Introduction

This blog describes how I'm teaching my 2 sons how to use the micro:bit during the Covid-19 lockdown. 

As a software developer myself, I've been trying to find ways of teaching my sons how to code.

My eldest (nearly 10 years old) was going to after school club learning scratch, so already knows some coding fundamentals.
I managed to get him to code an online tutorial simulating the corona virus and how we can flatten the infection rate curve. (https://creativesmartthings.com/simulate-a-virus-html)
He enjoyed this, but I think he just typed it in without really understanding how it worked.

My youngest (nearly 7 years old) hasn't done any coding. At the beginning of the lockdown, I introduced him to scratch. He enjoyed playing with the effects and he came up with the idea of a game moving a character through a maze and losing lives if you touch the walls. We did this together, and I think he enjoyed the process.

But with scratch they are both at different levels and I wanted to be able to sit both of them down and get them doing something together.

So I decided to buy them each a micro:bit and teach them how to code a microprocessor.

Why the micro:bit

In 2019 we took part in the annual Pi Wars competition, entering our robot Sputnik. This was based on the Raspberry Pi and written in python. However, we did use a micro:bit as a simple display. My eldest coded up the pictures and animations that were displayed.

I was immediately impressed with the micro:bit. It was very easy to code using the make code blocks editor, and had a vast array of functionality. In addition to the display and buttons, it boasts an accelerometer, compass, light sensor, temperature sensor and radio communications. This is before you get to using any external inputs or outputs.

I thought this would be a great introduction to coding, and they could both go through the projects at the same time.

I had a single micro:bit already from our Pi Wars robot, but order 3 more from kitronik, along with the kitronic inventor's kit and noise and neopixel add ons.

Why a Blog?

Part of the Pi Wars competition was to write a blog describing progress. Ours can be found at https://sputnikrobot.blogspot.com

I'd not written a blog before, but really enjoyed the process of writing. So I thought I'd write one to track our progress.

So - let the coding begin...