This post is intended to be a bit of a primer for teachers interested in getting into more varied use of the BBC Micro:bit beyond the inbuilt basics. My intention is to put together two posts: this one on the hardware and the ecosystem, and another on approaches in the classroom (which will mostly be a list of mistakes I’ve made and thoughts on doing things beter). This is by no means an exhaustive list of things you can do or components available. I’ve generally experimented with cheap and cheerful parts that I can source myself for a few dollars to see if it’s worth implementing in the classroom. I still have a long list of things I want to try! The components listed here I’ve generally had good success with. ...

Testing out LDR sensors This year I have been teaching robotics to Year 8s for the first time. I’ve mainly been using BBC Micro:bits, since they are quite affordable, robust, are easy to hook up to a range of widely available components, and are easy to program in a few different environments (MicroPython being my weapon of choice). To keep myself entertained, and to provide my students with a sample project (although more complex code-wise than they’re likely to accomplish) I decided to make something myself this term while my class worked on their own group projects (theirs are themed after the UN Global Goals). I had ideas for either building a carousel or a light gun game, and settled on the latter so I didn’t have to also tackle 3D printing out cams and gears and the like. ...

This is the first year that Digital Technologies has been a mandatory part of the Australian curriculum through to Year 8. Whilst the subject area contains a number of different topics, the one that generally comes to mind (helped in no small part by our politicians and media 🙄 banging on about ‘coding’ this, and ‘coding’ that) is programming and algorithmic thinking. Since our education sector has a fairly comprehensive set of licenses to all things Microsoft, we have Minecraft: Education Edition licenses for all of our students and staff. While I am not that big of a fan of Minecraft’s system of switches and redstone wiring (I prefer my programming higher level and less clunky), I do quite like plugging in external programming through Code Connection, as I’ve written about before in toying with core sampling. ...

Background I’ve been using Minecraft Education Edition with Code Connection in my Year 7 classes this term to teach programming principles, which has been a blast* (i.e. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage students to write programs rather than run around building stuff themselves). The Agent Code Connection comes with a ton of interesting tutorials to get started with, but I’ve been writing a few things for myself to try out different features, two of which are the Agent and the Builder. The Agent is a code-controlled character that can build from its inventory, attack and destroy surrounding blocks, and do basic sensing of its environment. The builder is an invisible constructor which is used for raising structures fairly quickly; it doesn’t have an inventory and can’t interact with its environment beyond placing blocks. ...

I’ve been getting a bit antsy about continuing to pay Squarespace to host Headtilt, mostly due to the infrequent updates that I seem to be doing over the last couple of years, and partly because I think I feel the need to tinker with stuff. For ages I’ve liked the idea of static site generators, and occasionally I’ll go and play with one for a while before falling out of love with the idea of writing up posts in Markdown, having to remember its syntax for links, images, etc, and then go running back to the arms of a regular CMS. ...

When deciding to play around with Publii (after taking a dislike to Jekyll, and not finding anything else that tickled my fancy), the first problem seemed to be that despite supporting tags for posts, there was no way to create an RSS or JSON feed based on a tag. Publii creates a feed, but it contains all posts regardless of the category. Two alternatives presented themselves, neither particularly nice: ‘hide’ all posts except Microblog tagged posts from the feed. This is both kludgy, and not pleasant looking, since only Microblog posts would then appear on the front page of the site. Write a script to create a new feed from the main one with everything except Microblog tagged posts filtered out. Not very hard, but requires running the feed filter after each post. This wouldn’t be a big deal if Publii followed most other static site generators in running with command-line scripts, since I could just add another script to the chain of posting, but since it all runs through a GUI program with a shiny “sync changes” button, it means then manually (or on a schedule to check for changes with a cron job maybe) pulling the JSON feed, filtering posts, and then pushing the new file to the site again. (not a real option) figure out how to modify Publii to do what I wanted. Anyhow, I guess option 2 seems like the way to go since it’s gross but simple to do. If it turns out I care (or post!) enough, I’ll automate it later. ...

Security of Wireless Networks My previous lesson looking at wireless networks used Microbits and their Bluetooth networking to illustrate some of the problems with local wireless networks (as opposed to general internet connectivity, which we mostly did by doing speed tests and complaining about the school’s net connection :). At the end I wrote a bit about what I wanted to do with the next lesson, which was look at some basic crypto to handle the eavesdropping problem we had when someone else listened to the same channel we were communicating on. ...

Overview Part of the new Digital Technologies curriculum for year 7 and 8 involves students learning about wired and wireless networks, and methods of data transmission and security. There are activities from the Digital Technologies Learning Hub that deal with routing and issues with performance (that are pretty good unplugged activities). I use these or variations on these when I teach those concepts, but I wanted to put together something that actually involved technology in the classroom, and dealt with ideas a bit lower down the network stack. ...

A couple of weeks back I saw a link on Twitter to a post on Laura Bain’s blog about data transmission with year 4 and 5s. Go read the post, since it’s nice and short, but it’s basically kids sending binary data representing black or white pixels to each other using a OneNote Class Notebook. I was starting some of my students off on an activity that used a similar idea to (try to :) teach my kids about image data, and look at why algorithms are important while I was at it. ...

The Backstory Before Christmas I was noodling around with Affinity Designer in an attempt to be a bit better at design. Part of this has been getting more familiar with the tools by working through a bunch of the tutorials at Tuts+. Tuts+ hosts some tutorials aimed at Designer, but working through the ones aimed at other software like Illustrator has been an interesting exercise in figuring out Designer’s tools. While I was making a robot face, I was trying to make wires by putting a gradient on a stroke, but it seems Designer won’t allow you to have a gradient which follows parallel to the stroke. Instead it will apply the gradient to the stroke colour in the same manner as filling. ...