Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

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Multiplayer rock paper scissors with radio communication based on shaking them?

https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams

Add on some motors and make a robot that hides from the light?

Make a robot that can follow a path, or that drives based on true compass directions.

Make a hide and seek with your microbit reporting hot/cold based on signal strength to other microbits? https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold

Display the temperature?

Send messages to people?

Add on any other sensors?

Connect to your phone and do something else (app driven robot maybe)

Firefly synchronisation https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/fireflies

There's loads on that page and really you've got sensors and can control other things, and do distributed communication. There's lots of things you can do with a low powered processor, and it's not locked down to a few options.

Edit - I've just found out you can play sounds with it too.

Edit 2 - I'm now actually quite excited about this. I'm going to go out and buy one now.

Based on my experience the compass is the only part of these I haven't liked. I haven't successfully managed to accurately calibrate one yet, which has really put a crimp on how that feature is used.

There's seems to be a known bug related to this, see https://github.com/lancaster-university/microbit-dal/issues/....

Really useful to know, thanks.

Sorry but for a modern kid, the sort of projects you are talking about sound like the sort of projects that an adult thinks kids would love, not what kids would actually love, which is screens, color, games, robotics and interaction.

It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.

> a modern kid

I think it's a mistake to assume modern kids need high powered things to be interesting. I've been at a maker faire where the kids were amazed at seeing an old broadcast camera hooked up to a TV. All it was doing was recording and playing things back, but they liked it. I'm sure lots of them even had phones which would do the same thing but with higher quality.

The local science museum always hads kids running about in the discovery section playing with things like pulleys and shouting into the long tube that creates a delay, or the glasses that turn things upside down.

Kids still play with lego which has absolutely no moving parts or complex interaction.

I'm sure if you start by telling kids it'll be boring they'll hate it. Otherwise kids seem to be able to have fun with anything as complex as a cardbox box upwards.

> games, robotics and interaction.

I mean, several of my examples are games, robots and involve interaction.

I can easily see how to use two of these to make a robot wars robot, one for the controller (steer with tilting and a button for "go" and a button for "fire") and one for the robot. Don't tell me kids wouldn't be interested in making fighting robots.

> It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.

I think it'd be a huge mistake to try and make something like the rPi. That already exists if you want to do stuff connected to a screen with a full OS and internet access.

I doubt it would have fitted into the budget for production either, given that these needed to be given to every year 7 in the country.

I think you're trying to make it boring, and have fun with that, I'm going to go and make a robot. Or maybe finally build the sensor to see how far my degu runs in a day on his wheel.

> It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.

Looking at what I see happening with the Raspberry Pi, I don't agree with that assertion. It's not been very important for making cooler projects with kids, it only made coding on it easier since it didn't come with a nice remote environment and you thus could use the Linux desktop on the Pi for coding. (It also opens up use cases like "media center", but those are not very relevant for education).

Kids find going to hardware like the microbit/Pi/Arduino interesting because it is breaking out of the usual screen(+keyboard in case of a PC) environment, and you can do

> games, robotics and interaction

that's not limited to the screen. And nothing stops you to combine both, have the microbit talk to a PC/phone.

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