Getting Started with the micro:bit

A The Story of the BBC micro:bit

So where did the micro:bit come from? Who thought of it, why, and why is it becoming so successful? And how do you go about giving away almost a million individual boards to children all across the United Kingdom?

To answer those questions, I corresponded with Howard Baker from the Micro:bit Education Foundation. He and Jo Claessens in their roles in BBC Learning worked together to design the first prototype, and Michael Sparks is the BBC R&D engineer who actually built it. (Howard has an interesting background: he’s been a chemist, a fashion designer, a science teacher, a journalist, and a researcher.) I also chatted with Gareth Stockdale from the BBC. I was curious as to the project’s inception, how it evolved, ...