1 Microsoft Touch Develop and the BBC micro:bit Thomas Ball*, Jonathan Protzenko*, Judith Bishop*, Michał Moskal*, Jonathan de Halleux*, Michael Braun*, Steve Hodges§, Clare Riley° *Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA, USA §Microsoft Research Station Road Cambridge, UK °Microsoft Education Relations London, UK tball, protz, jbishop, micmo, jhalleux, v-braum, shodges, clarer @microsoft.com ABSTRACT The chance to influence the lives of a million children does not come often. Through a partnership between the BBC and several technology companies, a small instructional computing device called the BBC micro:bit will be given to a million children in the UK in 2016. Moreover, using the micro:bit will be part of the CS curriculum. We describe how Microsoft's Touch Develop programming platform works with the BBC micro:bit. We describe the design and architecture of the micro:bit and the software engineering hurdles that had to be overcome to ensure it was as accessible as possible to children and teachers. The combined hardware/software platform is evaluated and early anecdotal evidence is presented. A video about the micro:bit is available at http://aka.ms/bbcmicrobit. CCS Concepts • Hardware • Sensor devices and platforms • Applied computing • E-learning • Software and its engineering • Compilers Keywords K-12 education; BBC micro:bit; Touch Develop; devices; cloud. 1. INTRODUCTION Computer scientists are continually looking at new ways to engage and retain the interest of young students in the K-12 years. Recently there have been several waves of new initiatives to engage children aged 8-13 (middle school) in computer science, for example: coding [6], computational thinking [10], games [11], robots [12] and storytelling [2] All of these are successful when led by dedicated and qualified teachers. The challenge is scaling out an initiative to influence an entire country of students, or even globally. Two significant success at the coding level have been: 1. code.org which initially took up the challenge of getting the K-12 students to code using a variety of online tools, and subsequently has started training teachers in the USA [7]. 1 http://aka.ms/bbcmicrobit 2. CAS (Computing at School) in the UK is an established community of mainly teachers who create curriculum for formal computer science courses nationally [3]. The Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer system provided evidence that students and children are enticed by activities where they can see, touch and change “the computer”, in addition to seeing code on a screen [4]. In addition to .NET Gadgeteer, the growth of interest in Arduino, Raspberry Pi and other small computers has been considerable in the developer world. However, rolling these out in schools presents the two challenges of cost and training. Gadgets, internet of things, and the maker culture are all attractive goals, but they need to be at a cost that schools can meet with a low barrier for entry in terms of skills required by teachers. If a device can be made inexpensive and robust enough to be distributed to millions of children, and if the accompanying software is engaging and intuitive, then there is a chance of making a leap in capturing the minds of an entire generation. At the same time, any such initiative for large scale roll out should acknowledge that children learn and grow up very fast, so that a progression of tools within the same basic platform is highly desirable. Taking up this challenge in the UK, a multi-partner initiative led by the BBC is providing a million small programmable devices – BBC micro:bits – to UK middle schoolers in 2016. We describe the device, the Microsoft-developed programming environment, some of our design considerations, and early evaluation results. There is also an accompanying video 1 . 2. THE BBC micro:bit The BBC micro:bit 2 is a pocket-sized, codeable computing device, designed to allow children to get engaged and creative with technology. The BBC announced the micro:bit on July 7, 2015, teacher training started in August 2015, and devices were made available to schools from February 2016. 2 https://www.microbit.co.uk Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. ICSE '16 Companion, May 14-22, 2016, Austin, TX, USA © 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4205-6/16/05…$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2889160.2889179 Figure 1 The front and rear of the BBC micro:bit device.