BBC micro:bit v2 board Unveiled with Nordic nRF52833 SoC, Microphone and Speaker
The original BBC micro:bit educational board was launched in July 2015 with a Nordic nRF51822 Arm Cortex-M0 MCU @ 16 MHz providing Bluetooth LE connectivity, a few I/Os, some buttons, and a LED matrix acting as a small display.
The British company has now launched a new update with BBC micro:bit v2 with the same form factor, but equipped with a more powerful Nordic Semi nRF52833 Bluetooth 5.1 Arm Cortex-M4 MCU clocked at 64 MHz and adding a microphone and a speaker.
Micro:bit Educational Foundation announcement. Also at BBC.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday October 14 2020, @02:53PM (4 children)
I'm not dumping on this project, or similar once, but I do wonder if these actually work. Not that the hardware works, I'm fairly sure it does. After all it comes complete in a box, no need to solder any kits together anymore. Something that could in my opinion be a bit of a loss, it removes part of the learning process by just jumping straight to programming. But then considering size, choice of components etc I understand why they don't sell them in kits. (Probably) No children would ever complete the soldering of that board with it working in the end. But from the mission statement, and part of the education, it seems that they have in large scrapped the idea of learning how a computer works to just learn to code. Still I do wonder if they work, as sort of a mission statement fulfillment. Do kids in large really learn or get started here or is it more of wishful thinking?
The idea isn't exactly new, it's been going on for the better part of a decade or two now that children should learn computers (and by that they usually mean learn to program and not actually how computers work). But there doesn't seem to be having much of an effect later on when it comes to picking educations or jobs. At least not on the levels one would suspect with the amount of schemes and projects targeting the market. I worked on such a project in the mid 00's at the university where elementary school children was going to learn to program by using Lego Mindstorm robots. The programming looks quite similar, you could write actual code or you could use some kind of drag and drop coding blocks. So it's still quite similar in that regard. There was a lot of funding and it went on for a few years. But when it came to evaluating the project. Well lets just say we didn't find anything, or that it had had any kind of positive effect or an increased enrollment in STEM. We did use some other microcomputers and kits to, but we fairly soon skipped the once that required soldering cause the failure rate was horrific when put into the hands of kids in the 10-14 age bracket. So I do wonder if this is not a lot of wishful thinking involved in a lot of these projects.
In some part it has a lot in common with the various Arduino boards, and kits, they are more about just assembling pre-built things others have made. There is not that much learning, or experimenting, involved. They are often great but I don't think for the most part there is a lot of learning involved. But I could be wrong.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 14 2020, @03:17PM (2 children)
Years ago I worked alongside some of the Logo group people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) [wikipedia.org]
Their school experience was very positive, young kids loved to program in Logo, worked collaboratively, shared their successes and problems. But I think it took a special kind of teacher and that may be one problem with this approach--not enough of these special people that encourage kids to self-directed discovery.
Some of the same people were also behind the One Laptop Per Child project, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/The_OLPC_Wiki [laptop.org] but their ambitious plans never really scaled the way they hoped (and there may have been some commercial "interference"?)
Maybe the take away is that learning about computers and programming isn't for everyone, but having options available for those kids that want to (and have the ability to) go beyond being software users is a good thing.
I know at least one kid (son of old friends) who had good fun and learned a lot from programming in Scratch in elementary school, https://scratch.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] but I don't know how many of his peers were as enthusiastic as he was (by now he's half way through a degree in physics).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday October 14 2020, @04:26PM (1 child)
We did have similar experiences. It was not that no children enjoyed it or liked it. But it was those kids that we can assume, or knew, are already into maths, computers and programming. It might have appealed to a few others to but not on the scale they initially assumed that it would or that we could in any way shape or form later show that it had. Lots of kids also loved coming there and doing the things on offer, but it's hard to say if they mostly just enjoyed it because it was one less day they had to spend in school. After all every kids love a snow-day, perhaps not so much for the snow but just cause they don't have to be in school. After all they got to do something "fun" and it was made an entire, or half, a day of something else.
So it's not that these are not good things, I just don't believe that the outcome is what they assume or expect. Sure it could be that for one kid or another this is the eyeopener that changed their young life but for the most of them I kind of doubt it. That programming and computers are not for everyone, and it might take a special kind of person, is not something the people (and politicians) funding these projects wants to hear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @12:32PM
I think you touched on a major failure of our education systems: they lack flexibility. Children will learn best when engaged and interested, which doesn't happen when school is a monotonous chore filled with predictable activities and asinine platitudes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday October 14 2020, @07:34PM
The soldering is probably a bit out of reach these days, the NRF52833 requires reflow soldering. So at the least a hot air station will be required. While not impossible, it's a bit trickier than using an iron. Also, burns at a distance plus kids might not be ideal.
Also, being a SOC, they wouldn't learn much about how computers work at the hardware level by doing the soldering, it's all in the chip.
That part of the experience is probably better served with a pre-made mainboard and a hand soldered peripheral board.
I do think something needs to be done to make all the modern devices less black boxes of mystery for kids. While all of the advances are great, the tech tends to be a lot less approachable to young kids. For example, when many of us were growing up, we had records and record players.You could touch the tech, notice that if you slowed the record down, it sounded funny. Notice that if you used your fingernail instead of the tone arm, you could hear the music very quietly. Try that with a CD! If you hooked a cheap earphone up to the right wires, you could hear a dial tone. If you tapped the switch hook, you could dial the phone. Basically, if you used the tech of the day in ways that weren't quite what was intended, you could get interesting results that would teach you something about how it worked rather than just failing (or being destroyed) or at best showing some sort of error.
Part of the value in all of that is that it could be spontaneous and un-directed. Those things weren't activities that only took place at special set-aside times with special things that existed just for that purpose.
Another issue is lack of ubiquity at an early age. Kids don't typically see their parents using these things from an early age so that they can grow up curious about them. (e.g. I learned automotive mechanics because I was curious when I saw my dad working on the car).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday October 14 2020, @03:18PM
Nordic Semiconductor is known to implement their own proprietary RF protocols in their chips.
So, this toy may be useful for tapping or even remotely hacking some other IoT devices using said CPUs and protocols, including many much older devices.
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/posts/intro-to-shockburstenhanced-shockburst [nordicsemi.com]
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday October 14 2020, @05:18PM
Asking because I'd like to try driving some active shutter glasses for an experiment. These have a somewhat peculiar Bluetooth protocol that requires tight real-time messaging that, from hearsay, is unobtainable on PCs. Of course, getting the developer board might be the "large" solution, but I sense that this might be a handy and cheap alternative for this very specific task. It would probably mean bypassing their stupid W10 & Cloud crap, but I really would not mind.