The event:
I recently had the fantastic opportunity to volunteer at the Celebrating Women In Engineering And Computer Science event at King Edward VII School. On the 1st of July 2019, with a couple of my lovely colleagues at UoS, I spent an amazing day talking to young ladies about the kinds of jobs available to them in IT and Engineering.
What an inspiring day of Celebrating Women In Engineering And Computer Science. Our fearless leader Bella Abrams gave the opening speech. That’s her in the photo above. I got to meet with friendly girls from across six different Sheffield secondary schools. I spent most of the day in the library “speed networking”. This involved talking to students (and some teachers) about all of the wonderful opportunities available to girls interested in computing and/or engineering.
Well known global chip manufacturer ARM sponsored the day. Thanks to their generosity students (and some cheeky volunteers) walked away with a free goody bag. Better yet, the goody bag included a Micro:Bit starter bundle, to encourage later Engineering fun.
The Micro:Bit
The above video shows the result of my first play with the Micro:bit. It’s a wonderfully simple device to get started with.
- Firstly plug the provided cable into the device and your PC.
- You can program it online using the MakeCode Editor. This website lets you drag blocks around to make code,. As you get more confident you can swap to writing the code yourself. The MicroBit MakeCode website also has tons of the most straight forward tutorials I have ever seen. In other words it’s the best place to learn about how the Micro:bit works
- Finally, and most importantly, download the file and transfer it to the plugged in device.
For simple instructions for how to get started quickly visit https://microbit.org/guide/quick/#platform-selector
For simple instructions on how to make the blinking heart go here: https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/flashing-heart
