Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 91, and it's all about the brand new beta Python editor for the microbit. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: My name is Kelly Schuster Peretz, and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: And Kelly, I'm Super excited. This week we have Giles Booth here from the Microbit Foundation to talk to us about the brand new Python editor in beta for the microbit. Welcome, Charles. It's great to have you here. Giles Booth: Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Kelly. It's lovely to be here. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And you're coming all the way from London. Giles Booth: I am in London in the UK, where it is currently treated from pouring with rain. But that's unusual. It hasn't rained here for weeks, so it's quite nice to see really well. Sean Tibor: We'Re definitely getting more and more rain as we get into the summer here in sunny South Florida. So we'll see if we can trade you for a little bit of Sunshine and hopefully make your spring a little bit nicer. Giles Booth: Thank you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. The last person we had on our show from London was Static because it was sunny when we were on the call. So that was his win of the week. So sad to hear that. Sean Tibor: It's raining again, but a perfect day for podcasting. So we'll go indeed. So let's start with the same place we always do with the winds of the week. And we like to make our guests go first because it's kind of fun to watch them squirm. So, Giles, it's over to you. Giles Booth: Okay. Well, I did have something up my sleeve, so I've got a winner with this Python related. So we had a call with somebody who we might be doing some work with in the future. And completely we kind of got slightly at the wrong end of the stick about what they really were after. But it was interesting because it was a really fluid conversation. I came up with an idea for a project that I think could be amazing, even if it doesn't get used for the thing that we were talking about. Come up with using a little documented, a little known feature of the microbit. Do something really cool with group activities. I'm not going to say any more than that at the moment, but watch this space. You may see an exciting new project on the Microbit website soon. Excellent. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Hopefully it's with Bluetooth. Sean's got a couple of little sleeves up, and we did a really great network activity with Microbit. Giles Booth: Well, yeah, it's not Booth per se, but it is using the radio feature of the microbit. So, yes, you're very warm. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, we are excited to see that because we like that feature a lot. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Anything group activity with the microbit is where the fun really starts to happen. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, I'm Super excited about this. So I've been looking on the Alpha and then the beta microbit, but I'm not going to steal Sean Thunder. I'm going to let him do his win of the week before we get just excited to talk about the platform. Sorry, my mind is white now. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I think the wind that we have to share is surviving and thriving. During the late part of April and early part of May, Kelly and I gave, I believe, five different talks in seven days across two different conferences, six days in two different time zones. So we went through a whole set of talks, including a keynote for an innovation Institute at our school where we spoke about what it takes to take your teaching from good to great. I'm not sure why they asked us, but we went with it anyways and we got quite a bit done with that and very well received. Lots of good feedback and good questions from it. We did some hands on work with LEDs and knitting with LEDs and making them light up and connecting them to some circuit Python boards, which was a lot of fun. And then we moved and shifted all the way to Python. US in Salt Lake City at the end of the week where we hosted the Education Summit, spoke at the Education Summit, and then gave a main track talk on learning Python like a twelve year old. So I think by the end of it, I don't know about Kelly, but I went home and I slept. I was so wiped out from that week. But we met so many amazing people at Python. We did an entire episode about it that people can go check out. But that was definitely the win. Not just of the week, but I think of the last few months. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's funny cause I got really energized. So I was like, it's done. It's off our plate sometimes. Think that was great fun. It was a whirlwind. But I don't know that added stress always seems to motivate you. And it's amazing how much stuff you can get done when you have a lot on your plate. So keep them busy and keep doing the things. Sean Tibor: Now I just feel lazy and unproductive because I only did a few things in the weekends. Right. Giles Booth: Bar quite high there, haven't you, for a productive week. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Productive week. Well, let me think. My wins right now have to be what I'm doing with my 6th and 7th graders. They're both using hardware. Actually, everything I'm doing with the end of the quarter has been kind of fun, but I'm using hardware with six and 7th graders and I decided to go ungraded the last three weeks and we've been doing still extrinsic. We're doing sticker challenges is what I'm calling it. And the top first group that wins the challenge gets a sticker because I got a lot of stickers from Python and a lot of stuff that really cool stickers. I don't remember who the Sharks are from, but we got some baby Sharks which are hit it's just going really well today with the circuit playground. I said to them, I'm like, okay, I'm making this up. Take the shake feature and light up one Pixel at a time. Make sure you do it with the Schuster so that every Pixel lights up every time you shake it. I'm sure it's out there somewhere with a counter of some sort. But I was like, just making them up at the spur of the moment, trying to use all the features of the circuit playground. And the kids really take to it. And we talk about problem solving and what are the things you need to know? And we go through when you label K, you need to know how to use the accelerometer. You need to know how to use a counter. If you're using a counter, you need to know how to go into the loop. And then we talk about errors and what's going to happen when the counter gets to a certain number. And if there's the counter gets to ten, it's going to have an error because you only have ten pixels. So the last counted number is a nine. And it's just a great process of teaching them how to think through these challenges. And I give out those hints sporadically throughout the 60 minutes, and they all get it. And then they all teach everybody. And it's just a lot of fun. So it's been nice not having to grade 180 assignments every day, but they've been learning a lot. Sean Tibor: And you've been working with the 6th graders with the microbit at the same time. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 6Th graders are doing the microbit as well. And their challenge today was the easy one, and it was light up an Led with some alligator clips. Alter the time and alter the code where it's just like blink on, blink off. Now you're going to add in a button and a feature that didn't quite take 60 minutes. It took them about 15, so I think I taught them too well. Usually I do that one first and it confuses them. So we've been having fun with that. Good fun. Sean Tibor: Nice. Any fails this week, Kelly? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, I was always fails with my 8th graders. So 8th graders, we were doing a couple of read, write open with activities. I thought it would be really cool and show them how to make a document on their computer. And I was trying to find things that engage them because they're really hard to keep engaged right now because they're on the high school track, ready to get out of middle school. And they're like, Yay, it makes a text. What am I going to do with that? A text file? And I'm like, really? That's all I get. There's a text file on your computer. And they're like, and I use Google Drive. And I'm like, well, you do Google Drive, too. They're like, why didn't you do that? And I'm like, Because it takes more. Takes more authentication and stuff. And I didn't know if it was going to work with you guys or we're going to get blocked. And I'm just like, okay, back to we'll do Matt plotlib. Now we're graphene which is a hit or miss with some kids. But, you know, we did some plank challenges and trying to get some fun data. Sean Tibor: So we'll see Jasmine fails from your side. Giles Booth: Yeah. Relating to what I said before, this secret hidden undocumented feature of the microbit exists in a make code block, and then it turns out it hasn't actually been exposed in the micropytheon API for the microbit. So I was puzzled by that. I was like, what am I going to do? This is a really cool feature. And I just posted a thing in our foundation chat. And of course, my tech colleagues love a challenge like that, especially when it's not directly related to what they're supposed to be working on. So within about five minutes, one of my colleagues had coded a beautifully elegant solution in Python that I just deployed as a function in my code. So I've got that added functionality, that block feature that is in Metro but isn't in MicroPython. Now it is. So that was lovely. That was a good idea. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I can't wait to release that. So intrigued secret? Sean Tibor: Well, my fail this week was a gardening fail. We have a sidewalk in front of our house, and there was an issue with it where there was a gap that was people stumbled over. And so the town came by to fix it and repair it. And they did a beautiful job, like cutting out the affected section of sidewalk and creating this graduated ramp so that it's now a smooth transition from one level to the other. And as they did that, they broke the sprinkler head that waters my avocado tree next to it. So I went out there to give my avocado tree a little bit of extra fertilizer because it's struggling with some of the heat and not getting enough water. So I'm giving it some extra fertilizer to give it a boost and give it some water. And I go turn on the sprinkler to make sure it's watering in. And all I get is this giant puddle rising out of the ground with water going everywhere. So I had to go to the hardware store and get the right connector and fit it all in and everything. And it's back to normal now. But definitely explained why the avocado tree was not getting enough water. And now that's fixed. But it was a bit of a fail. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You always have to try to Trump me with some sort of hardware thing, don't you? Sean Tibor: It's just plumbing. Nothing electronic about it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, let's get on to the topic, because I'm really excited to hear all about the process and share this great work that you guys have been doing. You all been doing over there. Sean Tibor: Yeah. So I think why don't we start just a little bit with what is the microbit first for anybody who may not have it? And then if you could share a little bit about the Python microbit editor and why this is a cool new thing that people should be checking out. Sure. Giles Booth: Absolutely. So for those of you who might not be aware of it, the microbit or the BBC microbit to give it its full title. It's a tiny computer. It came about in around 2015 as a design. Kelly, from the ground up as a tool for teaching coding in schools, initially aimed at students age around eleven to 14. That kind of age group and the BBC, in partnership with lots of other organizations, created this device. And in the UK, 1 million of these devices were given out to pretty much every student in England. We call it year seven. So I think that equates to grade six in the US. So pretty much every student in grade six in the UK got one of these devices in their school. So it had a massive impact. And since then, it has gone worldwide. So the BBC spun off the microbit. We are the Microbit Educational Foundation. So we're a small but global nonprofit, and we work with founding partners like the BBC and Microsoft and Arm and Lancaster University here in the UK who are doing a lot of the technical work. That the stuff under the hood that kind of makes the microbit tick underneath that. They write a lot of that code for us. And we have taken it worldwide. So there are now something like, we think 6 million microbit all around the world, helping millions and millions of young people learn about coding, both through Microsoft MakeCode blocks, but also through Python as well, all around the world. Yeah. Sean Tibor: I think about 200,000 of those microbit are floating around our classroom, either under tables or in boxes and bins or in student backpacks. Kelly, when did we first start using the microbit? I think it was probably what, around 2018, right. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: When you came in because you did the I think it was one year before that you came in, we restarted and we ordered them. And then Sean did his first demo lesson using microbit. We love it. I mean, it's been a core part of our curriculum for the past four years. Giles Booth: Well, that's great to hear. It's differentiated. People often say, well, for example, they compare it with a Raspberry Pi, and it's not the same as a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is a computer. It's a fully fledged computer. And you can use your Raspberry Pi or your other computer to program the microbit. The microbit, although we call it a computer, we don't call it a microcontroller because it's got features that you would get on a computer. It's got inputs and outputs. They're very simple. Like, it has buttons, it has a 25 Led display on it. It's got sensors built in. It has an accelerometer. It can measure temperature. The new microbit that we brought out in 2020 has got a built in speaker and a microphone as well, so it can measure sound levels. It's got a magnetometer, a Compass. It can do all that kind of stuff. So it's a complete package in itself. It can do an awful lot on its own without having to add other peripherals to it. That's why we call it a computer, rather than, say, a microcontroller or a development board. It can do a lot on its own, but it's the physicality of the device that is the key. It's for teaching computing through physical computing. And the idea that you can create something. Students can create something really quickly, a project, whether it's a step counter or a Compass or something simple, that they can create the code, they can flash their code onto the microbit. But then the magic happens when they unplug it from the computer, plug a battery pack in, and you've created that selfcontained digital kind of artifact that you've coded, you've created it, and it has a life of its own beyond the computer. And the idea is that everything is simple. Sometimes people say, Why does it have such a crummy display? Why is it only 25 pixels? Why is it not color? It's because everything is designed to be as simple as possible. It's the simplest abstraction, and you can do so much learning. There's so much to unpack about. Say, well, the topic of abstraction itself is like, we want to show emotions on our microbit. So what's the simplest form of a happy face or a sad face or excitement? So it's brilliant for breaking everything down to the really simple levels about understanding how input devices work, whether it's just a button or a sensor, and then learning about how code and the hardware work together. If you flip the microbit over and look at the back all it's an exposed circuit board. And we have labeled the key components. So that's a learning point in itself. You can just get your students to flip the microbit over and look at the labels and look at what all the different parts do and think about what role does the processor take? That's where your code is. Your instructions are being carried out on the other parts of the board and looking at those functions and understand about how computer hardware and complete system works both in hardware and software. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's really amazing the variety of projects that students have been able to pull off with such a simple board. And especially when we start talking about accessories, there's a whole range of accessories that take it even further. But to your point, I think there's something really empowering about a simple design that breeds creativity. For whatever reason. I've always thought that constraints breed creativity. But the microbit is one of those prime examples of that. We've seen everything from the step counters and things that you talked about to we've had students make I think my first year, I had a group of students who made a treasure Hunt for me using the magnetometer feature on it, where I had to track across campus with all these clues that they had written to surround it. And the closer I got to the other microbit, the more that they would be together. So it became like a game of hot and cold. It was brilliant. And it was because they found all these little features and characteristics that they could use to make it all work together. Giles Booth: Well, exactly. And it's always the students, as I'm sure you've experienced as well, the students who come up with the best ideas. So having that, giving them the tools like a toolkit of stuff and then finding out what they can do with it and being creative. And that's part of our mission as an organization to unleash young people's digital creativity, but expand their kind of Horizons and give them what we call a better digital future, that they understand how this technology works. And because the market is simple enough, they can sort of key in and understand how some features work things on their phones, like the fact that when you turn your phone, the image on your phone rotates when you move it. But how does that work? We've got a project in one of our new professional development courses that we just launched where we look at that, we unpack that, and we get students to actually make their microbit keep a smiley face the right way up every time you rotate it. But very simple, but it is relevant. The technology that you find around you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, that's a good challenge. I think I should add that one. I like that because we did the face up, face down, and we were playing that was one of the challenges, and I purposely made them do the face down. So I'm like, you have to make sure the image and they're crawling underneath it trying to look that's good. I found a Tetris game and a snake game one time, and I always hide that from them. But at the end of the unit, I always give them the code because they're like, can I have a battery pack? I'm like, please don't get that taken away during class because I'm trying to play Tetris on a five by five grid. It's fabulous. Sean Tibor: So I think what we should probably do is talk a little bit about the programming languages that go into this, because the hardware itself is incredibly well designed and elegant and pretty durable. I mean, I think we put our microbit through a torture Chamber every year with all the students to get their hands on them. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: There's a lot of buttons. Unknown: Yeah. Sean Tibor: But it's interesting. When I first started teaching with the microbit to 6th graders, those year seven students. I started with make code, and I thought, oh, this will be the easiest way for them to get started with it. And it's interesting because you can use a variety of different programming languages with the microbit, and it's relatively easy to switch between them. But I thought what was really interesting and kind of differentiating about the microbit, especially when it comes to Python, is that it has a really nice implementation of the micro Python interpreter on it that runs on the board and a variety of libraries that you can use. But it's entirely self contained so that you can start with micro Python. You can import things. The API documentation is really well made. And so we've traditionally used the Mew editor to do most of our coding. And one of the things that you've been working very hard on, Joe's, lately has been this new web based Python microbit editor that incorporates a lot of the features and even further reduces that start up time to get going with the microbit in Python. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be? Giles Booth: Sure. So we've had a web based editor for the microbit for some time. So if you just go to Python microbit.org, you'll see a regular web based Python editor which works in a similar way to Mu. It's using the same micro Python language to program the microbit. What we decided to do was to take a slightly different approach in developing our new editor. We want to increase the appeal of text based coding, and we want to reach students who perhaps might find it difficult or unappealing or not be engaged with it and find it sort of too hard or too techy. So we made some very significant design choices. If you look at our new code editor, it's not a black screen, it's white. It has very bright colors. It's using purples and bright colors just to make it appealing. This is not like a gender based thing. It's just a general thing. It's just a general observation from my own teaching. I dislike sort of gender based stereotypes about people because anyone comes up with a genderbased stereotype, I think, well, that can apply to all kinds of people, but it's just a general point to make it more appealing. The other big difference that we have in this editor is that we've got Sidebar that contains what we call the reference section. So you've got browsable snippets of code that are grouped a bit like the way you would browse block in scratch or in make code. So you've got discoverability there. So that rather than just being faced with a blank screen editor, that horrible white screen or white sheet of paper when you're starting to type and you don't know what to type, we've got various features in there that are going to help you. So we've got working code snippets that you can browse. And if you want to make something appear on the display. You've got working code snippets that you can just drag and drop into your code and try them out straight away. We've also balanced that with not just looking at device features, because a lot of the documentation around doing Python on physical devices, especially like the microbit, is centered around how do you make the features of the device work in Python? We've got that because obviously you want to do that and the physicality of the device is what makes it great and what makes it engaging. But we've also included some stuff that are more traditional sort of Python things. So we've got sections just on things like loops and logic and things like lists and arrays. We have quite a lot as well about data types and string handling, which is not an area that we would normally have touched, but because we think that this gives the opportunity to broaden out what you can do with Python on the microbit. So as well as doing all the traditional kinds of projects that you might do, like your treasure Hunt game or a step counter or all those kinds of things as well, you can do more kind of traditional Python teaching and learning with this as well, because we built in a serial console, so this already exists in the existing online editor. There is a serial console there, but it replaces your code. What we've done is put it in a little window in the bottom right hand corner so you can still see your code. You can still browse the reference section, like the documentation, but you can mess around with your code, you can tinker with it and get instant feedback in the serial console. So you can use things like print instructions. So if you just want to hack something together really quickly, you cannot even use the display on the market. But you can just print it to the console and use that as part of your development or debugging process, maybe to get inputs from sensors. Like, I want to know, what is that sensor reading going to be when I do this and get that data and view it on your screen on your computer and then use that thinking, oh, well, okay, it's going to around 50 when I do that. That's my tipping point. I'm going to use that number in my code and you've got that ability. But you can also use the keyboard on your computer as an input, for example. So you can do something like, I don't know what your experiences are. Like, the first initial kind of Python projects that people traditionally teach are but one common one, at least in the UK, is to code something like a chat box. So not a project you would normally attempt on a microbit. But if you have your microbit plugged in connected by USB cable to the new editor, you could code a chatbot and you could do that on your microbit. And it's like the microbit is kind of like your Python runtime and there's nothing to install on your computer. There's no software, there are no libraries. So you don't have to worry about getting your computer support people or technicians to unblock things or install new things. Sometimes people can be a bit worried about installing Python, especially because you can do things like write text files to the hard drive. Sean Tibor: That's quite scary, crazy things. Giles Booth: Students might not be impressed by that, but people who are looking after it security might have nightmares when you discover that you can do things like that. So you have a very sort of stable basis for doing a Python runtime. And in addition to that, so we've got this kind of browsable content that lets you discover things for yourself. You can use that almost like a handbook, like a textbook you can teach yourself. And we're aiming this is both aimed at students and teachers as well, because we're aware that a lot certainly in the UK, a lot of people who are teaching computing, especially in this age group, that age group of ages start eleven to 14 years. A lot of non specialist teachers get roped into teaching computing. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's me. That's what I was thinking about four years ago when I first started Python. I remember we were doing the microbit and we use the microbit a lot longer than I do now, because now I'm a little bit more efficient with my time, and I can cycle through the units a little bit better. But it was hard. There was a couple of things. One, I mean, I was just learning new, but I don't even think I had Mew yet. I think we used the Python dot microbit website. And the thing is the one thing, the old version you didn't have that start typing and your code pops up. You know how, ma'am? Yes, absolutely. And I was just like, I don't remember this. I have to go the documentation, I'm trying to remember. And so I like that. And I like the idea of now you're folding in with this new beta version, you're folding in these concepts because I like to loop through I do Python basics kind of thing, and I like to loop them into the microbit. I mean, that's what you're trying to teach. You're teaching Python. You're not teaching here's a microbit and only micro Python. Giles Booth: Exactly. So that's partly what prompted us to create the reference section in the new editor the way we did. So it's not just looking at the device, it's including familiar Python concepts. I'd love to hear if any of your listeners have got ideas about what's missing. There are some things we left out deliberately, and I'd love to know what people think are missing. We were trying to balance it. We didn't want to make it too much content, too complicated. But the more I think about it. Like, for example, there's nothing in there about Dictionaries. And I created a project yesterday where I just thought, oh, this works so well with the dictionary. This is so elegant that I can do this thing. And that's a real selling point for Python. Look how few lines I love things like that. Look how few lines of code it takes to do that. Beautifully. Very Python, very good, compact code. So there's things like that as an example of something that perhaps you might. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Convince me to teach Dictionaries in 6th grade. So I don't ever implement them until 7th. Giles Booth: This relates to my secret project. So I'll send you the code for it and see what you think. It's got a good use for Dictionaries, but the autocomplete function is the other thing that you mentioned. So we've got on the Sidebar, we've got that reference content that you can look up and browse and search. It's got a search box as well. But we're trying to help you in the code editor as well. So we've got a few features in there that hopefully will help very much students, not just beginner students, but even experienced students. You know how difficult it can be to remember some of the more complex syntax around structures and things that you know what you need to do, but you can't quite remember the precise sequence of letters or whether does it have a capital, whatever, all that kind of stuff. So we've implemented an autocomplete. So when you start typing in the new editor, it will give you options and you can press the enter key and pick and scroll up and down and pick one of the options, which is lovely just for Python in itself, but also great for things. When you've got things like the built in images in Python, the microbit can display the hearts and the Ducks and all those images that they then turn up in a list. Once you start typing, display, show image, and then you get a list of all the images that you can pick and you can scroll up and down that list and you can see there's another way you've got discoverability. We have got some very subtle but I think hopefully quite effective highlighting of the code. So I know from my own experience of teaching Python with and without the microbit, students often struggle with indentations. It's an odd concept. And students coming from other programming languages, we just certainly will find that a weird, weird concept. There are no curly brackets. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's crazy. Giles Booth: So trying to help students with that. So we've got two things that we've done. We've put subtle background color highlighting, and the more sort of indented or nested. Your code gets the color shift slightly and gets slightly darker, so you can see which lines of code sort of belong together, almost like creating a block in effect, but just with very subtle color. And the other thing we've done is put lines in. So you've got a line that shows the outline of your indentation. So it's very easy to see if you've got a little bit of code that's not quite lined up, but that's very visible. Sean Tibor: The thing that I really like about this, and you don't necessarily see this if you're using a professional ID like Pie Charm or Vs code or something like that. What's really important here is that the interface is designed taking into account the feedback from educators and from students. It's very clear that the editor experience is designed for that beginner student, the person who's maybe writing their first few lines of code. Because you're right. The things that I would say are the top three or four things that students always struggle with are indentation, typos, missing punctuation like dots or semicolons. Being able to see all these things and have effective hints, clues, signals to the learner that, hey, maybe this thing isn't working the way you want it to. So if you're a teacher who's listening to this, what are you talking about? Like, you can go look at this, go look at Python microbit.org. It'll prompt you for the beta release. If you click on that and start poking around it, because it's really surprisingly effective and it's something that maybe some of these other ideas should be taking into account as well, the ability to turn on those indentation guests. Giles Booth: That's fantastic to hear, and you can give us feedback as well in the editor. So we're still developing it even today. We're doing work right now on the error messages that pop up because we're trying to catch as many errors as you can before you flash your code onto the microbit. If you put code on your microbit with errors in, you will get an error message scrolling across the screen, but it's quite hard to read and it's quite cryptic. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: What do you Sean, I like sitting there and watching. Giles Booth: In the new beta editor, you can use the serial console for that as well. So if you open up the serial console, you can at least read your error message on the screen. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So much fun sitting there and go, guys, look, I've been having a lot of fun playing with this. The one thing that I get on the kids is the insert code. I like them to type it still, I like them to type it versus just drag and drop, because I feel like sometimes when they do the drag and drop, they don't really read the code that's coming out. So just as a teacher tidbit, I always try to change my challenges so they're not the same as the ones that are in available. That's just me. Like, I'll make a function with an accelerator and mix it up because once they get to the habit of dragging and drop. And we had this conversation a long time with Edgy blocks. We had this conversation Josh was like, well, we're lazy, we don't want to type. And I'm like, I understand that, but. Unknown: We don't want to learn vocabulary words in elementary school. Giles Booth: It's a really good point. And when we were first originally developing this and having our first ideas, we thought about what we didn't want to go down a completely blocks approach because we have edgy blocks already. Josh is amazing and edgy box is fantastic. So there's no point in recreating that. We did think about something called like ice blocks that you would drag in and they would melt or something or something like that. But we decided that basically this is a text based experience and it is at the end of the day, I'm afraid of these words on a text editor and there is typing involved. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, but I love it. I do like the insert code. I just always tell the kids, why don't you type it? It's there, you can do it in a hurry, but give a type feature. It's just an interesting and I also. Sean Tibor: Think though, that one of the things that's nice about it is as you click through the reference materials, we're only talking about a few lines of code. We're not talking about a giant full program or anything like that. So it's digestible. So even if they are inserting the code, they still have the opportunity to learn a little bit about what it's doing or try to understand it. And so there's definitely some teacher support that's needed there too, to either say no, you have to type it out or just say why don't you think about what it's doing? Ask yourself, be curious. Giles Booth: Yeah. So it's a balancing act. And one of my bugbears about API documentation in general is you'd have something very cryptic that would say give you a list of all the parameters but not give you a working example. It's like I don't understand all these things like this equals that and just show me an example that just does something and I'll tinker with it and I'll figure it out myself. But balancing that we're not providing something that is too long. So all of our code examples, we've worked quite hard to try and make sure that they're the minimum we can do that does something that's useful, that's also practical and it's realistic, something that you might actually want to do on a microbit and it has some relevance. So it's not just counting from one to 10, there is some purpose to it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love the API feature, to be honest. That to me was a hit because I start introducing API kind of talk, just API talk, not even anything else. But documentation is always introduced in 6th grade. Apis are kind of like 8th grade, but the idea of these documentation being snippets and here you say get why? Well, that's clear to a developer, but when a kid says get why? What do you mean? Oh, I have to add accelerometer, get why. And that's kind of like my method for doing things. And I like that feature a lot. And I like how you can point to it and just get a lot of the information. Giles Booth: So all the API documentation is there as well. And that search, if you do a search in the reference section, it will give you results from both. The reference section, which is a little bit more like a textbook, has a little bit more description around it and the code samples are a little bit Fuller. Also, it will search the API documentation. We've just improved that lately as well. So you will see now examples in the API Doc which weren't there before. So you will actually have that one line of code that lets you see the context, that bit that's missing. And also when you're typing as well as the autocomplete, you have a thing we call signature help. There's a little box pops up that will tell you what all the parameters are and what all the things you can do. But also have a little line of code that will show you a working example, a realistic example, and also a link to the help documentation. So you can click on that and it will take you to the relevant entry in the API documentation so you can find out more feature. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I forgot all about speech as I'm clicking. Yeah, it's on the API. I'm like, oh, that's my next challenge. Giles Booth: Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people don't even know that's there I did. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: But we had issues with it when I first tried it. And I think it's been improved upon. Sean Tibor: Well, especially since I think when we first started using it, it was so when we had to hook up speakers with the wires and everything. So I think the other thing that I know we've kind of glossed over it a little bit. But one of the most magical features of the web based editor is the fact that it talks between your web browser and the microbit. So you've written all your code, you've got all this working, you've got something you want to try out. When we first started doing this, we had to hook up or download a program that would flash to the microbit directly. Or if you're using make code, it would download the file and then you'd have to drag it over. And all of these things that were really tricky to get it to work. And this bit of magic with this web serial connection to be able to connect your microbit directly to the web browser and have it flash code over the cable. For someone like me who's been around long enough to remember even the days before USB, this is pure magic. And the fact that it comes back now with a serial console into your browser is like extra exciting. Giles Booth: Thank you. Well, yeah, it is amazingly useful. So, yeah, as long as you've got a recent version of Chrome or Microsoft Edge, then that feature, that Web USB feature should work. So you have that ability both in the Python editor and Microsoft MakeCode does the same thing, too. You can flash code direct from the make code block Editors. Well, straight into your microbit. Sean Tibor: Yeah. So it's definitely one of those. Back in my day, we had to copy file flasher. It is amazing how convenient this is. So literally, the time from taking your microbit out of the box to having your code running on it is now about as short as I can possibly imagine, because it's type in this URL, plug in these cables, flash this code and it works. Giles Booth: And you have a program. There already a very simple program that just Scrolls some text and puts a heart on the display in a loop. And you can flash that and you can get started. You don't even need to write any code. And then you can obviously start messing around with that the obvious first thing, you're going to change the message, scroll, put your name in, and then change the image. So we give you something straight out of the box to get started with. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's pretty cool. Sean Tibor: We've been talking about this for a little while now, and I want to make sure that we're kind of bringing it all together full circle for our listeners. So the microbit is sometimes a little bit hard to find right now because of the global chip shortages. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: A little. I got version one like, I don't want to send them back. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Unknown: Okay. Sean Tibor: So sometimes a lot hard to find, but if you can get your hands on them, taking this from essentially zero, where you have not used them before, to an actual learning experience for your students where they're learning about concepts in computer science is something that you can start on a Monday, and by Friday they can be off playing and exploring and doing their own thing and have built quite a few things along the way. And especially with this Web based editor now you can jump right past the make code block based coding if you're comfortable with it, and go straight into Python with a lot of the same supports that make the block coding so effective. Charles, what's next for the beta editor? Like, where are you taking this next? What are some of the ideas that you have in mind? When does it get out of beta and into? This is now version three. Giles Booth: That's a good question. So lots of my colleagues are working really hard on this. Now. We've got a few things in the pipeline. One of the things we're working or just been working on today is the way error messages get flagged up in the editor itself. So we're looking at catching some of that we know from teaching experience are very common errors and providing even friendlier, less cryptic error messages that are more helpful to students rather than providing them with perhaps complicated terminology. So it's actually telling them. Actually, no, you need to put a colon missing colon. Maybe you should spell true with the capital T. Maybe that's what you want to do, those sorts of errors. So we're looking at what we can do, how much we can do to make the error messages more friendly. We're hoping it should be out of beta at some point in the summer this year, and then we're looking later in the year. We may add some more functionality to it. It's going through more testing at the moment. It's been very difficult because of covet, as I'm sure you can understand, to do the classroom testing that we would have wanted to do. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You can always test with us. We did it. We used it. So we're here for you. We'll be in touch next August. We go on summer soon. Giles Booth: So just so you know, we definitely will be. And there's another feature that is in the pipeline. I don't know when it's going to come out, but we are working on a simulator. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Do you want to know what my wishes? Giles Booth: What's your wish? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I want the original code from V, version two when it comes package in Python and not as a Hex file. Do you know that when it comes and claps and spins and what we. Giles Booth: Call the OOB, the out of box experience? So, yeah, for those of you who don't know when you buy a brand new microbit, it has this demonstration program on it. It's very noisy as well. Some teachers have said to me, it's too loud, we don't like it, and it introduces you. You have to interact with the microbit, you play little games with it and stuff, and you discover some of the features of the microbit. It's available, as you say, as a Hex file on our website. You can download it and you can flash it back onto your microbit so you can have that experience again. But that program is written in C Plus Plus. Not possible to directly create that program in either make code or Python because it's using. I guess some of it is down to speed. The code that you can write in C can execute a lot faster than code that you can write in microphone or in make code. However, I have to say, good challenge for your students, getting to recreate that experience in Python. How close can you get? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I need to get them to flash it again. That was my first lesson with the version two was such a fun thing when they unboxed and we talked about counted how many different inputs and then looked at what was running and what do you think was running? If you look at the microbit, do you see the accelerometer and what buttons and what capacity touches? Giles Booth: Yeah, we had great fun. That program takes back to the original microbit had something like that on it. And when we did the VT, I was one of the teachers who got the original microbit back in 2015. So I've gone from one side to the other. And it was such great fun because I had that experience with my students back in 2015, and we unboxed it and plugged it in. And it was like I got a whole lesson out of that. It was brilliant. No planning, no marking. Unknown: Exactly. Giles Booth: We just explored it. But then I had such great, such a privilege to be able to work on. How do we make this work for the V two microbit? How do we add time to it? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Nice. Sean Tibor: I think the first day that Kelly unboxed the V two microbit with her students, I was working in the back of the classroom at my desk, and I'm just typing away, and all of a sudden I just hear if you've never heard it, you are missing out the sound of 20 microbit at the same time, all doing their out of. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Boxes and the clapping really loud. I invited our boss at the time for my teacher demo. I'm telling you, if you ever want to just wow your principals and your bosses and have a great teacher demo that shows really interactivity, get the outer box experience, talk about inputs and outputs. The principal, she was just sitting there laughing. She's like, this is great. I'm like, I know. I'm so talented teacher. I did all this hard work. Thank you, BBC microbit. Sean Tibor: It was not a great day for a quiet work environment, but it was a wonderful day for joy and exploration and fun. So I'll take it well, that's fantastic. Giles Booth: And those projects are really fun. And Immersive like the other ones that I found work really well as a group was the Fireflies project, which is very simple. It just sends a radio message where you get a whole classroom. We've got like 30 students each with their microbit, and you dim the lights and it's just magical. It was just a lovely moment. Watching these little outbreaks of Firefly activity around the classroom. The students really get thinking about what's going on here. How does that work? Sean Tibor: I was going to say, I have to send you my source code for the microorganisms project that we did in science class where each microbit had a little genetic code on it, and they would send it over the radio waves to the other microbit and they would mutate and change. Giles Booth: That sounds amazing. So it's just like a game of Conway's Game of Life, but with a whole room of microbit or something. Sean Tibor: So they had like one genetic code that they could pass off and a gender, and it would spawn a new generation every time they received it. And then we realized that it very quickly turned into a classroom of all females or all males. So we learned so much from it. But it was so much fun that they say, oh, my microbit reproduced. And I say, Mazel Tov. It's a boy. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's amazing. Giles Booth: Such a cool idea. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It was led to a great science discussion about population decline and what happens when you have the same species together. We had great genetic Punnett squares building. It was brilliant. Giles Booth: Amazing. Sean Tibor: That was our fun with the radio. And again, it's that group project, that group activity where they interact and they see how things affect one another and the microbit makes that possible. Giles Booth: And indeed, radio. To me, you talk about web USB being magic. I think radio is magic. It's just like that in itself. I still think it's amazing that how does that information get from there to there? I can't see it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I need a tutorial on that, too, like a little video that explains how that's happening because it's magic. Giles Booth: In our new professional development courses, I'm going to plug that in again. So we've got a new if you go to the Microbit.org website and go to teach and click on professional development, I think there are four courses on there now. There are more coming very soon. We have got a course coming up on radio and networks. They are based in MECO these courses. But a lot of what is in there will apply to Python as well. Obviously, pretty much everything you can do there you can do in Python, too. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Excellent. Super excited. Sean Tibor: Well, I think we should probably wrap up here. This is a wonderful place to stop and let Kelly get some lunch before she has to teach. But, Josie, it was wonderful to have you. And we look forward to many more amazing things coming out of the Microbit Education Foundation. We have certainly benefited as teachers from being able to have access to all the work that the foundation has done. And we know that our students have also learned a great deal, not always necessarily what we wanted them to learn, but they always learned something by working with them. I don't. Giles Booth: That's great to know. Well, thank you so much, Kelly. Thank you so much, Sean, for inviting me on. It's been lovely to be here. Sean Tibor: And thank you for coming. If you'd like to contribute to the conversation, you can always reach us through our website, Teachingpython. Fm. We're also on Twitter at Teaching Python. We hope to have the link to the YouTube version of our talk at Python available shortly. And as soon as that's out, we'll post it to our website and to our social media channels. Giles, if people want to follow the work that you're doing with the Microbit Foundation, is there a good place for them to stay in touch with you? Giles Booth: Well, absolutely. So the microbit website is a good place to start. So go to Microbit.org. We've got a news page there. We have an education newsletter that you can sign up for, which is probably the best way to keep in touch. We're also on Twitter as an organization, we are microbit.edu on Twitter. That's a fantastic way. We're on Facebook as well and my own personal Twitter is at blogmywiki. If you want to come and say. Sean Tibor: Hi to me wonderful well, hopefully we will get a chance to do this again soon and talk more about the microbit. It's definitely one of our favorite topics chat about so I think that pretty much does it for this week. So for teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off.