imagine if you could somehow sum up the total aggregate cognitive drain accumulated by every HN reader outside the UK wondering why children need such heavy computers
I think the majority of educated people can figure out the title given the context of the domain. “15 pound... bbc.co.uk” took half a second for my brain to figure out.
Similar to how you don’t get too confused with these (admittedly more common) titles:
- “How memory works… (health.org)”
- “Networking best practices… (sysadmin.info)”
- “Languages of the future… (sociology.harvard.edu)”
I'm a huge Raspberry Pi fan. I use it in my robotics work and I have two sons who I set up a Pi for years ago to learn to code on, but...
Did Raspberry Pi fail at its original mission of inspiring young programmers?
It's obviously a huge success in industry and in the maker/hobbyist community, but it feels like kids would rather use a phone or a tablet to do anything. And in my work as a robotics team coach for middle-schoolers (First Lego League), we do all the coding with Chromebooks.
(fwiw: both my sons are now either currently majoring in computer science in college, or will next year... but cumulative time spent working with the Pis over the years was minimal. Either way, maybe Pi and I should take the win?)
From what I see with my own children, Scratch has very much ended up as the "go-to" tool for teaching coding in schools. But Scratch doesn't really "inspire" them as such.
What does seem to inspire my children in terms of coding is hardware - at younger ages it's things like Beebot and Ozobot, and then moving onto projects using the GPIO pins on the Pi - eg we got a Pi-controlled robot car kit a couple of years ago which has been great.
Honestly, I think the idea of a less capable computer being used to teach kids to love _programming_ was misguided from the start. Raspberry pis are excellent for making electronics projects accessible and easy. I had an intro class in college that used Pi's for teaching electronics. It dramatically expands what's possible because you have a real computer with accessible pins, and the ecosystem made it all simple and comfortable. It felt much more accessible than Arduinos.
But teaching programming? Why? It does not enhance what's possible, it limits what's possible in a teaching way. That screams the sort of thing that educators would find useful and students would tolerate. Sure, they eventually get comfortable and see the benefits, but most of those aren't in programming.
In my opinion, it's actually closer to its original mission than previously as it can, in its current form, be quite easily used as a main computer.
Some kids will naturally like tinkering with these kinds of things and that's where the original, cheaper model is better, but most will want a computer to accomplish a task, so the best way to get them to learn this kind of thing is to give them a practical reason to. Want to play Minecraft/Roblox/Whatever on your pi? Go ahead, you just need to figure out how to actually set that up on Linux.
>Did Raspberry Pi fail at its original mission of inspiring young programmers?
Mostly yes, with a big but. Obviously the Pi has succeeded on its own terms in the hobbyist community (and industry, to a remarkable degree), but it was just too complicated and fragile and fiddly for most schoolkids to handle. The lessons from the failure of the RPi in education were the basis for the BBC micro:bit, a much simpler dev board based on an ARM microcontroller.
The micro:bit is just a brilliant tool for teaching the first stages of CS and EE. There are multiple toolchains supporting Scratch, Swift, MicroPython and a variety of block-based visual programming environments. It can be programmed directly from a browser-based IDE, so you can get to hello world very quickly and it works on essentially any device with nothing to install. It has Bluetooth and a bunch of sensors, so it can do fun and interesting things.
>> "but it was just too complicated and fragile and fiddly for most schoolkids to handle"
Really? Well I'm certainly not a highschooler, and have been working as a software developer for more than a decade. Until today, I see R Pi as tiny Linux box. Okay for running your PHP/Python apps.
If you want to go lower level, which I believe is necessary for CS/EE education, perhaps get one of those ARM microcontrollers.
For me the OS, the SD card, the power have been the major fragile points it’s had (some have been fixed in iterations).
For a school or people wanting to learn, that’s a lot of things you have to work around, keep in mind, or figure out when they happen. Not counting availability.
I think you can say that, much like the BBC Micro, the Raspberry Pi succeeded in many areas, not just inspiring and educating kids.
Of course it was never going to be as prevalent as any 8 bit micro, because the technology landscape nowadays is just endless.
But it got some kids into tinkering, got older programmers into new sorts of projects, it got into industry, product development, gardening, home automation, on so on.
They have sold more Raspberries Pi than any 8 bit computer. Record holder for biggest sales of any desktop computer is the Commodore 64; Raspberry Pi has sold about 50% more so far.
> but it feels like kids would rather use a phone or a tablet to do anything.
Please define "anything".
Mobile devices are basically consumption-only devices. Yes there's lots of options to turn 'em into general purpose computers or even do development on them. But they just... aren't it.
A RPi otoh is a general purpose computer (and Chromebooks too, for the most part).
>but it feels like kids would rather use a phone or a tablet to do anything
Easy is the enemy of Good. People opt for the easy and lazy way, because learning is hard.
Kids, encouraged to learn the hard things, become better and better at making those hard things easier for themselves. Kids, encouraged only to do the bare-minimum, 'easy approach' to things, only learn how to avoid doing anything hard.
Disclaimer: anecdotal parent experience. Its always better to learn how to do things the hard way than the easy way.
Glad to hear it worked out for you. My kids school went full on Pi and they were broken and discarded after 2 months because they are mostly not suitable for educational settings from a software and hardware perspective. The hardware is not robust or reliable enough and the software requires fixing by staff too often to be productive.
I’m surprised to hear that. We had an entire job tracking system in a large factory running off of them and they lasted years. This was with daily handling by factory workers.
I think the students are doing more "system integration" work than your factory workers are doing with their day-to-day handling. So they're touching all of the GPIO pins immediately after shuffling across the carpet to rub 18 balloons against themselves, connecting every GPIO pin to every other GPIO pin just for fun, rebooting by unplugging the power, etc.
If the Raspberry Pi had 5V compatible GPIO and SD cards stored data permanently immediately after fsync() returns, the Pi would have been much more successful in the educational environment.
I have a friend who has two children who are now allegedly young adults. They smash about one phone each per six months and one laptop screen each per three years. Their iPads are somehow intact, but dented to fuck. I, myself, broke a laptop screen when I was 16 (1999) by kneeling on it while it was open and concealed under my bedclothes. In the intervening 24 years, I have broken zero (0) laptop, desktop, PDA, or phone screens except by activities that I knew might result in their destruction (i.e. disassembly without proper tools under an understanding of 'either I manage to fix this right now or I order a new one and it arrives tomorrow’).
All this to say: kids are just rough on shit. They're inexperienced with potential failure modes and thus fail to anticipate what precautions might need to be taken in trying to avoid them. But they mostly grow up (after killing a few pieces of hardware).
Same here; multiple broken phone screens (and we're not buying him a new phone every time it breaks, he gets hand-me-downs at best), laptops (he managed to cram a power cable into the HDMI port in a panic, closed a laptop with probably something like a pen in between shearing the hinge, he probably punched it out of frustration / wanting a new one and blamed it on "some kids that used it as a shield"), multiple broken bikes, etc.
No. You have a 2 hour window and 30 raspberry pi's. How long do you spend fixing them versus teaching?
It's just a fucking computer, not a world changing thing. They already have computers that don't have all the downsides but do have all of the upsides.
Honestly a lot of kids in the US/UK should have no problem finding a used desktop/laptop to play with if they're into that sort of stuff. Even a 15 year old computer can run Linux today and people are practically throwing those out.
It's not as much _fun_ as making an obvious circuit board do Stuff (tm). There's a very tactile satisfaction about making an RPi or similar go. YMMV, of course
I do wonder where old computers end up at (or where they should be taken to), they don't seem to have much at charity shops for example which used to be great for things like secondhand PCs.
I have an old PC at home still collecting dust (~10 years old I think), I need to clean its storage and get rid of it.
Some charity shops (e.g. Oxfam) no longer take mains-powered electronics - my guess is because of the burden of testing them to make sure they're safe. Others will take computers but have various prohibitions - for instance, the Red Cross won't take computer hard drives (they say they're not legally allowed to sell hard drives containing software); the British Heart Foundation won't take gaming machines.
...later on, the BBC made[0] the micro:bit[1], another £15 (well, around £15 back then for the V1) computer to inspire young programmers. Funny to think that little did the BBC know that they'd be creating their own cheap computer.
[0]: Well, the BBC didn't _make_ it exactly — rather, the development and manufacturing was subcontracted to third-party companies (though some people at the BBC were involved in designing the prototypes — I've had a chat with one such person who did some prototype PCB fabrication in his own kitchen). The BBC came up with the initiative, though.
Did the BBC miss an opportunity to major on the Raspi? For a lot of kids it could have been the only real computer in their house. Another BBC Computer Literacy Project would have been amazing, the micro:bit doesn't feel like it does the business.
As much as the Raspberry Pi is really great for computing education, in my personal opinion, I think the micro:bit does well in terms of setting it up and getting started with it, especially in a school environment when there'll be around 20-or-so of these devices all being used by students.
With the Pi, you have to format the SD card and flash an OS to it, then plug in the peripherals such as the display, keyboard and mouse. While schools will likely have this equipment, having to reconnect all these devices from a school PC can be a chore, especially when it comes to the end of the lesson. Schools would likely also have to issue a lot of these peripherals alongside Pis for kids to use them as their only computer in the house, and that can get expensive.
With the micro:bit, all you need is a computer (which most schools will have), a USB cable (supplied with micro:bits) and a connection to the internet to access the online IDEs. Granted, that does place some barriers to their use at home when kids don't have a companion computing device for coding on.
Despite the micro:bit being limited as a microcontroller with a 5x5 pixel display and 2 user buttons, it does have a lot of on-board sensors that can bring a lot of potential opportunities to students in terms of creating physical projects that Raspberry Pis don't have built-in (you have to purchase external sensors, such as accelerometers, to match the functionality).
That being said, the micro:bit does require a special connector to use its GPIO pins in a DIP format that can be connected to a breadboard (the Pi is better at this due to its GPIO header). And, while the Pi does give a full-blown Linux environment that would have been great for all learners to interact with, the immediacy and portability of the micro:bit does have some advantages for new learners.
I was in fact in Year 5 back when the micro:bit was launched and given out to Year 5 school children, and now I'm an apprentice at the BBC (similar stories exist for the original BBC Micro); so I'd say in that respect that it was overall a good investment from the BBC :)
With mentioning that while I was still interested in programming and even had a Pi before I got my micro:bit, I'd say that the micro:bit did introduce me to microcontroller development.
The issue with the MicroBit was that it wasn't really a well thought out initiative with multi year funding. They gave them out for free to one single school year, and then schools had to pay for them which meant practically that most schools didn't do anything with them because it wasn't worth the time investment. They were also late delivering, so didn't turn up at the start of the school year when they were supposed to but half way through the spring term. I helped do some training of teachers to use it in 2015 while I was doing my PhD, and they'd not even got the kit for their classes at that point.
With the Pi, you have to format the SD card and flash an OS to it, then plug in the peripherals such as the display, keyboard and mouse. While schools will likely have this equipment, having to reconnect all these devices from a school PC can be a chore, especially when it comes to the end of the lesson. Schools would likely also have to issue a lot of these peripherals alongside Pis for kids to use them as their only computer in the house, and that can get expensive.
These are valuable computing skills that should be being taught to future programmers in their teenage years, already. The 'hassle' you claim is really the process of learning that should be promoted, not avoided because its 'too difficult'.
The micro:bit is entirely a specialist computer for which - yes, a basic set of computer fundamentals will be learned - but those same principles are equally attainable with the rPi, with the added benefit that students will also gain operator skills that are vital to their ability to be productive in this field - whereas the micro:bit will leave them with a lot of unlearned essentials.
As a parent (and 40+ years of experience systems-software developer) I would much rather my kids gain their computing expertise with a standard, easily attainable raspberry Pi platform than with the proprietary, not-standard micro:bit. Sure, they'd get some embedded experience - but that is possible with the rPi too.
The micro:bit is proprietary. The raspberry Pi, not so much (in terms of accessibility/availability). I think micro:bit is a step backwards for computer education.
I beg to differ. Formatting and flashing an sd card are worthy skills, but are unlikely to capture the imagination of a school age child. Making a basic alarm from a light sensor, an led, and a microcontroller (such as a micro:bit) just might.
RasPis are great, but they seem too much like the sort of phone-like "well behaved appliances" that are ubiquitous in all our lives now. Imo, as a starter platform for children they are just too complex, they present too high an obstacle to get started, and have too much potential for distraction. I suspect that a lot of Pi's that were provided to children ended up just being used to play Minecraft.
(I'm also a parent. Learned to write software in the early/mid 80s on BBC/Acorn computers.)
Teaching kids some proprietary thing that is only available in a special situation, versus teaching them broadly applicable skills that are entirely relevant, after 40 years of computing history, is very much more valuable - as a parent - than the alternative.
Also a parent, also learned to program on an 8-bit system, taught my kids computing with the Raspberry Pi and they still use them for things way beyond the Minecraft zone... just yesterday the younger of the teens figured out how to use his rPi to catch his older brother entering his room. Sure, he could have done that with the micro:bit too - but that would have been an artificial ceiling for things - as it stands, he's been spending the morning working out how to get his brothers' guilty pics uploaded to the family NAS, which is another extremely valuable skill that this teenager has now developed in a matter of days, which would not have been easy to attain with the micro:bit.
I think the micro:bit, as has been mentioned earlier, is proprietary and limited. There's nothing to learn there that can't also be learned on rPi, and the rPi gives far better future-proof opportunities.
The only 'advantage' is that micro:bit might be easier to teach - but that is just excuse-making for poor educational standards. I'd much rather my kids' teachers have the skills and ability to teach them future-proof computer subjects, such as the raspberryPi (the younger one has now just asked for their own Hetzner account) than limit them to proprietary stuff that isn't available anywhere else in the world ..
It is beyond embarassing that we are graduating students who don't know the difference between a File and a Folder, or why you need to format storage devices, or even what a storage device is .. micro:bit will re-enforce that ignorance in a generation of students - raspberryPi entirely discourages it and prepares the student better for the world, imho...
My 2p as parent with RPis + multiple Microbits in the house.
Microbits are far more limited in their capabilities but they are a useful stepping stone because they are limited. They can be used like a piece of lego as part of a larger creation.
They have inbuilt switches and sensors and it is easier to connect extra components to a Microbit. You don't even need a breakout board. They run off batteries quite happily and once you have uploaded a program onto the Microbit you might only need that single battery box. And if you have two or more of them then you can use the inbuilt wireless connectivity very easily.
The proprietary nature of the code running the RPis and Microbits is not a factor for me. Once my kids get closer to being teenagers hopefully there'll be some fully open platforms available for the next steps.
Congratulations. Your children are clearly knowledgeable and sophisticated users of technology.
Most kids don't get that far. They don't have parents like you (or me) to give them one to one help and encouragement.
> The only 'advantage' is that micro:bit might be easier to teach
Thats the point. Start with simple, concrete stuff. Work up to the complicated, abstract stuff. Basic pedagogy. Raspberry Pis undoubtedly have their place, but they're less than ideal teaching platforms if your aim is to get children interested and enthusiastic about tech, rather than simply being "users".
(As for future proof skills, I suspect you know as well as I do that nothing ever is - as the absence of BBC Model Bs in todays classrooms demonstrates.)
> Making a basic alarm from a light sensor, an led, and a microcontroller (such as a micro:bit) just might.
While I applaud any efforts to get more kids into programming, what I couldn't figure out with the micro:bit was its market positioning relative to the Arduino, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi and arm mbed.
Between those there were already several options with the explicit goal of inspiring kids into programming, there was already well documented stuff for baby's first blinking LED, already 100MHz+ sub-$5 options, already options with wireless, already options with online compilers, already options with micropython support, and even an option that didn't need a PC and could run fully-fledged python.
I picked up a couple of micro:bits out of curiosity and was impressed by the build quality. The after-market eco-system was impressive too, and I wrote a couple of projects to see what I could do with them. My favourite has to be the Wireless MQTT client (https://petergarner.net/notes.php?thisnote=20220502-BBC+micr...) which used a bolt-on IOT module card. Prior to that I'd installed a micro:bit in a small leakproof sandwich box bolted to a drainpipe which transmitted light level and temperature value to my computer inside the house (https://petergarner.net/notes.php?thisnote=20200125-Experime...). Hats off to whoever designed the device as it withstood sub-zero and summer temperatures without faltering. Great times!
Designing an SBC around a proprietary SoC from a notoriously secretive company to "inspire young programmers" never seemed like anything more than PR stunt to me. IMHO that mission is better served by getting them into something like retrocomputing and exposing them to the actually open PC-compatible ecosystem of the time, instead of encouraging them to participate in another thinly-veiled walled garden.
Best platform expansion I've ever made. Not the most popular—there's been only 876 downloads of the whole plugin library compiled for Pi, from the mediafire mirror—but it's all open source, and that's still quite a few Pis set up for music production :)
That's awesome, and is another reason why schools using the micro:bit approach, versus raspberryPi, are artificially limiting their students reach and horizon for computing. I've got my kids learning computers on their raspberryPi's - for them to learn that they can also easily get into audio programming is a huge benefit.
Eben Upton spoke at my school during my teens, I remember being so impressed with him that I applied to his college at Cambridge just so that I would be one of his students. Sadly he'd moved on by the time I arrived, but I got the impression that the Pi was largely a result of interviewing so many prospective CS students that didn't already know how to code, whereas in his generation they would have been able to.
I wonder how many CS applicants in 2023 know how to code?
The obvious answer in my view is familiarity. Most secondary school leavers will have some idea of what's involved in a maths, chemistry, biology, geography etc degree. Very few will know what's involved in CS and I reckon the uncertainty puts them off. I'm not sure kids that age would learn how to code without strong encouragement. Why would they?
The original motivation for the Pi was to offer current generations the same learning opportunities that low cost home computers offered those growing up in the 1980s. An expensive shared family PC in the 2000s didn't encourage tinkering. And things would get even worse as these PCs got replaced with closed smartphones as the only computing platforms people would grow up with.
So a really cheap computer, even if limited, would allow the young programmers to experiment and even if they ended up damaging it at a sufficiently low cost it wouldn't be a disaster.
The initial prototype hooked up two of the same processor in the first Arduinos, one running a Python interpreter and one generating a TV output. Booting to a programming prompt like the 1980s micro would encourage learning the language.
The second prototype used a much more powerful chip and the third added an ARM that could run Linux (it was the one shown in 2011 which looked like a fat USB pen drive). They realized that though the 1980s home computers booted to a Basic prompt, most of the time they loaded ready made games from cassette tapes instead. Having Linux would open up the modern Internet to the little machine.
I think they could have had it both ways - with a small local flash they could boot to a Python prompt if the SD cards was not present. With the card you would go into Linux. In a way, the original idea is finally here with the RP2040 microcontroller configured for MicroPython even though that has the flavor of cross-development instead of a stand-alone machine.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread(Edit: wow, actually that milestone was 5 years ago...)
imagine if you could somehow sum up the total aggregate cognitive drain accumulated by every HN reader outside the UK wondering why children need such heavy computers
Everything except driving speed, for obvious reasons.
Similar to how you don’t get too confused with these (admittedly more common) titles:
- “How memory works… (health.org)”
- “Networking best practices… (sysadmin.info)”
- “Languages of the future… (sociology.harvard.edu)”
Did Raspberry Pi fail at its original mission of inspiring young programmers?
It's obviously a huge success in industry and in the maker/hobbyist community, but it feels like kids would rather use a phone or a tablet to do anything. And in my work as a robotics team coach for middle-schoolers (First Lego League), we do all the coding with Chromebooks.
(fwiw: both my sons are now either currently majoring in computer science in college, or will next year... but cumulative time spent working with the Pis over the years was minimal. Either way, maybe Pi and I should take the win?)
What does seem to inspire my children in terms of coding is hardware - at younger ages it's things like Beebot and Ozobot, and then moving onto projects using the GPIO pins on the Pi - eg we got a Pi-controlled robot car kit a couple of years ago which has been great.
But teaching programming? Why? It does not enhance what's possible, it limits what's possible in a teaching way. That screams the sort of thing that educators would find useful and students would tolerate. Sure, they eventually get comfortable and see the benefits, but most of those aren't in programming.
Some kids will naturally like tinkering with these kinds of things and that's where the original, cheaper model is better, but most will want a computer to accomplish a task, so the best way to get them to learn this kind of thing is to give them a practical reason to. Want to play Minecraft/Roblox/Whatever on your pi? Go ahead, you just need to figure out how to actually set that up on Linux.
Mostly yes, with a big but. Obviously the Pi has succeeded on its own terms in the hobbyist community (and industry, to a remarkable degree), but it was just too complicated and fragile and fiddly for most schoolkids to handle. The lessons from the failure of the RPi in education were the basis for the BBC micro:bit, a much simpler dev board based on an ARM microcontroller.
The micro:bit is just a brilliant tool for teaching the first stages of CS and EE. There are multiple toolchains supporting Scratch, Swift, MicroPython and a variety of block-based visual programming environments. It can be programmed directly from a browser-based IDE, so you can get to hello world very quickly and it works on essentially any device with nothing to install. It has Bluetooth and a bunch of sensors, so it can do fun and interesting things.
https://microbit.org/get-started/what-is-the-microbit/
https://microbit.org/projects/make-it-code-it/
Really? Well I'm certainly not a highschooler, and have been working as a software developer for more than a decade. Until today, I see R Pi as tiny Linux box. Okay for running your PHP/Python apps.
If you want to go lower level, which I believe is necessary for CS/EE education, perhaps get one of those ARM microcontrollers.
For me the OS, the SD card, the power have been the major fragile points it’s had (some have been fixed in iterations).
For a school or people wanting to learn, that’s a lot of things you have to work around, keep in mind, or figure out when they happen. Not counting availability.
Of course it was never going to be as prevalent as any 8 bit micro, because the technology landscape nowadays is just endless.
But it got some kids into tinkering, got older programmers into new sorts of projects, it got into industry, product development, gardening, home automation, on so on.
Please define "anything".
Mobile devices are basically consumption-only devices. Yes there's lots of options to turn 'em into general purpose computers or even do development on them. But they just... aren't it.
A RPi otoh is a general purpose computer (and Chromebooks too, for the most part).
Easy is the enemy of Good. People opt for the easy and lazy way, because learning is hard.
Kids, encouraged to learn the hard things, become better and better at making those hard things easier for themselves. Kids, encouraged only to do the bare-minimum, 'easy approach' to things, only learn how to avoid doing anything hard.
Disclaimer: anecdotal parent experience. Its always better to learn how to do things the hard way than the easy way.
I built doorbells and game sites to use in school. I learned PHP on the thing, my first proper programming language.
Good times. :)
Instead they taught them python on windows.
If the Raspberry Pi had 5V compatible GPIO and SD cards stored data permanently immediately after fsync() returns, the Pi would have been much more successful in the educational environment.
All this to say: kids are just rough on shit. They're inexperienced with potential failure modes and thus fail to anticipate what precautions might need to be taken in trying to avoid them. But they mostly grow up (after killing a few pieces of hardware).
In the right educators hands', the raspberry Pi can be used to bring generations of teenagers into computing competence.
You're only as good a student as your teacher.
It's just a fucking computer, not a world changing thing. They already have computers that don't have all the downsides but do have all of the upsides.
Fix that problem. Don't address it by introducing the kids to useless, proprietary technology.
It's just a fucking computer, not a world changing thing.
This irrational, entirely emotional attitude is also the problem. Its why kids can't code today, but could in the 80's.
Computers are world-changing things. This is why its so vital to teach kids properly and not chintz out on it because "its too hard".
It's not as much _fun_ as making an obvious circuit board do Stuff (tm). There's a very tactile satisfaction about making an RPi or similar go. YMMV, of course
I have an old PC at home still collecting dust (~10 years old I think), I need to clean its storage and get rid of it.
...later on, the BBC made[0] the micro:bit[1], another £15 (well, around £15 back then for the V1) computer to inspire young programmers. Funny to think that little did the BBC know that they'd be creating their own cheap computer.
[0]: Well, the BBC didn't _make_ it exactly — rather, the development and manufacturing was subcontracted to third-party companies (though some people at the BBC were involved in designing the prototypes — I've had a chat with one such person who did some prototype PCB fabrication in his own kitchen). The BBC came up with the initiative, though.
[1]: https://microbit.org
With the Pi, you have to format the SD card and flash an OS to it, then plug in the peripherals such as the display, keyboard and mouse. While schools will likely have this equipment, having to reconnect all these devices from a school PC can be a chore, especially when it comes to the end of the lesson. Schools would likely also have to issue a lot of these peripherals alongside Pis for kids to use them as their only computer in the house, and that can get expensive.
With the micro:bit, all you need is a computer (which most schools will have), a USB cable (supplied with micro:bits) and a connection to the internet to access the online IDEs. Granted, that does place some barriers to their use at home when kids don't have a companion computing device for coding on.
Despite the micro:bit being limited as a microcontroller with a 5x5 pixel display and 2 user buttons, it does have a lot of on-board sensors that can bring a lot of potential opportunities to students in terms of creating physical projects that Raspberry Pis don't have built-in (you have to purchase external sensors, such as accelerometers, to match the functionality).
That being said, the micro:bit does require a special connector to use its GPIO pins in a DIP format that can be connected to a breadboard (the Pi is better at this due to its GPIO header). And, while the Pi does give a full-blown Linux environment that would have been great for all learners to interact with, the immediacy and portability of the micro:bit does have some advantages for new learners.
I was in fact in Year 5 back when the micro:bit was launched and given out to Year 5 school children, and now I'm an apprentice at the BBC (similar stories exist for the original BBC Micro); so I'd say in that respect that it was overall a good investment from the BBC :)
That's my thoughts, anyway!
These are valuable computing skills that should be being taught to future programmers in their teenage years, already. The 'hassle' you claim is really the process of learning that should be promoted, not avoided because its 'too difficult'.
The micro:bit is entirely a specialist computer for which - yes, a basic set of computer fundamentals will be learned - but those same principles are equally attainable with the rPi, with the added benefit that students will also gain operator skills that are vital to their ability to be productive in this field - whereas the micro:bit will leave them with a lot of unlearned essentials.
As a parent (and 40+ years of experience systems-software developer) I would much rather my kids gain their computing expertise with a standard, easily attainable raspberry Pi platform than with the proprietary, not-standard micro:bit. Sure, they'd get some embedded experience - but that is possible with the rPi too.
The micro:bit is proprietary. The raspberry Pi, not so much (in terms of accessibility/availability). I think micro:bit is a step backwards for computer education.
RasPis are great, but they seem too much like the sort of phone-like "well behaved appliances" that are ubiquitous in all our lives now. Imo, as a starter platform for children they are just too complex, they present too high an obstacle to get started, and have too much potential for distraction. I suspect that a lot of Pi's that were provided to children ended up just being used to play Minecraft.
(I'm also a parent. Learned to write software in the early/mid 80s on BBC/Acorn computers.)
Teaching kids some proprietary thing that is only available in a special situation, versus teaching them broadly applicable skills that are entirely relevant, after 40 years of computing history, is very much more valuable - as a parent - than the alternative.
Also a parent, also learned to program on an 8-bit system, taught my kids computing with the Raspberry Pi and they still use them for things way beyond the Minecraft zone... just yesterday the younger of the teens figured out how to use his rPi to catch his older brother entering his room. Sure, he could have done that with the micro:bit too - but that would have been an artificial ceiling for things - as it stands, he's been spending the morning working out how to get his brothers' guilty pics uploaded to the family NAS, which is another extremely valuable skill that this teenager has now developed in a matter of days, which would not have been easy to attain with the micro:bit.
I think the micro:bit, as has been mentioned earlier, is proprietary and limited. There's nothing to learn there that can't also be learned on rPi, and the rPi gives far better future-proof opportunities.
The only 'advantage' is that micro:bit might be easier to teach - but that is just excuse-making for poor educational standards. I'd much rather my kids' teachers have the skills and ability to teach them future-proof computer subjects, such as the raspberryPi (the younger one has now just asked for their own Hetzner account) than limit them to proprietary stuff that isn't available anywhere else in the world ..
It is beyond embarassing that we are graduating students who don't know the difference between a File and a Folder, or why you need to format storage devices, or even what a storage device is .. micro:bit will re-enforce that ignorance in a generation of students - raspberryPi entirely discourages it and prepares the student better for the world, imho...
I could write code, though.
I bet you know what a Folder and a File are now, though. You wouldn't get too far as a modern developer, otherwise.
That's the point: teach kids real skills, not decadence. Too bad if its "too hard" - don't pretend to be an educator if that's the case.
Microbits are far more limited in their capabilities but they are a useful stepping stone because they are limited. They can be used like a piece of lego as part of a larger creation.
They have inbuilt switches and sensors and it is easier to connect extra components to a Microbit. You don't even need a breakout board. They run off batteries quite happily and once you have uploaded a program onto the Microbit you might only need that single battery box. And if you have two or more of them then you can use the inbuilt wireless connectivity very easily.
The proprietary nature of the code running the RPis and Microbits is not a factor for me. Once my kids get closer to being teenagers hopefully there'll be some fully open platforms available for the next steps.
Most kids don't get that far. They don't have parents like you (or me) to give them one to one help and encouragement.
> The only 'advantage' is that micro:bit might be easier to teach
Thats the point. Start with simple, concrete stuff. Work up to the complicated, abstract stuff. Basic pedagogy. Raspberry Pis undoubtedly have their place, but they're less than ideal teaching platforms if your aim is to get children interested and enthusiastic about tech, rather than simply being "users".
(As for future proof skills, I suspect you know as well as I do that nothing ever is - as the absence of BBC Model Bs in todays classrooms demonstrates.)
While I applaud any efforts to get more kids into programming, what I couldn't figure out with the micro:bit was its market positioning relative to the Arduino, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi and arm mbed.
Between those there were already several options with the explicit goal of inspiring kids into programming, there was already well documented stuff for baby's first blinking LED, already 100MHz+ sub-$5 options, already options with wireless, already options with online compilers, already options with micropython support, and even an option that didn't need a PC and could run fully-fledged python.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
Yet overlooked.
Best platform expansion I've ever made. Not the most popular—there's been only 876 downloads of the whole plugin library compiled for Pi, from the mediafire mirror—but it's all open source, and that's still quite a few Pis set up for music production :)
I wonder how many CS applicants in 2023 know how to code?
The obvious answer in my view is familiarity. Most secondary school leavers will have some idea of what's involved in a maths, chemistry, biology, geography etc degree. Very few will know what's involved in CS and I reckon the uncertainty puts them off. I'm not sure kids that age would learn how to code without strong encouragement. Why would they?
So a really cheap computer, even if limited, would allow the young programmers to experiment and even if they ended up damaging it at a sufficiently low cost it wouldn't be a disaster.
The initial prototype hooked up two of the same processor in the first Arduinos, one running a Python interpreter and one generating a TV output. Booting to a programming prompt like the 1980s micro would encourage learning the language.
The second prototype used a much more powerful chip and the third added an ARM that could run Linux (it was the one shown in 2011 which looked like a fat USB pen drive). They realized that though the 1980s home computers booted to a Basic prompt, most of the time they loaded ready made games from cassette tapes instead. Having Linux would open up the modern Internet to the little machine.
I think they could have had it both ways - with a small local flash they could boot to a Python prompt if the SD cards was not present. With the card you would go into Linux. In a way, the original idea is finally here with the RP2040 microcontroller configured for MicroPython even though that has the flavor of cross-development instead of a stand-alone machine.