BBC micro:bit

As much as the Raspberry Pi is really great for computing education, in my personal opinion, I think the micro:bit does well in terms of setting it up and getting started with it, especially in a school environment when there'll be around 20-or-so of these devices all being used by students. With the Pi, you have to format the SD card and flash an OS to it, then plug in the peripherals such as the display, keyboard and mouse. While schools will likely have this equipment, having to reconnect all these devices from a school PC can be a chore, especially when it comes to the end of the lesson. Schools would likely also have to issue a lot of these peripherals alongside Pis for kids to use them as their only computer in the house, and that can get expensive. With the micro:bit, all you need is a computer (which most schools will have), a USB cable (supplied with micro:bits) and a connection to the internet to access the online IDEs. Granted, that does place some barriers to their use at home when kids don't have a companion computing device for coding on. Despite the micro:bit being limited as a microcontroller with a 5x5 pixel display and 2 user buttons, it does have a lot of on-board sensors that can bring a lot of potential opportunities to students in terms of creating physical projects that Raspberry Pis don't have built-in (you have to purchase external sensors, such as accelerometers, to match the functionality). That being said, the micro:bit does require a special conne…

My colleguage Andrew wrote the bare-metal part. I believe he picked the micro:bit board because it's readily available around the world. It also has a lot of fun sensors (microphone, rudimentary speaker, compass, ...). I'm sure there are other boards around, but so far people seem very happy with this board in our classroom training. The only slight problem is the noise when 30 boards are powered on at once :-D They ship with an elaborate demo program which plays sounds and blinks the LEDs when you start it up.

Feel like MicroBit v2 is a drastically underutilised tool. There's the potential to make completely self contained gadgets that anyone could use by copying a file into a directory. Falls into an awkward position where the people who could utilise it can do much more for much cheaper with an esp8266 Some pretty neat UI design limitation challenges involved too with the 5x5 display. e.g. I made a pomodoro timer with it; iirc I used used left-to-right top-to-bottom for normal time, reversed for breaks, a number for how far into the cycle it was and flashing figures for when setting inputs and it beeped when a break started/ended with a longer beep for the big break

One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way Ok, but then Micro:Bit is much nicer. It has a Nordic nRF52833, so Bluetooth LE, accelerometer, magnetometer, MEMS microphone, buzzer, 5x5 led matrix, tactile push buttons, and a touch sensor button. And it's easy to program with MakeCode (our daughter programmed it when she was 5 or 6) and MicroPython. It's easy to program, supports crocodile chips. And even the bundle with battery holder and batteries is cheaper than an Uno.

I would highly recommend using MakeCode to visually program arduino/microbit/adafruit circuit express. You can switch between the visual blocks or Python. I personally use the microbit as a hardware platform to teach my 8 year old daughter. We have build a remote control robot out of legos, a lego crane that can raise and lower an object. I have also been building out a course for her school that utilizes the microbit v2. It can use most of the sensors that the Arduino uses, but I like it as a more complete package. It comes with bluetooth, a radio, and a whole host of sensors built in.

I ran a code club at my local primary school last year using the micro:bits. They're awesome little devices, super simple to get some pretty effective results with. I had 15 kids aged 7 - 11, some of whom were there only because they went along to every after school club it's cheaper for working parents than a childminder, and all of them absolutely loved it. We did some great little projects - making 'musical instruments' with speakers and the gyroscope, making those buzzy 'steady hand' games, sending messages to one another via bluetooth, etc...

You can get a BBC micro:bit with Nordic SoC for $15 Not exactly $5, but not very expensive either There's also a decent growing community around them You've also got the nRF52 USB dongle which seems similar to those cheaper ESP32 kits, for around $10. > and going past that requires a JTAG programmer No, the official Nordic devkits comes with a built-in debugger. Same for micro:bit. It's just plain USB. That said, I do think Nordic could be better at penetrating the hobbyist/student market. I think one problem is the lack of a combined BT/WiFi chip. I think once Zephyr becomes more mature and there's more tutorials/guides around it, a good BT+Thread+WiFi solution from Nordic could become very popular. Zephyr is a bit hard to get into, but incredibly powerful once you get used to it.

>Did Raspberry Pi fail at its original mission of inspiring young programmers? Mostly yes, with a big but. Obviously the Pi has succeeded on its own terms in the hobbyist community (and industry, to a remarkable degree), but it was just too complicated and fragile and fiddly for most schoolkids to handle. The lessons from the failure of the RPi in education were the basis for the BBC micro:bit, a much simpler dev board based on an ARM microcontroller. The micro:bit is just a brilliant tool for teaching the first stages of CS and EE. There are multiple toolchains supporting Scratch, Swift, MicroPython and a variety of block-based visual programming environments. It can be programmed directly from a browser-based IDE, so you can get to hello world very quickly and it works on essentially any device with nothing to install. It has Bluetooth and a bunch of sensors, so it can do fun and interesting things. https://microbit.org/get-started/what-is-the-microbit/ https://microbit.org/projects/make-it-code-it/

But considering competition wouldn't Microbit be a better fit both for kids and even for students? Price is 10 GBP but you get also accelerometer, compass, 5x5 led array, 2x push buttons, 1x touch button, microphone, speaker, bluetooth le. You can power it with USB, AA battery pack or CR2032. You can program in scratch, javascript, python and even c++. You can even change firmware to Zephyr RTOS if you want to do some low level stuff. On top of that you have big ecosystem of extension boards or even robot kit. And tons of open source projects

Raspberry Pi The Raspberry Pi is excellent for kids (and adults). There are tutorials for any topic ( https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en ). A lot of people are not aware that the Raspberry Pi magazines (MagPi) and books are free as PDFs. Or you can purchase printed books or magazines. - Magazines: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/issues - Books: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/books Micro:bit The micro:bit is an even smaller pocket computer for kids. The BBC was a foundation partner, but now a Educational Foundation: https://microbit.org/

If you mentally decide "the Raspberry Pi is a $100 computer all-in" you will be much happier. You won't buy one to sit in a drawer (as many on HN have complained about), and you won't try to use a USB charger from your phone from 1992 and that SD card you got with your sandwich at IKEA and be disappointed that it's not very reliable. It's a bit of a shame that what started out as an educational computer is about $100 to get started properly. Nowadays I recommend Micro:Bit for tinkering (our daughter has one, she likes it very much). It's about 20 Euro and you have everything needed (including a battery pack if you want to use it portably). If you want a machine that fore serious work (NAS, media center, low-end desktop), before spending $100 one should at least consider spending a bit more and get a NUC. You can buy a NUC for around 120 Euro, then you have to add memory and storage. But at least, you get a machine with fast I/O, faster CPU, and is more expandable. It also does supports 4K and h.265 decoding like the Pi 4.