Microbit Adventurers
A new class of young Microbit adventurers kicked off today with some great little animations using the block editor.
Meeting Microbit
I was fortunate enough to talk with the people at Microbit whilst attending the Bett Show this weekend. They were really surprised at some of the projects that have come out of First Coding’s advanced courses, so well done to all! I came away with stickers for everyone.
This year I really want to push the Microbit to its limit to see what creative projects we can make.
Water Quality Monitoring
In today’s sessions we were looking at how we could use the Microbit to measure water quality. One idea was to use the light sensor, shining a light through the water to then have its intensity measured. Another great idea was to measure the conductivity of the water, as impurities would influence the readings. Here we’re just getting some base readings from ordinary tap water.
The Motor Control Kit
The school talks I recently gave on electronic toy hacking highlighted a problem that motor control for the Raspberry Pi and Microbit could be made a great deal simpler (and cheaper) when you see what’s already out there. It only took two prototypes of my pack before I was happy. Each pack contains example code, components and creativity.
I have made the component list, assembly instructions and sample Scratch block code available to download here: Motor control instructions for the Raspberry Pi and Microbit
The Automatic Plant Waterer
A pupil, bored with being tasked with watering his grandma’s plants whilst she’s on holiday, used his Microbit lessons to build an automatic plant watering system. The water pump is activated during high sunlight levels as well as the temperature reaching a certain threshold. Such a great example of coding for the real world. Well done.
