Microbit
This is the page which contains my program for the Online Station Skill "Microbit Programming".
The microbit is a microcontroller of the BBC, presented to all the school children of Great Britain.
In my opinion the microbit is one of the examples of "the next generation" of microcontrollers, the Arduino being the former generation.
Lot's of microcontrollers nowadays, some versions of the Arduino included, have many sensors, neopixels, led displays built in.
This avoid a lot of extra wires and means you can start working with these sensors right away, without practicing the wiring and the soldering.
Programming can be done in a drag and drop way of code blocks.
The microcontroller itself is still the microcontroller comparable to the ATMEGA328, or others ATtiny85, etcetera.
You can also program the microcontroller in Micropython -if a lot of extra memory is included, oftentimes 2MB!
Micropython programming costs a lot of memory more.
Advantage: you can get results faster, avoiding wires, the device with sensors is more compact, often you can even show text. The microbit programming is done online, the simulator is directly besides it. Using the code blocks, in the simulator the parts are added automatically (for example sound - speaker, Bluetooth - another microbit)
Disadvantage: drag and drop coding has its limits. The built in sensors remain the same, while you can buy better sensor versions for your Arduino. In the end you have to learn coding anyway, there is no shortcut in learning a programming language - it takes time and patience.
Introduction videos from the bbc: https://microbit.org/get-started/first-steps/set-up/
Although this is an online programming course not really supposing you buy the microbit, if you have one: I think the downloading of the hex file of the code and dragging it into the microbit disk is always a bit ...slow. Many steps, many clicks. So why not try this: https://microbit.org/get-started/user-guide/web-usb/ although using bluetooth can be slow and sometimes I could not connect to my device.
With bluetooth you can also program the microbit with an iPad, but then also you need the right firmware.
What I like is the editor, together with the simulator:
First steps: immediate results. I have made a few screen video's showing how to generate some very easy results.
Directly show some text. Adding a behavior to an input button is "so easy"!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmgzU7Dz2k
The light sensor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krgxXSAEYl0&t=28s
The temperature sensor: