“The device itself is really good but where it truly shines are the teaching materials around it and the makercode integration makes it very easy to start using straight away.
This is especially true with the build in sensors, led matrix, speaker etc.
Has a much shallower learning curve than, for example and arduino for kids”
“This is a great little computer and easy to program using Python, though there is another language available. As a 60+-year-old who learned to program on a BBC microcomputer in 1982 its good to see that the BBC are still working to educate young people about computers. The micro bit has so many things built in that we had to build separate boards for in the early 1980s. The price is very cheap, so much so that I got two so that I could try getting them to talk to each other via Bluetooth even though the experiment I wanted to replicate only needed one.”
“Delivery from Pimoroni was fast and excellent, and could not be faulted - and the tutorials on the website are great.
However the micro:bit is a hugely frustrating piece of kit to use. Using MakeCode the downloads are completely hit or miss. The drag and drop gives an error 521 (checksum failure) more often than not, and a download using WebUSB via Chrome fails more often than it succeeds - and it is more frustrating because I can't work out any logic to what does or doesn't work, and I can't find anything useful online.
I'm an experienced IT man, and doing this as a bit of fun to go through with my young grandchildren. They (micro:bit) don't seem to have got the fundamentals on the software side nailed yet (at least not with MakeCode) - so I won't be opening my classroom just yet!”
