Hello!
This is post #3 about our micro:bit project at Årstadalsskolan in Stockholm.
I would characterize the project as a partial success so far. We have had some hiccups on the way that has delayed the project a few weeks, and the kids and I have learned a lot, but we have not finished our clocks yet.
But, I am getting ahead of myself. First off : Goals, curriculum and so on.
In July this year a new curriculum was adopted in Sweden. There are some minor changes, and some major ones. Mostly the changes focus on digitalization and how that should be dealt with in various areas. The biggest change is that programming is now mandatory for all school children.
I teach science and math at my school, and for me there was two new areas I needed to adress. First off in math we need to explore problem solving with computers through programming as well as binary numbers. We also have a separate science subject called "Teknik", which just means technology. In Technology the new curriculum added programmable devices and using those to accomplish something you want done. It can mean just about anything, but it needs to be programmed and controlled by students.
When I heard of the giveaway I sat down and thought about how I could use micro:bits to accomplish these goals. What I came up with was to construct clocks with the micro:bits as brains.
I decided that we needed to do two things.
First we needed to have a look at the micro:bit, explore what it is and what it can do. Secondly we needed to learn about how we can program the micro:bit and use its capabilities to make it do what we wanted to.
Goal 1
To learn about what the micro:bit can do
Goal 2
Using the built-in sensors, buttons, display and radio to teach programming
Goal 3
Create clocks controlled by a micro:bit
I have 80 minutes a week with two different groups of about 12 students to accomplish this. Due to other teachers being off sick, holidays and various other complications my ten weeks got whittled down to six, which means that we are just now beginning to construct our clocks.
What we have done so far is working with the micro:bit programming environment, learning how to download programs into the computer and then testing them.
This is what we started with, a simple animation that just uses a delay in the forever loop to alternate two icons. We then built on this and added more animations, made our own icons and so on.
After that we moved on to using this to learn about loops and if statements. Flow control is essential if you want something to work.
We then moved on to more exciting things, like using the input capabilities and more advanced topics. We tried buttons, tested out what could be done with just buttons, some imagination and flow control. We did all kinds of animations where we could control them with button pushes. One of the kids found the sprite library on his own and wrote this awesome but hard game. I was quite impressed, and it really did take him 20 minutes, I promise.
Next up : exploring the sensors. This above is a couple of my students who went outside to make sure the temperature changed, and that it displayed that correctly. We tried out the accelerometer and the compass as well, but that was less interesting. Concurrently we dovs in a little bit into logic and evaluations of conditions. Conditional loops didnt take that long to grasp for most of them.
And this is where we left off last friday. I have been at home with the flu so we havent gotten any further. This is us working with the Bluetooth radio. In the first video you can see one of my students checking the range of the radio, in the second two others are explaining whats going on.
Basically I set one microbit up as a transmitter and sent out numbers from 0-9. Their task was to make a listening program that displayed the numbers. We had a lot of fun with that and we have lots of ideas going forward. One of those is a clock maed up from several microbits that listen to each other and help keep time in a distributed manner. So, I will probably be updating this tomorrow with some more of our experiments, this time with servos as the hands of a simple clock.
/Peter