IoT Innovators Meetup: Meet the BBC micro:bit with Howard Baker

It's been a while since I attended any hardware meetups and so I went along to a new group meeting at Canonical (the organisation behind Ubuntu) on London's South Bank, behind Tate Modern. Nice offices:

The presentation was given by Howard Baker who is a lead at BBC Learning looking at innovating technologies.

His talk was about the background to the micro:bit, the BBC's initiative to promote software development in schools through a micro device.

It turns out that software development is not taught at schools, something that astounded me (A-Level at least...) and that Universities complain that the entrants to Computer Science courses have to be taught basic programming skills. In answer to this. the current Director General of the BBC wants an initiative to promote programming, in the same way the Model B did all those years ago. Everyone has a computer these days so, after a few false starts, Howard and his team came up with the micro:bit. It has a small ARM chip, a magnetometer, accelerometer and a neat 5 X 5 led display, along with a low power blu-tooth transmitter/receiver. It also has a mini-USB port and external analogue/digital connector.

It's also got a nice web site with on-line editors for producing code to run the hardware, one in a Scratch-like block language, which translates into Microsoft's Touch Develop language, and one for JavaScript. There will, hopefully, be a Python one as well.

The goal is to roll out the device to 1 million children of 11-12 year old's (1st year secondary). Howard emphasised the social aspects of the program, saying that it wasn't just aimed at the children but that the parents could see their children being creative and enthusiastic. In particular, he said that he thought that the idea of owning the technology and making it themselves was fundanental, turning children "from consumers into creators", being influenced to some extent by the Maker movement.

Overall, it was an excellent presentation on an engaging subject, expecially for anyone who tried to play Elite on a Model B. So if you want a look at the future of technology, it will be available from a teenager near you.

After the presentation, I took a few snaps of the buildings around the river, all lit up.

Very festive.

Dragonmeet 2014

Yes, it's December, which must mean that it's Dragonmeet again. It's been moved to a new venue from Kensington Town Hall to the Ibis Hotel in Earls Court ("more room" according to one of the volunteers).

To me it seemed smaller, or more compact. There weren't many vendors there, but perhaps more producers, including a new card game called Stak Bots:

I bought an RPG that I've had my eye on for a while, which seems to be a bit different from the usual character based games:

Unfortunately, I didn't get a game so, on my way back, I stopped off at Covent Garden to do a little more shopping and saw the lights:

A Night on the Town - Olde Mitres and Banks

For a change, I went up into London to have a drink with some erstwhile collegues. We started off at The Olde Mitre, one of the oldest pubs in London:

It's built round the back of a church and is a typical London drinking establishment, with a good selection of beers. I had a half of something called "Dark Star Original", a sort of Porter\Mild.

Very nice. After we'd all met up (the pub is down an alley, so very easy to miss), we moved on down to The Old Bank of England (both of them are Fuller's pubs), a complete contrast, and probably the largest pub I've ever been in:

Very grand. I finished the night there and, after fond farewells, wended my way back to BasVegas.

Butterflies in London

Every year for the past few years, during the summer, The Natural History Museum hosts a live butterfly exhibition in a special marquee outside. Called Sensational Butterflies, you can see them hatching and flying about. It's a great opportunity to take some photographs, which I did.

I also managed to get a shot of one hatching out in the special frame they've made for the purpose:

They can be quite tame and one was even perched on a girl's hand:

If you are thinking of going with a camera, be careful of the humidity fogging up the lens as mine did initially. It might be worth waiting until the lens is clear before shooting.

I did quite a trek through London by the end of the day, so I was glad to get back to BasVegas:


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Friday: A Trip to the Science Museum

It's been a while since I went to the Science Museum in London. They've got an exhibition called "Who am I?" all about human beings. I remember something about it a few years ago, but it was a very small exhibit at the time. They've now expanded it and it's huge, covering an entire floor. It was quite interesting, but there were hundreds of kids milling about and you couldn't get anywhere near any of the interactive suff, which was a shame.

The Space exhibit was quite fantastic and they had a J2 rocket motor, used to power the giant Saturn V Apollo rockets:



Brilliant!! They also had the Apollo 10 re-entry capsule:



While there, I also bought some CyberClean to get rid of the gunge on my laptop keyboard.