So where did the micro:bit come from? Who thought of it, why, and why is it becoming so successful? And how do you go about giving away almost a million individual boards to children all across the United Kingdom?

To answer those questions, I corresponded with Howard Baker from the Micro:bit Education Foundation. He and Jo Claessens in their roles in BBC Learning worked together to design the first prototype, and Michael Sparks is the BBC R&D engineer who actually built it. (Howard has an interesting background: he’s been a chemist, a fashion designer, a science teacher, a journalist, and a researcher.) I also chatted with Gareth Stockdale from the BBC. I was curious as to the project’s inception, how it evolved, and what went into making it a success.

According to Howard, the idea for the micro:bit was spawned by two separate news articles that were released at about the same time in 2011 and 2012. Both articles—one from The Royal Society and one from Nesta—discussed the fact that children in the United Kingdom were graduating with almost no knowledge of coding or computer science, and the result was that the UK expected to have a “knowledge deficit” of skilled tech workers in a few years.

Because Howard was then working for the BBC, he put forth the idea that the BBC should do something to “spotlight the problem, raise the profile of computer science, provide positive role models and get kids coding and interested in computer science.” The organization had had previous experience—in the 1980s the BBC Micro had introduced children all over the UK to computers. Howard and his colleagues had noticed that the Maker and Hacker movements had become very popular with young people, and he wanted to build on that, to enable children to make something.

When it came to designing a product that could do what they wanted it to, Howard and his team considered a host of factors, including cost, complexity, and how easy it would be for kids to interact with the board. Luckily, ARM chips have been steadily decreasing in price, so they were able to make a device that was much cheaper than a Raspberry or an Arduino (both excellent boards, but costing a bit more than pocket change if it came to giving them away). As Howard puts it:

We thought of the device as a “platform”—there was the device itself—the micro:bit—but it had to be delivered with the simplest, easiest software possible and learning resources that would excite kids to get involved. It had to be very cheap so we could give it away—this gave some challenges, including its shape. It had to be very easy to program—nothing was to get in the way of a kid being given one and them getting it to do something interesting. It had to excite kids; they needed to look at it and want to get to know it and use it. However, it also needed to be easily extensible—low floor, high ceiling—once they had done something to excite them they could see the potential to build complex things with it and the device would be capable of letting them do that. It was also necessary for it to be a physical object, stripped of coverings, so a child could see how it worked and it could fit in the palm of their hand—they could touch it, work with it with their hands, build things with it. We also planned the device to be a wearable, so again it had to have a certain size and appearance. The other thing I was thinking of at the time was the Internet of Things. I was looking at what was the next revolution to affect society—preparing kids for an exciting tech revolution is a better stimulus than telling them if they didn’t get their act together and learn coding they would be unemployable. I wanted the micro:bit to be an Internet of Things tool—something that would help them create the revolution, not wait to consume it.

Gareth Stockdale from the BBC adds that “there are significant and distinct educational advantages to providing a hands-on experience” when it comes to teaching kids about technology. In other words, just learning to code is one thing; learning to code on a device that then does something is another thing entirely. As an engineer myself, I can totally vouch for this way of thinking; I enjoy coding, but I much prefer it when my code makes something do a task that interacts with the physical world. Perhaps I’m not much more than a kid after all.

As far as partners with the project, the BBC was obviously involved straight from the beginning and has nursed the project through its current state. It has always been an extremely popular program within the organization, so although there were difficulties, there was enough in-house support to make sure it succeeded.

In December 2014, the BBC put out a call for expressions of interest for organizations wanting to be partners in the project. More than 150 companies responded, and 31 were chosen. It wasn’t a problem to convince people that the micro:bit was necessary—many organizations were already aware of the looming skills shortage and were looking for ways to address it.

In fact, according to Howard, there was no shortage of companies and individuals wanting to donate cash, chips, services, software, and everything else; the hard part was coordinating everything. The BBC Micro project was thirty years ago, after all, and getting dozens of partners to work together in sync was, as you can imagine, a logistical nightmare. In the end, a total of thirty-one organizations banded together in order to make it possible for the BBC to create a board that could be given away to a million children—one for every school child in their first year of secondary school (the equivalent of seventh grade in the United States). Initial prototypes proved popular—kids loved the 25-LED matrix, the two buttons, and the fact that it was so easy to get the board to do something.

There has been support from more than the coordinating partners, of course. For example, in April 2016 the BBC One show aired a report showing how three students from Fallibroome Academy in Cheshire, England, were taken to the Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory. There, astrophysicist Tim O’Brien allowed them to program their micro:bits to turn the 3,200-ton telescope to point at a distant pulsar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqIzufUiwN4). Not bad for a device that weighs only a few grams!

There are obviously going to be comparisons between the micro:bit and the Raspberry Pi, so I asked Howard if the Pi was part of the inspiration, and if there were things he wanted to emulate or do differently from the Pi Foundation. His response was that micro:bit team wanted to create something that had a lower barrier to entry than some of the existing products in the market. The team kept that in mind as they designed their board. They also tried to keep their target audience a bit younger than the Pi’s, letting their device act as a springboard to more advanced devices like the Pi and the Arduino.

The Pi Foundation was very supportive of the project and was involved with discussions right from the beginning. The micro:bit team always kept the Pi in mind as they were building their board; they wanted a device that would be extremely easy to set up and use so that there was no entry barrier, but that would then get users interested in the next logical step—a Pi or something similar. They wanted the micro:bit to be a stepping-stone to the Raspberry Pi, and the boards seem to be working together quite well. The micro:bit has sensors that the Pi doesn’t have, and the two can communicate easily over BLE. The micro:bit can then display information from the Pi on its LED matrix, so their partnership seems to be a success.

As to what the future may hold for the micro:bit . . . the organization has some grand plans. In late 2016 the BBC launched the nonprofit Micro:bit Education Foundation, with the goal of empowering children, parents, and teachers around the world to create and learn using the micro:bit. The Foundation’s big objective: to get a board in the hands of 100 million people around the world. Nine partners are now involved: the BBC, Microsoft, ARM, the British Council, IET Institution of Engineering and Technology, Nominet, Amazon, Samsung, and Lancaster University. In pursuit of their goals, the team has migrated the original website, http://microbit.co.uk, to http://microbit.org, which is available in twelve different languages. They are continuing educational programs in the UK and are sponsoring classroom kits around the world, with national rollouts in progress in the UK, Iceland, and Croatia. The fact that you can now purchase the micro:bit from US retailers like SparkFun is partly thanks to the Foundation’s work, and the board is now available in thirty-two countries around the world.

In closing his remarks with me, Howard stressed that the micro:bit “is the product of the very hard work of a large number of clever and wonderful people and organizations.” Those organizations that have led the way on software, hardware, design, manufacture, and distribution include ARM, Barclays, the BBC, element14, Lancaster University, and many others. The project is the brainchild of a large number of extremely brilliant and talented people in BBC Learning, which leads the BBC’s education strategy. That strategy includes the Make It Digital season, which was announced and championed by the BBC’s Director General Tony Hall in 2015. After working with the device myself, I have to say that I’m extremely impressed with the finished product and I hope it gets a whole new generation interested in computers, programming, and engineering.