Microbit course outline

This is an outline of key features of a Digital Technology course, using the microbit, which I have taught to year 8s this year. The time allocation was 17 hours (two 1 hour lessons per week over a 9 week term, with one holiday day subtracted)

Vocab sheet: I produced a vocab sheet with 30+ words. We talked about the words and their meanings at suitable times during lessons. Later on in the course I modified the sheet by including a mix and match list.

Reference:
Maas, Pauline & Heldens, Peter. The Invent to Learn Guide to the micro:bit.(2023). This was my primary reference, referred in situ by M&H, page number. There are other great project ideas in this book that I didn't have time to try out.

Lesson 1: I distributed microbits and discussed its features. Our aim will be to make artifacts that perform in some way using the microbit. We’ll often work in groups so tell me your preferred partners

Lesson 2: Heart beat, Name badge, animations, starry night, starry night challenges

Lesson 3 and 4: Dice simulation. I told the students to play “Pig” with a real dice first and then play it again with a dice simulation on the microbit.

Coin simulation. I told them to play “Two up” with real coins first and then using a coin simulation.

Measure the temperature (then warm up your microbit in your hand to increase the temperature)

Shake it up. Vary the LED icon with small shake, medium shake and big shake.

LED war (two player game with 2 microbits using radio to communicate). Press the A button to put random LEDs on your microbit. Press the B button to wipe off random LEDs on your opponents microbit. You win the game if all 25 LEDs light up.

Challenges: Make a better game – 10 LEDs appear with one A button press; 10 LEDs disappear with one B button press; add sounds

Lesson 5: Fruit music (M&H, 42). Although this works better with the Makey Makey with the microbit you can use 3 pieces of fruit connected to pins 0,1 and 2 for 3 notes and then use the A and B buttons and logo for 3 more notes. I provided the notes for twinkle star. Challenges include different types of fruit, testing beakers of water for conduction and devising or looking up your own tunes.

Lesson and 7: Unicorn Greeting Card (M&H, 25). This utilises the microbit pins to light up a LED which becomes the eye of the Unicorn.

Lesson 8-11: Helmet. I adapted an idea from Rob Morrill’s Circuit Playground course here and broadened it out. Students made a cardboard helmet complete with a 0.5m neopixel strip. I provided a wide variety of ways in which they could code their helmet.

• Display and change colours using buttons, shake and tilt
• Sound input: talk, sing or whistle to your microbit. The challenge here was to make the harder to get louder sounds colours stay on for longer
• Show and rotate a rainbow using light. The challenge here was to make the rainbow rotate faster as you shine more light onto it
• Random colour changes. This started with all pixels red and then various button or logo presses led to random pixel colour changes. Finally a shake was used to create millions of random colours which changed rapidly for an extended period.
• Range of colours. The code was provided to set the first and last 7 pixels to rainbow colours (ROYGBIV) and the inbetween colours to flashing between white and black. The challenge here was to change the colours and speed of the flashing white to black.
• Accelerometer. Initially the neopixels are all green but when tilting the head one way they flash blue/black and when tilting the other way they flas red/black.

To accompany the helmet activity I produced a sheet which asked questions to test comprehension of some of the coding and hardware basics (about the battery voltage, about ms, about bits and bytes, etc)

There was too much coding here for some of the students. I felt the course momentum became bogged down here for some. When I do it next time I’ll assign the different coding tasks to different groups and ask them to demonstrate their results to the others.

Lesson 12-13. Servo introduction and Turkey Trot (M&H, 36) is a straightforward build and coding introduction to a positional servo. The coding challenge asks students for a medium, fast and slow rotation variation.

Lesson 14-15: Art machine (M&H, 118) is an interesting use of a continuous servo. Strong connections are needed for the clothes pegs. The coding challenge is for circular rotation, back and forth rotation and then try to obtain a straight line

Lesson 16-17: Ask students to develop their own projects which incorporate either servos or neopixels. One group used a 1 metre neopixel strip and designed a scarf. Another group used a continuous servo to design a helicopter. Only about 4 students out of my class of 12 kept up with the pace I was expecting so the majority ran out of time and didn’t complete their own design. Longer lessons would have helped here but schools don’t always keep up with the organisational structure required.