Using the BBC micro:bit to teach STEM
Our December meeting celebrates ACM CSEdWeek with a talk focused on education.
The BBC micro:bit was developed by a partnership of 30 organizations to meet the needs of educators in the classroom. Since the project launched with 1 million devices being distributed for free in the UK, a further 4 million micro:bits have been distributed around the world. It is in daily use helping students get creative with coding across 70 countries, with 250 accessories, and editors for Blocks (for example MakeCode), Python and Javascript, as a start!
The micro:bit is designed to be a seamless plug and play tool that puts creativity, learning and ease-of-use for teachers and young people first. Instantly interactive, the micro:bit’s sensors and slick design make it accessible and exciting to the widest possible audience, even (perhaps especially) those who didn’t realize that coding was for them. It takes no time at all to build your first program, and the simplicity of the tools means that what follows is an upward spiral of success and satisfaction that encourages your imagination to run wild.
In October 2020, the Micro:bit Educational Foundation announced the release of micro:bit V2, which adds a speaker, a microphone and increased computing power while keeping compatibility with existing programs.
The talk will be about the story of the BBC Micro:bit, how it came to be, and how it is in use today. It will show some of the challenges, technical and educational that the Foundation and partners had to solve in creating micro:bit V2. It will also discuss what’s ahead for the micro:bit community as we embark on the teaching of AI/ML concepts and work to inspire and prepare the next generation to work with digital technology everywhere in their lives, and an appeal for your help with this!
For more information about the BBC Micro:bit, see the March 2020 article in Communications of the ACM - https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/3/243028-the-bbc-microbit-from-the-u-k-to-the-world/fulltext.
Date and Time
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- Date: 10 Dec 2020
- Time: 05:30 PM to 07:00 PM
- All times are (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
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Speakers
Jonny Austin
Biography:
Jonathan Austin is the Chief Technology Officer at the Micro:bit Educational Foundation, on secondment from Arm Ltd. He was responsible for Arm’s delivery into the original BBC micro:bit project through 2015, and has been the Chief Technology Officer of the Foundation since its creation in 2016. He is the lead author of the article, “The BBC micro:bit—From the U.K. to the World” in the March 2020 Communications of the ACM (https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/3/243028-the-bbc-microbit-from-the-u-k-to-the-world/fulltext).