Gareth Halfacree - The Official BBC micro:bit User Guide

The Official BBC micro:bit User Guide

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ISBN: 978-1-119-38673-5

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ISBN: 978-1-119-41384-4 (ebk)

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For my father, the enthusiastic past, and my daughters,
the exciting future.

Gareth

GARETH HALFACREE is a freelance technology journalist and the co-author of the Raspberry Pi User Guide alongside project co-founder Eben Upton. Formerly a system administrator working in the education sector, Gareth's passion for open source projects has followed him from one career to another, and he can often be seen reviewing, documenting or even contributing to projects such as GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, Fritzing and Arduino. He is also the creator of the Sleepduino and Burnduino open hardware projects, which extend the capabilities of the Arduino electronics prototyping system. A summary of his current work can be found at http://freelance.halfacree.co.uk .

DAVID WHALE is an embedded software engineer whose career of over 30 years has involved him designing and building embedded software for a diverse collection of high tech products. David is a STEM Ambassador and volunteer for the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), where he regularly helps schools and teachers introduce and run computing clubs, as well as trains teachers nationally. It was through his association with the IET that David became involved with the micro:bit project, where he has helped to develop a large base of teaching resources, as well as train and support the delivery of the IET Faraday national STEM challenge days using the BBC micro:bit. David now works with the Micro:bit Educational Foundation, where he continues to develop projects and resources with many partner organisations, which includes the Doctor Who team at the BBC. David is the co-author of the successful Wiley title Adventures in Minecraft, a book that teaches Python coding to children via their interest in the Minecraft game, and he has been technical editor of a wide range of technology and computing books.

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Wiley

Cover Image
Courtesy of Gareth Halfacree

1. Table of Contents

IN APRIL 2015, I spent a lunchbreak searching my local supermarket for the cheapest thing I could cannibalise to finish a demo for the BBC. What they saw that afternoon was the battery clip from a 1 alarm clock, glued onto an early BBC micro:bit prototype. I was building a demo as one of the 31 partner organisations that the BBC had recruited to help them deliver a bold and audacious project: to give a coding device to every year 7 in the UK, for free. However, the BBC micro:bit wasnt designed to be just another programmable development board, but a seamless plug-and-play tool that puts creativity, learning, and ease-of-use for teachers and young people first.

As an engineer on the project, the most compelling thing about working with the BBC micro:bit is seeing the exciting (and sometimes ridiculous) things these new audiences choose to do with this technology: build a team game based on a teleporting duck, measure a rocket cars acceleration, tell the interactive story of pizza, build a portable heart-rate-monitor, or invent the fantastic rain detecting hat you can find in this book. This guide brilliantly captures the exhilaration, simplicity, and creative potential of the BBC micro:bit, and Im sure it will help many more people become coders and inventors.