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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.
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.
It means in success and adoption, rather than performance. Its not a competitor to the Pi, its aimed even more at the educational market and has been deliberately designed in such a way that there is little prospect of a secondary market (so they dont get sold off on ebay).
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.
That's a bit unfair. Why single that one out?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Those $8 machines which are going like hot cakes on ebay? Yeah, hand them out one day and by the end of the day half of them will have been nicked from classmates and hocked on ebay...
The Micro:bit has no secondary market, its deliberately designed in such a way that if you want to actually do something productive then its cheaper to go to another solution than work around the Micro:bits limitations.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
It's a microcontroller, not a computer.
I don't understand why you're trying to compare them.
Because the creators compared them! And they came to the wrong conclusion, that there was a purpose for what they were making. But there isn't. What is really wanted is more Pi Zeros. You can use them for the same stuff as the Micro:bit, but you don't need a host system for development. You can use them with one if you've got one, so you're not giving up anything, and you get dramatically more for your money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Does every child really need their own computer though? It would have made more sense to buy enough RPis for a class and maybe give each kid a flash drive for their work. You need a separate PC just to program these things, unlike the Pi you can't plug in a keyboard and monitor and develop on them directly.
The Micro:bit is just such a terrible idea. The lack of a case makes it vulnerable to physical and static damage. No provision for a real display, just some LEDs and two buttons for input. It's not really a computer at all, it's a crap Arduino knock-off that can do far less. For a beginner learning software concepts and basic programming, a Pi is much better.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They guy you are replying to is not denying that a Pi is "better", in terms of capability. But this has some qualities that make it "better" for the task at hand:
1. It's fairly worthless outside of it's intended environment, which means it won't be a temptation to "lose" it on eBay.
2. It's simpler. Setting up a Pi is not exactly hard, but it teaches you about setting up a computer, not electronics. You can get right to blinking lights.
3. It's cheap enough to give to the kids. Most kids will put it to the side and never play with it again. A few will dick around with it and graduate to an Arduino or Pi. Those are your target.
You want to introduce kids to stuff and see what floats their boat. Some will get the musical bug, others the art bug, and some will get the electronics bug. Sometimes they get this exposure at home, sometimes at school. If society values technical people, then technical education needs to be part of public education.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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!
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!