BBC’s micro: bit computer
The Micro:bit Educational Foundation and the Raspberry Pi Foundation both support the teaching of coding worldwide, but using very different computers, writes By Peter Sayer
Anew educational foundation hopes to introduce children worldwide to coding, using a tiny single-board computer that has changed the way coding is taught in schools across the country.
You’ll have heard of the Raspberry Pi, a £29 computer the size of a credit card that, with the addition of a monitor, keyboard and mouse, can stand in for a desktop machine.
But this isn’t about that. It’s about the UK’s other single-board educational computer, the micro:bit. This is smaller and cheaper than the Raspberry Pi, and it has a built-in keyboard and display, albeit consisting of just two buttons and 25 red LEDs arranged in a five-by-five grid. It was developed for the BBC, which gave a million of them to schools. Whereas the Raspberry Pi resembles a low-powered, low-priced PC, the micro:bit is more like an embedded computer, encouraging children to develop their own takes on the Internet of Things.
The tiny computer has already found favour in Iceland, Norway, Singapore, and the US, and now the BBC and its partners in the project have created the Micro:bit Educational Foundation to promote its use in other countries.
The broadcaster will continue to support micro:bit users in the UK, but the independent foundation “will also work to enthuse and support young people on a global scale as well,” wrote the BBC’s head of learning, Sinead Rocks. It will also have support from ARM, Microsoft, Nominet, Samsung Electronics and the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, founded in 2009, has a similar mission.
For ARM, at least, the story has come full circle. The company was spun out of Acorn Computers, which created the microcomputer used in the BBC’s first educational computing initiative, in 1982. After developing several generations of the BBC Microcomputer, Acorn began designing its own processor, then known as the Acorn RISC Machine. Now a distant relative of that processor, the 32-bit ARM Cortex M0, powers the micro:bit. It runs at 16MHz, stores code in 16kb of RAM, and communicates via a Micro-USB port, a Bluetooth Low Energy module, and three input-output ports that can carry analogue or digital signals.
The original BBC Micro, in contrast, had an eight-bit Motorola 6502 processor, 16- or 32KB of RAM, an analogue input, and network, video, audio, and printer ports. Its 32KB of ROM contained a BASIC interpreter, and external storage was on audio cassette.
The micro:bit is smaller and cheaper than the Pi, and it has a built-in keyboard and display, albeit consisting of just two buttons and 25 red LEDs arranged in a five-by-five grid