million year 7 school children over the UK. element14, has signed a 15-month contract to allow this to happen. Speaking to Richard Curtin, strategic alliance director, Premier Farnell, he thinks it is very important that children start learning to code from a young age. “I think, in the age we are in and the way technology is moving, I think it is as critical as English and Maths. To learn the basic fundamentals of coding is going to be a requirement for a huge percentage of careers for these young people as they move forward through their lives so I think it is critical. “And what’s more important for me is the fact that the UK is absolutely leading the charge in the education and the awareness of coding with young people through the designs of things like the Raspberry Pi, which is a UK design out of Cambridge, and a fantastic platform for learning how to code right up to advanced levels. But the BBC micro:bit provides a stepping stone for those of us who might not be quite comfortable enough to get a Raspberry Pi and put it all together and really get into quite complex coding straight away. It is a stepping stone to do it in a safe, friendly, accessible environment.” The BBC micro:bit is the BBC’s most ambitious education project in 30 years and builds on the pioneering role of the BBC Micro, which helped introduce the nation to computing in the 1980s. To make it possible, the BBC has partnered
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with 31 organisations including ARM, element14, Microsoft, NXP Semiconductors, Samsung, Microsoft, Technology Will Save Us and the Wellcome Trust. “element14 provides electronic components to engineers all around the world and a big part of our customer base are actually students and what we call ‘makers’ who fall sometimes into professional design engineers and sometimes into hobbyists or students who are doing some kind of technical dissertation on a certain technology. We have a global online community of over 400,000 registered users of which about a quarter of them are in education or currently a student. So we always wanted to make sure we are servicing their requirements, we give them free technical support, we give them special discounts to make sure they can get access to technology easily. And when we heard about the BBC micro:bit it resonated with us because we are heavily involved in the Raspberry Pi which has a really nice education moral around it. And we have just manufactured the first one million units.” The micro:bit is a small, wearable,
programmable device. There is a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 which is the MCU on the board provided by NXP. There are also sensors, a compass, an accelerometer, LEDs, some buttons, and some peripheral such as how you power the device and where you plug your micro USB. The board is very simple to work; the user can go to the BBC micro:bit website on their laptop where they can plug in their device from the USB cable from the laptop to the device and they can open the programmable languages and projects and learn more about the technology on the board. They can then follow those programmable scripts and languages, compile on the website and they can send that code through the USB directly to the board onto the micro:bit and they can get some level of display of whatever they have done by using the 25 LEDs on the board.
Users can also use the micro:bit on the Components in Electronics
go by connecting it via Bluetooth. Samsung have created apps for the BBC micro:bit so it is possible to connect the micro:bit to the users smartphone. Curtin explains why this is so important for the younger generation. “The aspiration here is we know that there is a huge percentage of the one million 11-year-olds who have smartphones so on
the way to school, on the bus or wherever they are, they can start to code or play games with each other through the micro:bit and they can share their codes with each other. So the Bluetooth technology is a really important part about this accessibility and about making it relevant for the user group that we are targeting.” So far the response to these boards in school has been excellent. Teachers have said it is simple to use, accessible and you do not have to be a coding genius to work it out. There is also training material, projects, and different programming languages provided by BBC and Microsoft on the website. “From a teacher perspective it’s been really good. The first response from the kids was ‘wow, what have you given us!’ They were really excited by this little device that flashes and has buttons and you can plug it in and power it up. We spoke to several schools and what they told us was that typically what they use in school is iPads or some sort of Android equivalent and their PCs, but everything they use is a finished product that is nicely packaged with a keyboard and a screen and they know exactly what to do
with it. To get something like a micro:bit which is essentially the guts of an iPad and be able to see what the components look like, where you have to plug things in and to be able to then follow simple project guides to write your own codes. There has been a huge response on the BBC micro:bit website. So far, there has been 4.5 million visits by students and teachers, over 450,000 BBC micro:bit programs downloaded, which means that teachers and students are actually doing something with it, and there has been more than 80,000 scripts downloaded.
This is just the beginning for this device with more and more companies joining the partnership to develop it even further. To find out more information about the micro:bit, visit
www.microbit.co.uk.
www.cieonline.co.uk
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