BBC Micro Bit Mini-Computer To Expand Internationally With New Hardware (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: The Micro Bit mini-computer is to be sold across the world and enthusiasts are to be offered blueprints showing how to build their own versions. The announcements were made by a new non-profit foundation that is taking over the educational project, formerly led by the BBC. About one million of the devices were given away free to UK-based schoolchildren earlier this year. Beyond the UK, Micro Bits are also in use in schools across the Netherlands and Iceland. But the foundation now intended to co-ordinate a wider rollout. "Our goal is to go out and reach 100 million people with Micro Bit, and by reach I mean affect their lives with the technology," said the foundations' new chief executive Zach Shelby. "That means [selling] tens of millions of devices... over the next five to 10 years." His organization plans to ensure Micro Bits can be bought across Europe before the end of the year and is developing Norwegian and Dutch-language versions of its coding web tools to boost demand. Next, in 2017, the foundation plans to target North America and China, which will coincide with an upgrade to the hardware. TrixX adds: The makers of the BBC micro:bit have announced that they are releasing the full specs for the device under an open license, (SolderPad License, similar to Apache License but for hardware). This means that anyone can legally use the specs and build their own device, or fork the reference design GitHub repo and design their derivatives.

Comments

Re:Why would anyone want to associate with BBC?

[brantondaveperson]

"The announcements were made by a new non-profit foundation that is taking over the educational project, formerly led by the BBC."

So, it's not even the BBC anymore. And during the world's various wars, all media companies got themselves involved in propaganda. It's not as though anyone who was in charge of the BBC then, is in charge of it now.

What "current actions"?

Re:Not a minicomputer

[hughbar]

I think it's a micro-controller actually. One program at a time, no operating system, just load/run. It's therefore similar to the Arduino.

As a Brit, I'm very annoyed by this, they could have just got behind the Arduino (for example) but no that was apparently NIH (Not Invented Here) so they've spent a lot of public money on this.

I do a certain amount of school volunteering and this is another thing that fragments attention and class time. I would have preferred full-fat pupil owned Raspberry Pis for example, a little more expensive but an order of magnitude more capable. Still the BBC is a law unto itself.