BBC micro bit

[#1]

Ok   my youngest 12 yr old came home with one of these https://www.microbit.co.uk/#

Actually quite good fun   even for myself at 60 .

any one else seen or have one

[#2]

I don't have one but have heard of them and must say I think it's good of the BBC to have come up with it.

I have several arduinos around which are similar and responsible for the micro processor revolution but they don't come with as many lights as the BBC unit. Instead they have a lot more input and outputs.. But the trouble is I have no motivation to do anything with them. 

[#3]

The BBC have a good history of enabling children to acquire computing skills.

Back in the '70's they were asked to run an educational programme to showcase

the advantages of the new technology & as part of their programme they asked

companies to produce an easy pc to use with the programme;

enter the BBC Micro!

[#4]

@chuffchuff

Certainly agree with you there but what happened to the BBC micro ? Am I correct in thinking they sold it to another company, whatever, they did not continue with any meaningfull computer programming, although there were numerous non BBC publications such as Bebug which dealt in BASIC (Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).

So could they go down the same road and sell this off as well ?

[#5]

There were many wonderful (educational) programs produced for the BBC micro among them LOGO later developing into SuperLogo which allowed children to develop early "programming"skills and these were then linked to the control of robots called "Roamers". Successive governments of both political persuasion poured money into the schools' computer developments.

Possibly there are folk on these forums who may recall using LOGO & Roamers?

I do not believe it was the fault of any of the political parties that meaningful programming by children has never achieved the levels it should have. That fault lies elsewhere.

As regards going down the same road and selling it on? Sadly, it is inevitable!

[#6]

I don't remember Roamers but do remember shooting the [-Censored-] out of thargons in Elite

[#7]

Slight upgrades for the game Elite making it suitable for a modern PC

https://www.elitedangerous.com/

I achieved Elite status on the BBC. Highly unlikely to repeat it.

[#8]

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gleneagles wrote:

@chuffchuff

Certainly agree with you there but what happened to the BBC micro ? Am I correct in thinking they sold it to another company

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The BBC micro was never theirs, it was built by Acorn and licensed by the BBC to have their name on it, Acorn boomed breifly and went bust and Olivetti bought them out, tried keeping them going then scuppered the tired old ship & sold the name off to someone who likes buying old brand names...

Then people like me during the 90s and even early 2000s had to suffer those ancient piles of junk when at home it was the Windows PC that was the defacto-standard, all because the governments backed the wrong people for computing...

[#9]

Windows machines did not start appearing in schools until the mid '90s

and even then (and still is a split between Apple & Windows).

To educate children in computing from the age of 5 up to older pupils at 16 in the early '80s

and into the '90s there wasn't much available for schools to choose from. In the country as a whole

it was either the BBC micro or Apple. In London you could add Research Machines (RM) - initially the 380z, then the

480z and eventually their Nimbus.

There was also a lot of resistance to the introduction of computers into the British Educational system and the government was encountering almost total blockage within schools to moving forward with the technolog

[#10]

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chuffchuff wrote:

and into the '90s there wasn't much available for schools to choose from.

There was plenty to choose from, but the powers that be just decided that 1970s technology was perfectly fine for 90s-era kids to learn computing on when home computers were standardising on two platforms (neither of which were compatible with acorn), I mean, seriously, in 2000 I was still forced to use a severely outdated, yellowed, slow, tired Acorn archimedes to do schoolwork on, even the ancient 386 and 486s dotted about the school were preferable to those things (mostly because I knew how to run those effectively!), no excuse to have them things hanging around for so long...

[#11]

What was available in the '90s to equip primary & secondary schools with, that would have suites of programs

to support & extend childrens' learning from ages 3 in the Nursery classes up to 18 year olds in Secondary schools?

[#12]

Typing programs, encyclopedia software, educational games, office software for word processing, spreadsheets, etc., there was plenty, it's just that the people in charge didn't want to spend the money on actually researching what was available, where from and what platform to use it on.

And like I say, I got stuck with using acorn and BBC Micro stuff when Windows 2000 was shiny and new with all it's internet and network abilities that the dead-formats lacked...

[#13]

think yourself lucky when I was in school our it lab was a room full of token ring linked c-64's in the library we had the bbc master systems and a laser disc player for interactive learning support (interactive meaning it played video's of attenbourough's bbc series) when I went to college they had a set of 286's (brand new straight from the factory) in the engineering department with viso circuit design pre loaded, when I joined the military 12 months later our it labs were filled with pentiums (94) with the turbo boost feature to make them run at an amazing 66mhz for the battle simulator programs.....

in 96 I became the proud owner of 686 p2-200, with windows 95/sr2, that could house a maximum of 8MB of ram....

funny thing only the Commodore /Archimedes pc's were anywhere near as good as the spectrum+3 for learning programming on, the others all required that you compile in a different difficult to learn language and run a compiler before being able to execute the script.....

if kids want to learn programming the best thing to teach them on would be a souped up version of the spectrum +3, simple to learn how lots of easy to follow tutorials and the opportunity to create your own diverse range of end user programs, we had a lot of fun using them back in the day for all sorts of stuff, even if they have less compute power than the average scientific calculator in schools today they were a lot more versatile ....