The BBC will be giving away mini-computers to 11-year-olds across the country as part of its push to make the UK more digital.
One million Micro Bits – a stripped-down computer similar to a Raspberry Pi – will be given to all pupils starting secondary school in the autumn term.
The BBC is also launching a season of coding-based programmes and activities.
If they were actually handing out PDP’s or Nova’s to 11 year olds, that’d be some news.
Why they went with this other board rather than the RiPi is a bit weird, but I’m guessing the one they’ve selected is much cheaper?
Edited 2015-03-12 17:39 UTC
witch one micro, 2 buttons and 25 LEDs it’s way cheaper than a RPi
my guess would be ~2€/ pupil
Edited 2015-03-12 17:57 UTC
Yeah, looks like they gave up a lot with this. It seems like it needs to be attached to a real computer to program it, as there is no display other than the led array.
Plus, this think will only be made one year. Thats it. Its dead before its born.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/12/chuckie-egg/
I hate kicking a dead horse’s bones, but the raspberry pi will be around for a while and lot will work with it. Its a much better idea to teach the kids that.
Dont forget what happened with the BBC Micro.
BBC (a neutral quango) caused a massive diruption in the market by going with one Acorn (who are still going in the form of ARM) over Sinclair.
They wanted to avoid this situation happening again. Sadly, I tend to agree that it has also reduced the ‘out of class’ utility of the learning platform by picking a system there are little/no resources/community for.
i wouldn’t call c++ on an ARM-core (m0?) a bad choice
but what i miss is a breadboard-compatible header on the board
Maybe I’m jaded from the Advanced Placement C++ classes that my brothers were subjected to, but C++ is a difficult language to teach people. There is such a variety in dialects and standard libraries, that it can be difficult for students to transfer their knowledge.
Python, which this supports is better, slightly. You only really need to worry about the distraction of whitespace. Which might be very difficult, but its only one topic of possible confusion.
teach them anything about encryption. A certain PM would not approve.
I remember when mini computers were mini computers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer#/media/File:Pdp-11-40.jpg
Yep. My grandkids still get a thrill out of playing Luna-lander on my PDP-11/73 and VSV-11 Graphics card.
30+ years old and still going strong although finiding displays that have RGB+Sync is getting a bit difficult these days.
In these days of multi-core, multi-Gigahertz CPU’s it is real change to use the PDP with its mighty 15Mhz clock rate.
No wonder you can emulate a whole PDP-11 on a mobile phone.
You know if you’re willing to shell out for it you can get devices that convert RGB+Sync to standard VGA, though they’re not cheap.