How the BBC micro:bit will kick-start a coding revolution

How the BBC microbit will kickstart a coding revolution
David Vintiner


It's 9.30 on a cloudy morning in June, and in an IT classroom overlooking the playground at Winterton Community Academy in Scunthorpe, a group of Year 7s is learning how to code.

Twenty-four excitable students sit around the school's RM One PCs playing Flash games online before the teacher, Mark Sidell, sets them to work in Blockly, a visual programming language. The kids begin piecing together bricks of code like Lego ("if x, do y"; "repeat") and testing it using an on-screen simulator.

Since changes to the curriculum in September 2014 - when coding and computer science were brought in to replace the failing ICT curriculum -- this has been a common sight in UK classrooms. This morning, however, is no ordinary class. Winterton has been selected as part of a pilot for a BBC project launching this month that has the potential to transform computing education. On every screen is the image of a computer, the front of which has two buttons and a grid of LEDs. Catherine, 12, is using it to write her name in lights. She drags a brick across her screen and a letter "C" starts flashing on the display. One girl has a pulsing heart flashing.

Nearby, a group of children plays with the device: a 4cm by 5cm single-board computer, which looks like a slightly smaller, black Raspberry Pi. When a button's pressed, text scrolls across the screen: "hello i am microbit". Developed by the BBC in partnership with companies including ARM, Microsoft and Samsung, the device is designed to introduce kids used to sealed-off smartphones and consoles to the basics of computer science.

Winterton possesses some of the first micro:bits in existence. But in September, the device will be given, free, to every student starting secondary school in the UK - that's around a million computers. The aim? To inspire a new generation to experience technology in a way that Britain hasn't known since the 80s.

Coding in the 80s

On January 11, 1982, a new TV series called The Computer Programme aired on BBC Two. The first episode -- an introduction to the new idea of "microcomputers", sandwiched in a mid-afternoon slot between a documentary on Kayapo Indians and a Humphrey Bogart film -- marked a significant moment for British computing: the screen debut of the BBC Micro. Built by Cambridge-based Acorn Computing, the machine was to be the centrepiece of the corporation's Computer Literacy Project. "The BBC, in its wisdom, decided to educate the people about the coming computer revolution," recalls Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Acorn. "And they concluded at the time that the only way they could educate the nation was by providing a computer they could actually try things on."

The Computer Literacy Project was a nationwide initiative, backed by the Department of Education and Science. "The model was the Adult Literacy Campaign, which had happened in the early 70s," says David Allen, the producer of The Computer Programme, who was instrumental in developing the Micro. "Everyone was talking about the microprocessor revolution. There was a huge threat to employment predicted."

A beige, 8-bit machine with an impressive 4MHz processor, colour graphics and seven connectivity ports, the Micro came with its own BBC BASIC operating system, designed to be easy for beginners to use. "It was very expensive," says David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments and co-creator of the bestselling BBC game Elite. (The lower-spec Model A Micro sold for £299, compared to £125 for the rival Sinclair ZX Spectrum.) "But it was an incredibly capable machine." The Micro sold more than 1.5m units, and The Computer Programme was soon followed by instructional shows, Making The Most Of The Micro and the popular Micro Live, in which presenters demonstrated how to program the Micro and use it for everyday tasks.

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With government support, an estimated 60 per cent of UK primary schools and 85 per cent of secondary schools adopted the Micro. A generation of children took IT lessons using BBC BASIC. "It was very easy to program," Braben says. "You could be programming within a second of turning it on. It went 'beep beep' and it was working, and you could type '10 PRINT DAVID, 20 GO TO 10' and you had your first program written in five seconds. Even if you made a mistake and it all went wrong, you pressed the Break key and it would go back to the start. It was very good for learning."

The Micro and the Computer Literacy Project had a transformative impact on Britain's IT skill base. Acorn would give rise to the semiconductor giant ARM, whose processors are in most tablets and smartphones. Many entrepreneurs, including Autonomy founder Mike Lynch and the Raspberry Pi team, have cited the Micro as pivotal to their success. "My whole career was down to the BBC Micro," Lynch says. "It was my only access to a programmable computer and training at a fundamental level."

But the advent of Windows PCs in the 90s changed computing education in schools. Kids who once had to learn the fundamentals of computer science -- how a computer works, not just how to work it -- began to be trained only to use Office software. "The big change which happened, I believe around 1999, was that computer science was replaced with ICT [information communications technology] -- which wasn't a specialist subject. The teachers didn't need training, so ICT was being taught by PE teachers and DT [design and technology] teachers," Braben says. "The curriculum changed from teaching kids how to program in BASIC to using Word. They lost the ability to program," Hauser says. "I remember computer departments complaining to me that nobody knew how to program any more." "Computer science as a subject just slid into disrepair," says Simon Peyton Jones, chair of the education group Computing At School. "Because everybody used computers, head teachers would think: 'ICT, it's just about spreadsheets and word processing.' It became a low-status, deskilled subject."

Those changes had a huge impact on the UK's computing education: in the decade after 2001, the number of students taking computing- and ICT-based GCSEs and A levels fell significantly. In August 2011, Google's Eric Schmidt gave a MacTaggart Lecture criticising the state of British computing education, accusing the UK of "throwing away" its computing heritage. Meanwhile, a group of professors at the University of Cambridge, noticing a decline in both the number and quality of applicants for computer-science degrees, decided to do something. They set out to develop a cheap, credit-card-sized computer called the Raspberry Pi, which they hoped would become the BBC Micro for a new generation. They even approached the BBC to suggest calling it the BBC Nano. "We talked to a lot of people at the BBC," says Eben Upton, a co-founder and now CEO of Raspberry Pi. "The guidance we got was: this is very hard. It's hard for an organisation like the BBC now to do what it did in the 80s and endorse a third-party platform."

The BBC's trepidation was unsurprising: in 2007, the organisation had been forced to close BBC Jam, a free digital-education portal, after rivals complained to the European Commission. The fiasco cost up to £150 million. "It was unfortunate, but I believe understandable, that it wasn't going to fly," says Upton.

The Raspberry Pi was an extra-ordinary hit, reaching five million sales in February 2015. But its impact in education has been more limited - mostly because of a lack of budget in schools and limited coding knowledge among parents and teachers.

The wider issue in education has refused to go away. In January 2012, the Royal Society released a report called Shut Down Or Restart? The way forward for computing in schools, which suggested scrapping the IT curriculum in favour of programming and computer science. A January 2011 report from Nesta into video-game development and the visual-effects industry found that poor IT education was adversely affecting digital creative industries. Then in May 2012, Nesta and the Science Museum jointly released The Legacy Of The BBC Micro, a report that called for a new Computer Literacy Project like that of the 80s.

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Reviving the BBC Micro

At around the same time, Howard Baker began thinking again about a successor to the Micro. Baker, an affable 59-year-old with the shoulder-length hair of an ageing rock star, is editor, Innovations at BBC Learning, which works out how to incorporate emerging technology into the BBC's education programming. "When those reports came out about the lack of skills in the UK, it was like a huge bell ringing. So we started thinking about what the BBC could do," says Baker, sitting in a conference room in Dock House, part of the BBC's Media City campus in Salford Quays. "When the people from Raspberry Pi came to see us, I remember thinking, 'I'd die to be able to do this'," he says. When he started to focus on the problem of how to get children re-engaged in coding. "I was cycling home and I thought: what's the cheapest thing we could put in their hands that they'd actually use? We were doing lots of work with Blue Peter, and they said any make on Blue Peter has to be under £2. So I thought, 'What can we give kids for £2?' "We'd looked back at the BBC Micro and knew you can't repeat that process. Kids are different, technology is different, the system is different. So we thought, 'OK, what's the next revolution?' Wearables, the internet of things, ubiquitous computing."

Baker and his team envisioned a small microprocessor board that children could program and so learn the fundamentals of coding. "We started to build up this picture. There'd be a little LED screen they could program, some buttons on it, maybe some input/output." Working with computer scientists at Manchester University, Baker's team built a prototype of something they called the Code Bug: a green, insect-shaped board with a USB connection and a 5 x 5 grid of LEDs which could be programmed to display simple messages. They tested it at some CBBC events around the UK. "The kids had huge smiles on their faces. We thought: actually, this looks like it could really work."

"Putting something physical in their hands was immediately very powerful," says Sinéad Rocks, head of BBC Learning and Education. "It gave a real learning experience. We had kids queuing up to have a go." The plan was to build a a few thousand Code Bugs to use at CBBC events around the country.

Then, in April 2013, Tony Hall took over as BBC director general. As part of a wide-ranging programme of changes, he announced plans to "bring coding into every home, business and school in the UK" by 2015. An accompanying video for the Make It Digital campaign harked back to the legacy of the BBC Micro, and included guest appearances by talent such as Brian Cox.

Baker and the Learning and Education team decided to show off the Code Bug to colleagues. "I remember being at this meeting, and they said, 'Well, what do you want to do with this?' I said, 'We're thinking we want it at events, maybe make 10,000,'" says Baker. "They said: 'What if we did a million?'" "I think the first conversation was: let's give it to every child in the UK," Rocks says. "We often start from a massive ambition that would make your head spin, then we roll it back to something more practical. We started talking about who would this have the most impact with."

Putting out a million devices wouldn't be easy. In the 80s, critics -- most memorably Clive Sinclair -- complained about the BBC getting into bed with Acorn, a commercial company. Not to mention the political risk of the BBC spending millions in licence fees on hardware. "We knew this couldn't be delivered by the BBC alone. We needed partners on board - and, to put it bluntly, the partners would be paying for it," Baker says.

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In December 2014, the BBC sent out an open call for companies to partner in manufacturing, financing and distributing a BBC-branded device. A meeting was arranged at Broadcasting House in London, bringing together representatives from leading tech companies and education startups. "It was one of those classic W1A meetings: a tiny stuffy room, people basically sitting on each other's laps. But it was completely surreal, because there was so much creativity in the room. Everyone was there," says Clare Riley, group manager at Microsoft's Education Relations team, who was present. Remarkably, 25 companies signed up. ARM provides the processor. Microsoft has built the online coding platform. Samsung has designed an app. And 16 education partners, including Code Club and the Open University, are distributing and providing materials for the device. The September launch will be supported by a range of BBC output.

Not everyone's happy with the scale of the project: the University of Manchester team, who'd been instrumental early in the project, is no longer involved. In April, three of them funded a device -- the CodeBug -- on Kickstarter. Backers noted similarities with micro:bit. "It's complicated, and the BBC has a big legal department," says CodeBug co-founder Andrew Robinson. "I want to be sympathetic, because we want the same thing."

Meanwhile, Baker's team rushed to build enough micro:bits for a pilot project in 13 selected schools that would take place during January 2015. The prototype, built by Michael Sparks of the BBC's R&D team, was an unpolished blue single-board computer with an LED display, USB connector, two simple face buttons and an array of inputs and outputs for peripherals. His team also developed a browser-based environment to let kids code in Blockly and Python, and then test the results using an on-screen simulator. "We had a week to send out 500 devices," Baker says. "We took over the kitchen in BBC Learning. We sent an email: 'Please, anyone who can, come and help.'" Sparks remembers: "There was this delightful moment when a colleague sent an email saying: 'We've shipped to the schools. I said, 'You do realise that this is the first microcomputer the BBC's shipped in 20 years?'"

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Designing for widespread appeal

On March 12, 2015, Tony Hall officially announced the micro:bit at the Make It Digital launch in London. But this left only six months until the start of the school year to test, manufacture and ship a million devices, to train teachers to use them and distribute them to every secondary school in the UK.

The device also had to be completely redesigned, with a new ARM Cortex M0 processor and new features such as an accelerometer, magnetometer and Bluetooth low-energy connectivity. "There was a huge feature explosion. Every partner wanted their feature to be advertised on the front of the board," says Mike Vanis, lead kit designer at Technology Will Save Us. The design startup, which makes popular coding kits for children, has designed the final version of the micro:bit that will be delivered to schools. It's June when WIRED visits, and the company's Shoreditch headquarters in London is littered with design iterations and notes.

The blue prototype board suffered the same problem as the Raspberry Pi: it would appeal to a small number of knowledgable, skilled children, but might intimidate the majority. "When you look at the Raspberry Pi, it's just hardware," says Bethany Koby, co-founder of Technology Will Save Us. "We wanted to design something that was fun, cool and interesting, so when they open it the kid goes: 'Wow! what's that?' And immediately they want to interact with it and make it theirs."

The computer-education market is crowded with hardware -- the Pi, Arduino, kits such as Kano -- but Koby believes the micro:bit is unique. "There's nothing designed for this age group," Koby says. "The Raspberry Pi is not for them. Arduino is definitely not for them. That's why this is such an interesting platform."

The micro:bit has an attractive, rectangular design: the front shows the LED matrix, two buttons and a combined croc-clip/edge connector, which can connect to a wide range of other devices, including Raspberry Pi and Arduinos. On the back is a micro USB port, the ARM processor and a reset button. "The front is your project place. On the back you've got all the tech stuff: you've got an explanation of where everything is, you've got the chip and the capacitors," Vanis says.

Children can program the micro:bit using Blockly, TouchDevelop or Python before loading their own projects over USB or using a smartphone app. The display can be used to show messages or animations or play simple games. Using the accelerometer and magnetometer, they might build a simple pedometer or fitness tracker. It can also be used while tethered to a computer to control desktop programs; Sparks demonstrates a version of Flappy Bird using the micro:bit as a controller. "It's not like the Pi. The Pi is a full computing platform," says Gary Atkinson, director of emerging technologies at ARM. "The micro:bit is an edge device. It's a sensor. It can't run Linux, it can't run Windows. You program it to do a handful of quite fancy things. The children might stitch it to their clothes and make a wearable, they might 3D print a housing for it." "There's a lot of expansion capabilities," says Tom Ball, a Microsoft researcher who helped to develop the micro:bit's coding platform. "I think we'll see kids starting with simple programs, then they could do some experiments, collect data and hook it up to other devices."

Development of the micro:bit

The micro:bit's development has not been without its problems. Because of the extensive design changes, the team missed its target of mid-June to unveil the finalised design to the press and schools. Such delays are typical of hardware launches, but the postponement does call into question the decision to announce the project only six months in advance.

There are also lingering questions about whether the micro:bit will be given time to prove itself: the BBC is currently committed to only one year of the project. (As WIRED went to press, the corporation and its commercial partners announced plans to launch a non-profit company to oversee the micro:bit legacy and to make the hardware open-source, allowing other companies to manufacture and distribute devices.)

Then there are the corporation's political enemies, who may see the micro:bit as a well-timed goodwill exercise with the licence fee up for review in 2016. On this, the director general is bullish. "The time to make an impact and inspire people is now," Tony Hall tells WIRED. "It feels like we're at a tipping point, and the BBC can help put the spotlight on digital creativity like never before. "I believe that only the BBC is able to bring together the wide range of organisations capable of doing this. If anyone had any doubts about our ability to do a project on this scale, they shouldn't have them now."

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The micro:bit is, at the very least, late to the party: in September 2014, following the recommendations of the Shut Down Or Restart? report, the Department for Education instituted a computing curriculum that requires children to learn coding from primary-school age.

But, according to the teachers WIRED spoke to, the intervention is still sorely needed. "The BBC is in a very special position, in that it reaches such a huge percentage of the population through all its channels," says Clare Sutcliffe, co-founder and CEO of Code Club, who will be creating after-school activities centred around the micro:bit. "They're in the position to make it part of the natural conversation of the country, so that it becomes as normal to talk about computer science as talking about catching the bus. So for them to do this, well, it's really quite amazing." "What the BBC can do is it can reach into people's living rooms," says Peyton Jones. "What the BBC Micro did was to get personal computing off the hobbyist's workbench and on to the kitchen table. That's something only the BBC could do."

Whether or not the micro:bit is successful won't be measurable for a while; that's the trouble with trying to inspire a generation. "We can measure the data of people using it," says Jessica Cecil, controller of the Make It Digital project. "My vision is someone sitting as my successor in 30 years' time, pointing to people who have careers in digital creativity as a result of what we're doing now, just as happened with the BBC Micro." "It would be great if it became a playground craze," says Baker. "But, yeah, what I want is when you talk to a CEO of a big company in 20 years and they go: 'It started when my micro:bit was given to me in year seven.' "So," he smiles. "I've got a long time to wait."

Oliver Franklin-Wallis is assistant editor at WIRED*. He interviewed Simon Pegg in 08.15*