Week Six was quite an interesting week in Tech class! Rowena Stewart and Renee Noble came in to teach us about programming and coding.
Firstly, we were introduced to BBC Micro:Bit.
MICROBIT: A mini computer, designed for programming in classroom.
We were introduced to two MicroBits: a V1 and a V2.
- A V1 is 25 watts, has lights, input pins and power pins. Using the lights, text and various shapes can be programmed into it. It doesn’t have a speaker but sound can be heard through headphones.
- A V2 has a speaker. It generates sounds all by itself and doesn’t require headphones. It includes a gold plated antenna for bluetooth, and can be put into sleep mode by press and holding the sleep button, unlike the V1 which doesn’t have this feature. The V2 also has capacitive touch (sensors which can recognise touch input like a touch screen), an accelerometer (to show which way its tilting) and compass (to know which way its facing).
- For both the V1 and the V2 you can use anything (e.g graphite) that generates electricity.
They also showed us a mini moo, which is a glove you can put on, and you can make play different sound samples depending on the way your tilting it. Rowena explained to us that someone made choreography for Shake It Off using the mini moo.
We then looked at a program called www.makecode.com/multi which uses block coding/javascript to build up a data sequence to program our own online microbit. It had very colourful, jigsaw puzzle type graphics to make coding a little easier for us to understand.
I struggled a lot with trying to comprehend all the coding terminology, and tried my best to recreate the coding sequence provided, however I didn’t get very far. For the rest of the seminar the class were free to finish coding, and for those who had finished moved onto another program called Kookaberry https://kookaberry.auststem.com.au/ which had slightly more complex coding. I continued working on the previous task for the rest of the lesson.
This was a very insightful lesson and I am hoping that one day I can strengthen my coding skills… you never know when you may need them! 😊
