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

Not a minicomputer

[arth1]

This is not a minicomputer. It's a microcomputer. Thus the name.
A minicomputer is typically the size of a small fridge, and were named so because they were much smaller than the big ones.

Re:Not a minicomputer

[Bing Tsher E]

A good way to refer to it would be as a picocomputer.

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.

Re:Not a minicomputer

[hughbar]

And a magnitude more of a pain in the ass to set up. To use this Pi, the pupil would require - a monitor or TV, an HDMI cable, a USB mouse & keyboard, a network connection or wifi dongle, a PSU, a charger, an SD card, and a very patient teacher and set of parents capable of setting this all up and transferring files for grading and exercises.

Actually I worked last year with one school that was successfully doing this. You don't really want switched-on smart phones in class, anyway, so you're obliged to hook the micro:bit to a 'computer' (of some kind), as with the Arduino if you want to do any programming.

Also to continue being ranty, Microsoft has had a good look in this time, not surprising since the last two technology heads were biased in that direction. If they want to 'develop', everything, yes, everything (the thing itself and associated ecosystem) needs to be open source, because it's public cash.

I did freelance work for the BBC in the early 2000s, but have stopped (my own choice) now.

Deployment

[itamblyn]

The rest of the article is actually pretty interesting. It sounds like there wasn't a clear plan (or at least the teachers weren't onboard) about how to work these into the classroom. OLPC had this problem too - tech people thought you could just hand out shiny things and everything would work out. It frequently doesn't work like this in the education setting. To be clear, BBC:Micro bit is really neat, and I think it will be useful, but it seems like figuring out how to effectively use stuff like this in the classroom continues to be a hard problem.

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"?

The kids love it

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

My girlfriend works with kids in the target age group, they love playing around with this. Their web code tools aren't half bad either - my girlfriend now understands the basics of code (so this is what you do all day eh? well, not exactly...)