[Microbit-Python] Flat API

Wed Sep 23 01:25:05 CEST 2015

Sometimes when agreement doesn't come easily it can be because the goal isn't clear to everyone.... which made think that perhaps the goal isn't clear to me. 

What is the goal of micro:bit?

Is it to teach 11 year-olds good programming skills?

Or is it to inspire 11 year-olds with an interest in problem solving, STEM etc.?

If it's the first, then there's a strong case to make our designs "proper", even at the expense of making things a bit more difficult for the novice initially. 

If it's the second then the emphasis changes and it's more weighted towards accessibility, I think.

I realise I've been assuming the goal is the second and I'm happy to be corrected if it's not. 

In my mind the micro:bit is it's own fun little problem solving universe. It doesn't have a web browser or built in games (yay!) - it's only going to do what you make it do. It's amazing that you can program it in python. Even if it happened to use some non-standard variant of python or its API wasn't completely "proper" it wouldn't really bother me... iff we're aiming for the second goal. If we're aiming for the first, it would bother me. 

When I suggested a flat version of the API I wasn't just thinking about 11 year-olds and their typing or spelling ski11z, I was thinking about teachers and myself. I'm wondering if, in the classroom (which is only one situation of its use), it's going to feel more like "live coding". It really did for me when we were all round the table at pycon and Nick was saying "You've got 20 minutes to make something interesting", and I was coding on the REPL, continuously recreating my program with the up arrow and finding out the command history is only 10 lines. 

If these thoughts aren't useful or are bike-shedding, please ignore them. I don't want to waste your valuable time and distract you from the cool stuff you're doing. 

Cheers,

Alan

Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 23:13:17 +0100
From: david at thinkingbinaries.com
To: microbit at python.org
Subject: Re: [Microbit-Python] Flat API

I'm sure both GCSE and AQA specifications talk about abstraction and decomposition - how can you do that without functions??
All our 11 year olds use functions in the schools I work with. We introduce functions in Adventures in Minecraft (aimed at 11-15 year olds and mostly syncronised to the GCSE curriculum) in chapter 3 and use them extensively through to chapter 10 as a way to build up and test programs in small incremental steps.
I personally think OCR are wrong on this.

D___________________________________________________________
David Whale, B.Sc (Hons), MIET
Software Engineer and IET Schools Liaison Officer, Essex

email:  dwhale at theiet.org
twitter: @whaleygeek
blog:  blog.whaleygeek.co.uk

Co-author of the new book "Adventures in Minecraft" - lets get kids coding!

On 22 September 2015 at 16:09, Michael <sparks.m at gmail.com> wrote:
Cool. I was more worried I'd offended you. Glad I haven't :-)
(it's very difficult to tell over email, so try to err on the side of caution!)
To explain where I'm coming from perhaps better,  I've been hanging out on the computing at school forum now for 2-3 years (or more), and randomly reply to python queries on there, and been rather surprised to see this response sort of response from time to time - either to my replies or to other people's:
 ...  thanks for taking the time to write it. Although the fact that you recommend using functions also reminded me that we are not in the right territory: Functions are outside the scope of OCR GCSE programming, believe it or not (they are present in the AQA specifications though, so maybe I should switch…)
(this was in a response to a simple question about validating input data, and simply suggested simple "isint" and "isfloat" functions to avoid repeating the same logic over and over...)
That's a little scary to me, and it's always at the back of my mind - because it's a far more common perspective. That comment incidentally is from a teacher who is teaching 14-16 year olds rather than 11-12 year olds. (and yes, there were plenty of other replies from other teachers saying that was the wrong approach)
It's interesting actually, if this was an API for CodeClubs (even for the same age range), I wouldn't even have worried at all.
Anyway, I'll wait to see the bike now before I start suggesting training wheels or a different colour shed :-)
Regards,

Michael.
On 22 September 2015 at 15:49, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:

    On 09/22/2015 02:05 PM, Michael wrote:

      Hi,

        Sorry if I've offended you (it looks like I might've done).

    Naah, no worries.  And I didn't realize you weren't there
    yesterday--I didn't get everybody's names.

    This is private, but I can post this to the list if you like,

    /arry

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