BBC Micro:Bit Learn-To-Code Device Up For Public Pre-Order In UK (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a TechCrunch report: A tiny programmable board designed as part of an educational initiative for UK kids to learn programming skills and originally distributed by the public service broadcaster, the BBC, to one million schoolchildren is now up for public pre-order. The micro:bit is available for public pre-order in the UK, via Element14's website, with delivery slated for July. Although at this point it's being sold in minimum quantities of 90 for resellers (such as Microsoft) to then sell on to individuals. So consumers will have a bit longer to wait to be able to buy a device just for themselves. Prices start at 12.99 Pound ($19) for a single BBC micro:bit; 14.99 Pound for a starter kit which includes a BBC micro:bit, mini USB, battery pack and four project ideas; and 140 Pound for a 'BBC micro:bit Club' pack, which includes 10 devices and "everything needed to get a coding club started". The intention with the micro:bit project -- part of the BBC's wider 'Make it Digital' initiative to inspire "a new generation to get creative with coding, programming and digital technology" -- was always to open up the distribution of the device after the initial giveaway.

Comments

BBC Micro: Model A/B

[Anonymous Coward]

10 PRINT "36 years later"
20 GOTO 10

Hi, I have a quick question

[Anonymous Coward]

Should I install Windows 10? Thanks.

The Pi Hut

[Anonymous Coward]

https://thepihut.com/products/...

Extremely expensive

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

12.99 British Pounds equals 18.71 US Dollars.

The Raspberry Pi Zero only costs 5 US Dollars.

Even a simple Arduino Pro mini clone on eBay costs under 2 US Dollars and is much more powerful. You could probably get a classic Arduino clone with a color TFT LCD shield with a built-in gamepad and buttons for the price of that BBC Micro:Bit with its lame LED matrix.

Re:Extremely expensive

[TechyImmigrant]

12.99 British Pounds equals 18.71 US Dollars.

The Raspberry Pi Zero only costs 5 US Dollars.

Even a simple Arduino Pro mini clone on eBay costs under 2 US Dollars and is much more powerful. You could probably get a classic Arduino clone with a color TFT LCD shield with a built-in gamepad and buttons for the price of that BBC Micro:Bit with its lame LED matrix.

Or you could use the PC that's been sitting in the corner of the room. It's got a keyboard and screen and everything.

Re:Extremely expensive

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Not a TFT colour LCD, but still better than a simple LED matrix. It's under USD$6.00 too.

Re:Extremely expensive

[ShanghaiBill]

You are comparing apples to oranges. The RPi-Zero does not come with a header, so you will need to do some soldering. A better comparison is with the standard RPi, which costs more. The BBC Micro:Bit has additional sensors, including a 3D accelerometer. The Arduino is a nice device for learning electronics and bit banging, but it does not run Linux, has no HDMI or other video port, and cannot be used as a standalone computer.

Anyway, once something is "cheap enough", a few dollars here and there should not be the deciding factor. The features and capabilities matter more.

Re:Extremely expensive

[serviscope_minor]

Beyond some thresholds, it's not about price, it'd about consistency.

This is why the RPi is more popular than the cheaper and more powerful alternatives off eBay and AliExpress. They're consistent and there's a good community. You spend a bit more but you're sure it will work the same every time.

Same with this. I mean sure everyone could have their own cheapass clone with complex peripherals etc etc. But that's not what the BBC is trying to do. Much like the previous effort, it's an educational initiative. This means that it's better for the devies to be completely consistent all of the time, and completely under the control of the BBC.

Likewise the point is for education, so a "lame" LED matrix is a better bet than a colour TFT because it's much much easier to understand.

And if you need a device for yourself evaluate it based (a) on whether it does what you need, (b) whether guaranteed consistency and the lack of fucking around time is important and (c) if a and b how it stacks up to other known good vendors.

Simply opting for the cheapest/most powerful device is generally silly.

Re:Extremely expensive

[thegarbz]

and is much more powerful.

And thus we've missed the point.

As well as ignoring the hidden costs of the alternatives which aren't plug and go out of the box.

Re:Extremely expensive

[thegarbz]

I know the youths of today have baggy pants, by they're not that baggy, how are they going to carry it home? Actually that reminds me of that guy who brought his full desktop gaming PC into Starbucks. :-) The staff say technically he bought a coffee so he's okay to sit there.

Re:Extremely expensive

[TechyImmigrant]

Who learns to code at school?
The interested kids will do it the way it's always been done, by hacking on their parent's computers until their parents get them their own.

Re:Extremely expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, and also some of that extra cost will go towards all the educational material on https://www.microbit.co.uk/

Which you might not care about if you are a hacker just wanting to play around with the device, but vitally important for an educational device aimed at 12 year olds.

Re:Extremely expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The Raspberry Pi Zero only costs 5 US Dollars

It has to be available to buy first.

Re:Extremely expensive

[thegarbz]

Who learns to code at school?

Based on how politicians are talking I would say everyone.

The interested kids will do it the way it's always been done, by hacking on their parent's computers until their parents get them their own.

I'm sure they would. Now what has this got to do with a program to develop educational tools for schools again?

Re:Extremely expensive

[nadaou]

This thing does not run Linux. It's a cut down micro controller even simpler and less capable than an Arduino.

Re:Extremely expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The microbit doesnt come with a header either. Instead you have to buy an expensive edge connector board, and then solder things to that!

Re:Extremely expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The processor that the children's code runs on is an nRF51822, so identical in power to the Arduino Zero, and much more powerful than many Arduinos. It's a Cortex-M0 at 16MHz.

How can BBC be micro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought it was big by definition

Re:How can BBC be micro?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Just on the inside.

Good grief.

[Frosty Piss]

The whole "everybody needs to learn to code" thing has got out of hand. Everybody DOES NOT need to learn to code, and in fact many if not most people have no interest or aptitude for programming . Some people need to learn to weld. Others need to learn to cook. Yet other need to learn to drive trains. Some people (but obviously not Slashdot "editors") need to learn to write and edit. And quite frankly, there are the vast majority that will never move beyond learning how to drop a fry basket. But everybody DOES NOT need to learn to "code".

Re:Good grief.

[serviscope_minor]

Everybody DOES NOT need to learn to code, and in fact many if not most people have no interest or aptitude for programming

By the same logic, everybody does not need to learn about literature, history, mathematics, woodwork, PE, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, civics, or any of the wide variety of thing you get exposed to in school.

Some people need to learn to weld.

So? How on earth are you going to know who is good at welding and who is good at coding if you don't try to teach both? Or do you only plan on teaching welding to those people who picked it up all by themselves welding the doors shut on dad's car age 5?

Re:Good grief.

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

The thing is, almost everything we do these days in our modern world is run by a computer of some kind. While I agree that not everyone should or even can learn to code, they should at least be given a basic coding level course, it could be in BASIC for all I care. The only thing people really have to learn from these classes is that computers have memory (like the memory on a calculator, but a computer has millions of them), can perform math operations on these memory cells and can decide do to things based on the values of those memory cells.

The thing is, what they really need to learn should fit inside a single one-hour class, maybe two hours if you have a Q&A session.

Re:Good grief.

[Koen Lefever]

The whole "everybody needs to learn to code" thing has got out of hand.

This is nothing new, BBC Micro has been promoting learning to program since 1981.

Re:Good grief.

[Frosty Piss]

By the same logic, everybody does not need to learn about literature, history, mathematics, woodwork, PE, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, civics...

Correct.

Re:Good grief.

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Fun fact: The company behind the BBC micro, Acorn, then developed their own computer architecture, for their follow up computer, the Archimedes. The architecture was named after the company; the Acorn Risc Machine, or ARM, for short. It got quite popular as time went on... :-)

Reportedly they even used the BBC micro in the development of ARM.

Re:Good grief.

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt a one hour class really cuts it.

There are successful models for how to integrate this stuff into education but they're often denigrated as "boring" because they teach programming as an element of the (already mandatory because _innumeracy is very bad news for your society, hello McFly?_) mathematics course.

You start with Turtle graphics doing simple geometry. The Turtle is a physical robot, which is interesting for small children because it's toy-like and obeys their instructions. With enough turtles (hopefully not one shared for a class of 30 kids) they can all learn that the robot does what they tell it to, even if that's not what they really wanted. THIS is already a valuable lesson about programming.

By age 9-10 physical Turtles go away, the child is able to accept simple abstractions of their world, just as they are OK with doing arithmetic that doesn't count actual things, fractions that aren't fractions OF anything and so on. The virtual turtle can draw 3D objects, and mistakes are annoying but don't involve sending a robot crashing into the walls.

By age 12-14 the turtle concept itself goes away and so does the obsession with geometry. Programming is an abstract idea the child is appreciating without needing to control a robot or its virtual equivalent. Just asking the machine a question and having it give inhumanly fast and correct answers _because you programmed it_ is sufficient.

And you're done, these kids now appreciate what the programmers they work with, or hire, later in life are actually doing.

You are correct that the goal is not to make a legion of Python programmers. The goal is to have a population of people who can guess that "Split the tip across however many credit cards are paying the bill" is easy, "Choose movies I might like that I haven't already seen" is a bit trickier and "Drive from Chicago to New York and wake me when we get there" is really hard. Rather than a legion of people who have to break that down for the poor schmucks with the cash who don't know.

Re:Good grief.

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers are everywhere and part of everyday life. Every citizen needs some basic understanding of how they work. Elementary school programming classes is a reasonable way to introduce some of this knowledge.

Also, everyone eats and everyone uses things made of metal, so, yes, everyone should be exposed to cooking and welding as well. No great depth is necessary, but people should have an opportunity to understand the world around them and basic education at the K-12 level should cover that.

Re:Good grief.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they used a now forgotten Acorn workstation that ran a Natsemi 32/16 bit processor

Re:Good grief.

[Koen Lefever]

That was the ABC 210/Acorn Cambridge Workstation, with a NS32016 second processor, which was also available as an expansion to the BBC,

The Acorn Archimedes 305 and 310 models were also sold under the BBC Micro label. That was in 1987, when 32-bit ARM was running circles around (8/)16/32-bit x86 in terms of instructions per second.

Re:Good grief.

[serviscope_minor]

Correct.

So... we should select a vocation for the kid before they are really old enough to know what they want to do for the rest of their life, then never expose them to anything else in case it turns out we're wrong?

What is this, Brave New World?

Re:Good grief.

[s0litaire]

"Learning to code" is actually a by-product of this endeavour NOT the main focus.

It's about Problem solving skills.

Give a group of kids a Problem to solve and the tools required to find a solution.

This can be in any medium you like, for example give them a pile of wood, rope and woodworking tools and tell them to make a working trebuchet.
It's just that it's cheaper and safer to use electronics and coding rather than Middle-age siege weapons!

If you can't learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

on your regular computer, how would you be able to with this? Dishonest marketing, and just what the Raspberry Pi built its hype and success on.

Re:If you can't learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

The price of these machines are low enough that any school can afford to buy one for each student and have the student keep them afterwards. Another point about these kinds of machines are uniformity; it's quite feasible to build a standard set of teaching tools and accessories to promote the education of computer programming. The final point I have is the issue of simplicity. These computers are not designed to maximize resource effectiveness for a given computing application. These machines are designed to use simple mechanics in order to illustrate a fundamental computer organization that isn't plagued with historical design issues. These are ideal teaching tools that are affordable and quite reasonable for teaching high school level students.

When you teach programming on commodity PC devices, you normally have to teach a highly abstracted version of programming. Computer organization and OS implementations are normally sophisticated to maintain the utility of a responsive multi-process environment that works in the context of standardized and full-featured hardware. This means that these topics are normally only taught at university computer science and IT degrees. Micro-controllers by themselves are great computing devices for teaching fundamental programming ideas but these initiatives take it a step further by promoting a whole community and environment that's dedicated to the idea of teaching programming to young people.

Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what would encourage the development of software? Freedom in software is the answer. For decades now, businesses and individuals have been teaching society that sharing software is a punishable offense. People certainly share proprietary software regardless but they have to do so underground, away the eyes of the owners of the software. If they want to promote programming to young people, then they should promote free software that encourages sharing of knowledge and being upstanding community members.

Buy a Pi! Or, at least, an Arduino.

[hughbar]

These things are a bad, expensive joke and (to some extent) a Microsoft and Google trojan horse. The BBC just had to have its own project rather than being sensible and supporting Pi development and adoption. If £30 odd is too much, then buy an Arduino or a clone, more community etc. etc. And before the troll that attacked me about this last time reappears, I'm a Brit, old, a 40 year industry veteran and a UK schools volunteer.

Re:Buy a Pi! Or, at least, an Arduino.

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think this? The micro:bit can be programmed driver-free and with no software installation - that's an important thing for many of the schools I've been into and not true of either of the other things you mention. The 5x5 LED matrix and the sensors onboard make it immediately interactive and watching kids use it, it's a totally different experience to a Pi - especially for people who haven't usually engaged with computing. Sure, they could have based it on the Arduino platform but they used mbed instead, (also, there weren't arduinos as powerful as this until recently, and having the grunt to run, EG MicroPython is really nice!)