[FRIAM] Micro:bit event March 8

[Edward Angel]

On March 8 4-6 PM, there will be a community micro:bit event at Meow Wolf, jointly sponsored by Meow Wolf, the Computer Science Alliance and the Santa Fe Alliance for Science. It will bring together students, teachers, parents, hackers and many others including I hopeFRIAM and Wedtech to demo, share  and, most importantly, generate interest in CS in the community.

A few weeks ago, Ken Prokuski and I brought our micor:bits to FRIAM where they were of interest to many of you. I learned about micro;bits from Paige Prescott, who many of you may know from her long involvement with Project GUTS and NM CS for All. She is now head of the New Mexico Computer Science Teachers Association and the new Computer Science Alliance. The event had its genesis in a conversation I had with Paige about using them to spark interest in CS within our community.

Micro:bits are little micro controllers that were developed in the UK by the BBC and made available to all school lids. You can get various kits from Amazon and other sites for as little as $20. They are amazing little devices. Each has a simple display, buttons for input, bluetooth for communicating with other micro”bits and even cell phones, an accelerometer, a temperature center and the ability to output sound and voltages to control other devices such as motors. Programming can be done via a web app using block JS, JS or Python. They are truly remarkable little devices. I was able to get my first program going within a few minutes.

We hope that many of you will get your own micro:bits and develop some fun apps to demo. Why not a complexity app or two? Or even a more philosophical app that Nick might develop.

More information to come as the event develops.

Ed
____________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)		 	angel at cs.unm.edu <mailto:angel at cs.unm.edu>
505-453-4944 (cell) 				http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel <http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel>
							 	



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20190113/57d4e549/attachment.html>