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One Million School Children To Get Free BBC Micro:bit Computers
Mickeycaskill writes with this news from TechWeek Europe: Every Year 7 student in England and Wales, Year 8 student in Northern Ireland and S1 student in Scotland will be handed, for free, a BBC micro:bit computer specially designed to help pupils learn to code. Micro:bits, which are smaller than the size of a credit card and can be hooked up to a mobile app or accessed via the Internet, will be delivered nationwide through schools and made available to home-schooled students over the course of the next few weeks. The students are able to keep their devices as their own, meaning they can work with the device for homework, in school holidays, and use it for more applications as their grasp on coding increases. The initiative follows on from the BBC's Micro programme that was introduced in the 1980s, and sees a partnership between the BBC and some of the world's most notable technology companies such as ARM, Microsoft, and Samsung. The computer will hope to emulate the Raspberry Pi, of which more than eight million have been sold. A BBC story explains a bit about the project's ambitions, and points out a few "bumps in the road"; originally, the hardware was to be in classrooms several months sooner. The BBC's own micro:bit page features more on programming the device, as well as many sample projects.
This seems a bit anemic in comparison. It looks like it uses another computer or a mobile for user I/O.
I've still got my BBC Master from last time around.
The last BBC computer education initiative worked amazingly well. Having the BBC in a classroom is what got me into programming when I realised I could make it do what I wanted.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The micro:bit designed to try and keep the Raspberry Pi out of UK schools. See also how Microsoft acted to sabatage the OLPC initiative. ref .. brand new millennium, same old MICROS~1 :)
Why emulate the Raspberry Pi?
It's cheap and actually produced in the UK.
Japanese kids are born knowing how to code, says AmiMoJo.
BBC is not a government entity.
The computer will hope to emulate the Raspberry Pi, of which more than eight million have been sold.
Not literally, of course; not even that figuratively, either, since they're not selling any of them.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
my daughter is in year 8 not 7, so she'll miss out. and I don't get to play with it!
This is simply millions (possibly billions) in tax revenue grabbed by the BBC to pretend to be 'helping the children'. These kids already have better computers at home, so why would this less capable device help them? I'd love to see how much it's costing to produce these, I bet it's eye watering.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
Wait a minute, may be....
Sigh...
The BBC here in the UK is NOT, repeat NOt funded by the Government. It is funded by the people through the TV license. The money goes nowhere near the government. The current license is approx £144/year per household.
The ONLY bit of the BBC that is Government funded is the World Service.
Please get your facts right.
STFU, Donald.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's a bit unfair. Why single that one out?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Micro:bits, ... will be delivered nationwide through schools and made available to home-schooled students over the course of the next few weeks
And most will end up in a drawer / in the bin or on eBay within a matter of weeks.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Rest it on a balloon or other improvised resonator to maximise the effect.
Oh please do bugger off.
"Extortion"? Really? Really? Yes, if you own TV and are capable of receiving live TV you pay. Don't like that don't have an aerial and get on with your life.
And really, for £145/year if you can't find anything on BBC TV or radio worth having then I pity your lack of imagination. Its radio output alone is worth more than that.
A now deceased BBC employee was almost certainly a serial pedophile. It's inexcusable and if you were here for any period of time you'd notice quite how much the BBC is self-critical. I don't think Sky would be quite as open and hair-shirt about this. The Director General resigned over a hagiography of this individual being broadcast and possibly interfering with critical news coverage largely because he was given a really hard time on BBC Radio.
But yes, kill it all. Let's have 40 minutes of program with 20 minutes of adverts per hour everywhere. Let's have lowest common denominator radio. You'll be £145 richer but considerably worse off.
And finally, I live here. The BBC is basically awesome.
owned by the government
Nope.
controlled by the government
Nope.
funded by the government
Oooh, so close! But nope.
It even taxes the public with the "television license fee".
It's not a tax.
I've never understood this knee-jerk reaction libertardians have to government. The government is, as far as the majority of its actions (i.e. those not concerned with initiating force), just a landlord which has a part proprietary interest in all land, and which collects rent on all those who choose to remain on its land. The difference between that and a private landlord is that each citizen has one unsellable share in Government Inc.
The BBC, in particular, is publicly owned, in the sense that it is a statutory corporation created by charter. Does that mean it belongs to the government, or does that mean it belongs to the people? In principle, they're equivalent - the government, after all, belongs to the people as well (any edginess along the lines of NO IT BELONGS TO THE WEALTHY/MEGALOMANIAC POLITICIANS/THE MAN means you're just not good enough at persuading people to vote the way you want them to vote). But it's technically incorrect: the BBC is run independently and controlled by a Trust. The Trust is overseen by government, but so is every organisation under a government's jurisdiction - in fact, the BBC has slightly more regulatory independence than other communications organisations, the remainder of which are all overseen by Ofcom (although the Tories, whose primary funders don't like the BBC much, might be trying to change this).
The only really interesting thing the government does wrt/ the BBC is maintain licence fee legislation. Many TV stations are paid through by advertising, which means you have to pay for them through the sponsorship cost of product purchases whether you watch those channels or not - similarly, the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, which means you have to pay for them through the licence fee whether you watch BBC channels or not. In exchange, the country gets a public service promise, which means a broadcaster providing a certain standard and range of programming, and independence from commercial interests - something that can't be done if they're subject to the business pressures that come with subscription/advertising revenue.
Social democracy - a balance of capitalistic and socialistic principles without the childish ideological extremism that comes from an attempt to create a pure form of either - is really rather good, as Northern Europe in particular has found. Try it sometime.
Meh, its a little bit of both.
The TV license funds the BBC and various other services in part - the BBC also sells its content on the secondary market for more funding (Top Gear was completely funded by its secondary market, it cost the BBC nothing for example).
The TV license is however a government backed tax, the same as other directly collected taxes such as vehicle tax - the government sets the rate and the TV Licensing authority collects it and distributes it (most of it goes to the BBC and related providers, some of it goes into a fund to subsidise broadband for rural locations).
So no, the BBC is not funded by the Government, but yes, the BBC's funding is provided by a revenue stream created, controlled and protected by the Government. Subtle difference.
In America federally mandated is synonymous with government run.
Look at Obama care. With the rhetorical you'd think the government is coming into our homes and sticking thermometers up or asses.
You've got to admit though, Royally chartered statutory corporations are influenced by the government.
It might not be in the BBC's remit, but it's only tax payers money, so who cares?
For you Americans who may not know, every UK household that wants to watch any form of live TV must pay £144/year to the BBC, even if you don't watch BBC channels. The rules are being changed to include non-live TV too.
That's such a misnomer. There is no free TV in the UK.
As someone who has worked with young students, high school teachers, university students, and university faculty getting Pi's into the classroom (e.g. http://clean.energyscience.ca/..., http://rpi.science.uoit.ca/ I can say that the micro:bit may be a better starting point for really young kids and their tech phobic teachers than the Pi. From what I can tell, the micro:bit isn't really a computer (unlike the RaspberryPi), but rather a peripheral that enables some physical computing.
There are some ugly sides to the Pi for the uninitiated. I'm not saying one is better than the other (I really like the Pi), but I do think the micro:bit could be a welcome addition to the ecosystem.
I'm disappointed that BBC isn't making them available to the general community from the get go (or even before release to schools). We have a way better chance and troubleshooting (and populating stackoverflow) issues than they do. Despite the fact that this is intended to be plug-and-play, things never are (especially when they involve locked-down machines like those present at most schools).
In any case, I'm looking forward to getting one of these things!
Most things are influenced by the government.
The government is not my fucking landlord and does not own my fucking land. If you want to be a peasant with a landlord bending you over at will, have at it.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It might as well be. It is the propaganda mouthpiece of the 'government' (the Jewish, shadow government, more accurately), hence it's constant pushing of 'multi-culturalism', 'diversity', 'gay rights', and other Bolshevik bullshit.
Bullshit. Any government mandated fee is a tax. I'm not saying that is a bad thing. Just don't try to put lipstick on a pig.
The bit device is meant to be a simple board that a kid can plug into a PC and run little experiments that teach them the fundamentals of computing. Unlike the Pi it doesn't require teachers or parents to screw around flashing an SD card, or hooking up a network, display, keyboards or whatever to get it working.
And at the end of the day kids who learn the fundamentals on a bit are far better placed continue learning on the Pi or a computer. So I'd see their place in the world as being complementary to each other rather than competitive. But then again I'm looking at this rationally. I suspect some Pi owners have developed some kind of siege mentality and see other boards as a personal threat.
More like a distinction without a difference.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
If we're going to talk about getting the facts right, the World Service has been funded through the licence fee since last year with a relatively small top-up from the government announced back in November.
If you can't put kids - who have grown up on desktop PCs - in front of Notepad and Ruby to teach them how to code, then how the hell will this little device help? It's the same sham and stupid lie that the Raspberry Pi marketed itself with.
It's not a tax.
But it is a a ripoff, which is why I don't bother with it. Forget the fact the where I live I can pick up practically no channels over the air other than the most very basic. Then they take the best channel of the air to make it "online only" (bbc3) They leave 4 online showing the same kind of stuff as 2 then they fill 1 and 2 with pure dribble for the most part. Oh gotta watch me some of that high brow bargain hunt, or shitty shitty daytime game show, or benefits saints and scroungers. The state of bbc tv is an absolute joke. All the money gets poured into the the 7pm-9pm slot and they still can only come out with shit like eastenders and downton fucking abbey. The only bbc that gets any screentime in my house and is actually worth anything to me is cbbc, and that's still nothing but repeats and cheap links, luckily for them their target audience doesn't know/care about such things. Also, anyone seen the new cbbc logo. If they spent more than £1.44 it was yet another waste of licence fee money. Fuck the BBC, they're obsolete and crap. They cling to the licence fee with tooth and nail because without it no one would voluntarily pay it for their crap and they know it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
So the fact that the government mandates insurance if I want to drive my car on the road means the cost of my car insurance is actually a tax?
Sorry, lad - the government IS your ultimate landlord and DOES have ultimate ownership of your land. Your partial ownership rights exist and are acknowledged and well embedded in law, but they are not absolute.
The government was there before you - just like any private landlord is there before you, and you can't force them to sell - and it gets final say. I don't want to be a peasant, but - assuming you're in a developed, democratic country - we have wayyyy more rights than any feudal peasant, so stop whining. Anyway, I'm not telling you what I want to be - I'm telling you how things actually are, and always have been, and always will be outside of anarchy. But anarchy ends up with a new overlord building a government eventually - usually one rather less rights-respecting than you'd probably be comfortable with.
No, it's a Salad Mixxer!!!
http://www.adultswim.com/video...
A now deceased BBC employee was almost certainly a serial pedophile. It's inexcusable and if you were here for any period of time you'd notice quite how much the BBC is self-critical.
What many of us found quite telling is that they made a huge row over Clarkson socking up his producer to get out of his contract, but they tried to hush up the reports of pederasty. If they really cared about the children, they'd have been shouting their condemnation from the hilltops.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
our PBS is similarly largely supported through private means, but that doesn't stop the idiots here from trying to cancel the meager sum the government does send its way.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"public service broadcaster" ... owned by the government, controlled by the government, funded by the government... so wtf is it if not a government entity? It even taxes the public with the "television license fee".
Actually I thought it was run by HSBC
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Why do people persist in being so smugly ignorant?
You "own" your land until:
A. You fail to pay your property taxes and the government sells it to someone else for back taxes.
B. Donald Trump decides it's sitting on part of his next development and he pays, er persuades, the local government to seize it by eminent domain
C. Your wildest Libertarian child-dream comes true and the goddam gubbmint is disbanded, leaving Attila the Hun free rein to come swarming in with his hordes and take it - and your family - and you - by force and if you're lucky and you survive, maybe they'll let you work their land as a slave. Unless, of course, you can afford your own private army.
And for the pedantic, yes, I know that Libertarianism isn't "no government at all", but the "All Taxes are Theft" basement-dwellers, usurp the word "Libertarian" to mean "I want to mooch off public benefits and not have to pay for it". Rather like welfare queens, in fact.
Oh please do bugger off.
"Extortion"? Really? Really? Yes, if you own TV and are capable of receiving live TV you pay. Don't like that don't have an aerial and get on with your life.
Extortion? Basically yes. You own a TV? Pay us. You don't want to watch or partake in any of the bbcs services? Tough, you have the capability to technically be able to receive our signals, pay up! Doesn't matter there no way you can block it out and prove you don't use it. Pay the fuck up! I live here too and it's shit mate! But you enjoy your dickensons real deal, ad free. BBC already is lowest common denominator only they don't have to care if people are watching or not so they don't even make vaguely entertaining shows all they care is you pay them so they can keep doing whatever the fuck they want to do.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
and probably not even £145 richer - when you think that Google makes $70bn in advertising revenue per year, and that the advertisers have to find the money to hand over to Google to show their adverts, you'll be paying far more than than in increased costs for products. And have to watch the damn adverts too.
The BBC has its faults, typically left-wing liberals trying to set the agenda, but that doesn't mean all of it is rubbish or needs to be thrown away.
No it isn't, you dumb shit.
Why do people persist in being so smugly ignorant?
You "own" your land until:
A. You fail to pay your property taxes and the government sells it to someone else for back taxes.
B. Donald Trump decides it's sitting on part of his next development and he pays, er persuades, the local government to seize it by eminent domain
C. Your wildest Libertarian child-dream comes true and the goddam gubbmint is disbanded, leaving Attila the Hun free rein to come swarming in with his hordes and take it - and your family - and you - by force and if you're lucky and you survive, maybe they'll let you work their land as a slave. Unless, of course, you can afford your own private army.
And for the pedantic, yes, I know that Libertarianism isn't "no government at all", but the "All Taxes are Theft" basement-dwellers, usurp the word "Libertarian" to mean "I want to mooch off public benefits and not have to pay for it". Rather like welfare queens, in fact.
Let the smugly ignorant individuals live in their fantasy world until the "backhand" of Scenarios A, B, or C (or all of the above) slaps them on the back of the head. I guarantee they'll be the first ones who cry, bitch, moan and complain the loudest.
Will the cluster run systemd?
Welfare queens are way more honest than libertarians. I'm fairly wealthy and I don't even care if poor people claim a little more money than they absolutely need, ultimately coming out of the taxes I'm paying - I've been poor, I know life sucks if you're poor, and I know I've had opportunities that others don't. Basement Libertarians, otoh, think they're entitled to AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE: rather than acknowledging that their sense of entitlement is regulated by society and taking what society offers - as welfare queens do - the basis of their whole philosophy is one massive bitch that FUCK SOCIETY BUT ALSO SOCIETY OWES ME EVERYTHING, the greedy leeching cunts.
+1
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Fair enough. I'll concede it's possible that you might want TV but not BBC TV/Radio. It's just given the range of stuff it does I think it's difficult not to find something in all its TV/Radio output. I'd happily pay the license fee for an add-free 6 Music. Or Radio 4. Etc. Etc.
FYI, when talking to Brits it can get confusing when you refer to the "government". To them the Queen is not part of the government. Since the BBC is not authorized by Parliament directly, but by Royal Charter, it would be more proper to say that the TV license is an "Establishment-backed tax".
Hopefully I got that right - you can go in circles with this obscure terminology when talking across the Atlantic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
PBS doesn't do itself any favors by consistently targeting viewership from one side of the aisle. While that strategy does give them fervent supporters, it also gives them fervent detractors. Like it or not, those detractors do pop into political power now and again.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Does it matter from any point except semantics? It's money that you have to pay because the government forces you to. Where the check goes is secondary. If you have a TV in Britain, you have to pay money by force of law - do you really care if you make the check out to the BBC or "Her Royal Highness"?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
To a Yank, the Queen is part of the government. Just pretend kav2k said "Establishment". The BBC and it's "fee" is imposed on the people of Britain from above, call it what you will.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The BBC exists under Royal Charter, but the TV license is authorised by the Communications Act 2003, not the Royal Charter, and is set by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, so the TV license most definitely is a "revenue stream created, controlled and protected by the Government".
The difference is lack of control.
Any government-funded process usually has government control. The BBC is not controlled by the government, not funded by the government (although I agree they're involved with the mechanics of the funding process) and was established by royal charter.
The BBC are frequently critical of government policies (as well as shadow-cabinet policies. Try watching politicians of all walks squirm on News Night, for example - although I believe Jeremy Paxman has retired from the program now, he was a shark amongst goldfish when interviewing politicians. It'd be interesting to see a real "defend yourself and your policies" 1:1 interview like this over here on US television. I don't think any of the networks would have the balls to run it though.
The BBC aren't above lampooning important members of the government either. On "Have I got news for you?" (A topical quiz/panel entertainment show), when Roy Hattersley failed to appear for the 4 June 1993 episode — it was the third time he had cancelled at the last minute — he was replaced with a tub of lard (credited as "The Rt. Hon. Tub of Lard MP"), as it was "liable to give much the same performance and imbued with many of the same qualities". Roy was ... a little overweight...
IMHO, the BBC are rightly regarded as being as impartial as you can get with a national broadcaster, and they actually fulfill the important (to any democracy) role of the 4th estate, being critical when necessary and not shying away from controversy when its demanded. They have suffered in recent years of trying to always appear unbiased by covering both "sides" of the story when any reasonable person might conclude there's only one side really, but hey, I'd rather have it that way round than the other.
The BBC is one of, if not the, pre-eminent news organization(s) on the planet. Their funding is (IMHO) a good part of why that's the case. They truly have nothing to fear from government oversight (they do after all get to report on any overly-intrusive government actions) and they have the guaranteed resources of a national broadcaster to execute on their charter. It's all pretty good.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Clearly the price of the hardware is now irrelevant - there can't be many places in the world where a one-time $5 per-child expense is unattainable.
The only limiting factor now is whether kids have the course materials to learn - and whether they have access to a machine with display and keyboard to write their programs on. The coursework isn't going to be cheap - but if done right - and OpenSourced - then the cost can be amortised down to nearly $0. So the one remaining problem is whether these kids will have access to something to type, edit, compile and download their code on...and there's the problem.
If you already have access to that kind of hardware (an OLPC, at a minimum) - then why not learn to program on THAT? Why do you need to learn on an embedded system - which is harder to debug, more easily damaged, etc, etc? I think the answer is that there has to be a REASON to write programs - or programming classes will be as hard to get kids excited about as (say) Math classes. Programming a robotics project - or even just getting some push-buttons and LED's working - is quite compelling when compared to the dross that's taught in Java Programming 101 in US schools and colleges...I've helped two people through that kind of course - and you'd think they were teaching someone to write accounting software...urgh!
IMHO, teaching kids to write games would be a better approach - but embedded computing works too.
Where I think these things may really help is in teaching about electronics. Simple stuff like how to interface a switch, a potentiometer, an LED or an R/C servo to an I/O bit on a microprocessor is a useful introduction - and programming it to do something interesting is also useful.
It's all going to be down to the courseware.
www.sjbaker.org
When I was young and at college, I used to think this way. Then I grew up, moved out of the country, and realised just what a gem the BBC really is. Until you've experienced the advert-laden projectile stream of vomit of fully commercialised television without anything like the BBC to restrain it, you don't realise what you've got.
Let me put it this way. Even if I never watched any of the programs, I would gladly pay the equivalent of a license fee over here in the states just for the moderating effect the BBC would have on other channels. I can seriously watch a 40 minute show that has 10 minutes of adverts interspersed; to rub salt into the wound, they do a summary of everything they're about to show you in the next 10 minutes as the first 2 minutes of that 10 minute segment, just so there's no interest in actually watching the program; and finally to add insult to the injury, I then get TV executives complaining that I'm stealing programming if I skip through the adverts using a DVR. I have about 600 channels of shit to watch. Great.
It's a bit like the NHS. Everyone likes to moan about it, but that's because you're all basically used to having it around and have started to take it for granted. You don't really get the perspective of the true horror of not having it until it's gone, and by then it's too late. Living elsewhere can give you that experience. Try it, and I think you might change your viewpoint.
All IMHO and based on the assumption that you don't currently live outside the UK. If you do, well, I don't know what to say to you then :) I guess we just disagree.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Except it's not mandatory. If you don't watch live TV you don't have to pay it. But you can still watch iPlayer.
Compare old episodes of Horizon (popular documentary) from the 70s and 80s to modern ones. It's incredible how dumb the modern episodes are in comparison. It's so bad that the BBC won't repeat the old ones, except in carefully edited clip shows where the old "boring" footage of people talking has been spiced up with some shitty "moments of wonder" piano music and a new, breathless voiceover.
Meanwhile, Japanese TV was showing a documentary explaining the Unix filesystem and file permissions the other evening. The BBC version would just treat the whole thing as mysterious and impossible for the viewer to comprehend, but hay look at this datacentre porn and guy with a beard telling you how it was the most revolutionary thing since the invention of the lightpen.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If the funding they get is so meager why would it matter if it were cancelled? Our local PBS station (WTTW Chicago) always claims during pledge drives that the funding they receive from government sources is very small compared to donations and sponsorships. For some reason during pledge drives they replace their normally excellent programming with special programming that, in my opinion, is mostly very low quality and I tend not to watch during those two weeks every quarter. If the government funding stopped and they quit with the special programming (except Geoffrey Baer's excellent tour shows) I would probably increase my support.
The best way to ensure this is making coding knowledge worthless!
"Why should I pay you, an excellent programmer, good money when there are five hundred people in line for the Job?"
Coding, the MacDonald job of the future? "U want source with that?"
In my experience, when a PBS station puts up special programming during pledge drives, it is often programming (such as rock concerts) that you never see any other time of the year. So even if you like them, your money won't go toward more of them appearing regularly. Fortunately my MythTV will happily record the unmolested regular content that shows up at 1AM.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }