I truly do not want to rain on anyone’s chips, so to speak, but as a KS3 teacher of Computing/ICT, I have to say I am a little nervous about the BBC micro:bit (I am trying to learn to type its name that way, although it’s horribly fiddly).
Like Agent Mulder, I want to believe. Although I was hugely frustrated by the delays, I attended a training session back in January where it almost caused me physical pain to have to hand the device back. Enthusiastically, fully-frontal adverbially, I set about playing with the sample units when they arrived. I made noises with them, I tested my plant to see if it was happy with a micro:bit, I made a first lesson plan for Python with it and made a game or two. I was lucky enough to be able to get help from the author of the excellent standalone Mu Python editor to get it to work on our virtual desktops at school.
So I think it’s fair to say that I was engaged and supportive of the project. But then two things happened (or rather didn’t).
First: I let children loose on the devices. Admittedly these were Year 5 children, not year 7s, but they were the members of my lunchtime computer club. We did some Python coding using the official online editor, using the Chromebooks in the same small ICT room where we’d built musical instruments using MakeyMakeys over a period of weeks. And then something odd happened. One of the micro:bits got very hot and died. Another appeared to be running warm.
Throughout this the BBC have been amazingly helpful – they immediately sent me a replacement for the failed device. My initial batch may have been abused a bit – after all, I’d wired up speakers and pot plants to their GPIO pins (although isn’t that what they are there for?).
Then the replacement device, only ever used with a Chromebook and the official editor, never had anything connected to its GPIO pins, started getting INSANELY hot. I mean, like, really, really hot. It didn’t fail, though, and I sent it back to the BBC so they can analyse it. (I think it may be the power management chip that was overheating – the unlabelled IC on the right).
Again, the BBC have been amazingly helpful. To try to isolate environmental factors, they sent me 5 more micro:bits and a device to measure current draw. I spent 45 minutes testing each one of the 5 new devices in the same environment, and… they all behaved perfectly. All cool. All drawing very little current.
Why does this worry me? Because the only thing absent from my test of the 5 devices was: children. Now my computer club are exceptionally well-behaved children, and it’s a small group – 6 of them – so I can’t imagine any of them wilfully abusing the devices, and if they had I would have noticed. I’ve used MakeyMakeys lots in the same room, same laptops, same children with no problems at all. So this leaves 2 possibilities: I have been extraordinarily unlucky – a 75% failure rate of my first 4 micro:bits (though that failure rate is now down to 33.3% I suppose). Apparently no-one else has had this experience, the chance of this is billions to 1 and I should buy a lottery ticket. OR real, live, curious children, prodding and poking, are capable of frying micro:bits without even trying. I guess we will only know for sure when whole class sets get handed to thousands of Year 7s across the country.
So I’m still nervous about handing them out. Are teachers and schools indemnified in case a device overheats in a child’s home? Are we but the conduit for the BBC, and can I have that in writing please?
The other reason I am not sharing the micro:bit hoopla just now is that we STILL didn’t get our class sets before we broke up for Easter. I would love to hit the ground running with the beasties after the holiday, but I can’t pencil in lessons until a) I have the devices in school and b) I have given my Y5 computer club a set to test, hopefully not to destruction. So Year 7 will be doing more Excel spreadsheets next term – not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I will try and make it as fun as I can by getting them to analyse some real temperature data gathered from a Raspberry Pi in the classroom. But really – having been waiting since September 2015 for this, having had my fingers burnt (almost literally) – I am just finding it hard to get in the micro:bit party mood.