I Danced with a Nun in a Disco…and the micro:bit

How's that for a click-bait title? But it's true. Back in 1969, the British government created the Open University, or OU. This was a university intended to democratize university education by offering degrees mainly to people who already had a job and couldn't simply go and live on campus for a few years as at a traditional university. Many of the courses were broadcast in the early morning, late at night, and weekend mornings on the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. This was before the days of video recorders and so the students had to watch them live. I still remember that at VLSI '81, some American professor coming to breakfast astounded that when he couldn't sleep due to jet lag, he had turned on the TV, and found himself watching a lecture on quantum mechanics. The BBC was thus a major conduit for learning.

Oh, the nun thing. Every summer, the OU would borrow some university campuses and run summer schools. I forget if they were compulsory or just highly recommended. One OU summer school was at Stirling University and since they always needed extra people as TAs I went there for a couple of weeks one summer. It turns out a lot of nuns do courses at the OU and then show up at the summer school. In the evenings, there are various social events and so I was standing near a nun who I had been helping with some computer programming (yes, some nuns can program, who knew?) and I asked her to come for a quick dance so I could say "I'd danced with a nun in a disco." I can't say it was the wildest dance I've ever had.

Mike Muller, in his keynote at TechCon, talked a little about history. Acorn Computer, the company ARM would eventually be spun out of, was created in 1978 to participate in the microcomputer "revolution." In 1980, the BBC decided to create the BBC Computer Literacy program, with television programs and a computer that they would subsidize for schools but would also be available to buy. There is a lot of backstory but Acorn won the contract with a computer called Proton but soon renamed as the BBC Micro Model B. In the press panel after his keynote, Muller and team were asked what happened to the model A. Nobody could quite remember, but they thought it had less memory—too little in fact, so it never sold. Whereas the BBC Micro Model B was a huge success selling over 1.5 million units (in a country with a total population of around 50 million at the time). Since it cost £335 in 1981 (about $1400 in 2015 money) that both was a surprisingly large number and made a lot of money for Acorn. They decided that none of the processors they could buy were what they needed so they went ahead and created the ARM 1, the first step on a path that led to the processors that are in all our smartphones today.

All this is a very long winded way of pointing out that the BBC has a long history of involvement in education in Britain, through the Open University, the BBC Computer Literacy Project, not to mention some of their normal programming (the British version of Nova, for example, is called Horizon on the BBC).

The latest project is called micro:bit (also called the BBC Micro Bit). It is, surprise, ARM-based and unlike the BBC Micro it is cheap enough that it will be given free to every year 7 pupil in the UK (11-12 year olds), of which there are about 1 million each year. It contains an ARM Cortex-M0, accelerometer and magnetometer sensors, Bluetooth and USB connectivity, a display consisting of 25 LEDs, two programmable buttons, and can be powered by either USB or an external battery pack. There are lots of partners such as Nordic Semiconductor who supplied the processor, Freescale for sensors and USB, and many others.

Here's Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, taking a look at a schoolkid with a micro:bit and doing a little bit of early recruiting. Actually Microsoft is heavily involved and will host all the code created for the device, and developed the teacher training material.

To learn more about the micro:bit, take a look at the BBC's website.