Abstract:

Microcontrollers are becoming more and more popular in people of all ages. Microcontroller Arduino is widespread in the world. As it turned out at our Department of Computer Science, learning Arduino for beginners is sometimes difficult because working with Arduino requires knowledge of hardware parts and programming skills. For beginners we teach is the most appropriate device an educational board BBC micro:bit which offers programming in three different programming languages (block-coding like in Scratch, JavaScript and Micropython). Similar to Arduino, different hardware components can be attached to BBC micro:bit. The board micro:bit consists of 25 individually-programmable LEDs, 2 programmable buttons, physical connection pins, light and temperature sensors, motion sensors, bluetooth and many others. The article presents our experiences with using this educational board BBC micro:bit to teaching programming at our extracurricular activity at the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica.

Keywords:

Micro:bit, programming, arduino.