BBC’s Micro Bit: useful gadget or more school junk

When the Year of Code was launched I likened Coding to the new Latin. Originally led by the hapless Lottie Dexter (dumped after her car crash appearance on Newsnight), it has got a little more organised but ever more bizarre. We Brits love coming up with little bits of odd tech, something that looks as though it was designed by someone in a shed. Trouble is, they rarely get out of shed-land into commercial success. So it is with the very odd Micro Bit.

1. Gadgetry is not computing

Emma Mulqueeny’s infamous blog post "7 reasons why the Year of Code is just AMDram" echoed my own views at the time but this turns a reasonable attempt to change the computer studies curriculum into a gadget-led mess. The Year of Code launch was a disaster, a reductionist view of computing skills as ‘easy coding’ and this is just more junk thrown at what is a complex teaching and learning problem. In the end this is of limited value, a piece of use once, see that it's useless, throwaway object. What's more, it has already suffered from a shed-like approach to design, and have had to drop the battery slot. The idea was that all the 'cool' kids would slap a square circuit board (that can display letters and numbers - WOW) on their designer clothes, to impress their friends. I can see a lively lewd series of YouTube videos coming. Interesting that since the last press release, they've dropped all references to GTA - what were they thinking?

2. All supply, no demand

This is a typical - build and they will come strategy. Does anyone in the know anything about supply and demand in the BBC? Let's face it, IT is not the BBCs strong point. They burned £100 million on their last, massive, failed IT project and few around now remember that the BBC Micro failed in the market – I bought one, used one and was there. Remember BBC Jam - £75 million and not a second of content released? As usual, they failed due to a lack of business acumen. At least this time round they admit that it will fail commercially even before the launch – novel.

3. Yet more hardware?

Take a million devices, then launch them in late October on schools and teachers with inadequate preparation and training. Have we learnt nothing about launching gadgetry in education? How many reports do we need that stress teacher training, support and proper planning? What teachers don’t need, is yet another poorly planned, alien-looking gadget, parachuted into schools and classrooms, hard on the heels of the last one, the Raspberry Pi, with no real training. And by the way of 1 million of these is the answer, why didn’t the 3 million Raspberry Pis do the job? It's marketed as being 'complementary' to the Pi but that's a description of convenience.

4. Hokey ‘Micro Bit’ brand

To be clear, ‘Micro’ means small, and ‘Bit’ is a binary digit, a basic unit that can have one of two values. ‘Small bit’ doesn’t make any sense. A bit is a fixed unit of information, and small is what linguists call a ‘gradable antonym’, it scales. In short, it’s grammatically stupid, like saying ‘Small one or zero’. Maybe it refers to its tiny size. Who cares if it’s that size? As soon as you add the big bits to make the damn thing work, like a proper computer, you’ll find that it’s a bit of a big bugger. Of course, someone in some daft meeting of people with no real marketing expertise had in their mind echoes of the last bit of failed hardware the BBC produced – the BBC Micro. Why resurrect a failed brand? It’s all a ‘bit’ Reithian, old-fashioned and nostalgic.

5. Don’t Call Saul

Saul Klein, who the BBC reported as the mastermind behind the scheme, claimed on the BBC website, and I kid you not,  that “90% of the country didn't know how to code, 70% of adults didn't know that coding would be in the curriculum come September, and 100% of teenagers thought it would be vital for their future job prospects.” To be honest I’d be astounded if 10% could code, that would be 6.4 million – no way. The second (70%) stat simply suggests that the curriculum change is already in trouble and the last (100%) is not just a lie, it’s dumb. Let’s suppose that 100% of teenagers did believe this, and that I don’t believe (I’ve now asked a few), it would still be dumb. Knowing how to code is irrelevant to the vast majority of youngsters’ future job prospects. One last thing - if you want reliable stats - Don’t Call Saul.

Conclusion
Put aside the really awkward word ‘coding’ and you find an initiative largely led by people who don’t know what it really means. I’ve run IT companies with lots of ‘coders’ but they were part of a wider team. I also invest in tech companies and have seen the high quality of outsourced programming to India and other places, at a fraction of the cost. Sure we need new skills but seeing computing as just coding is a reductive solution. The real skills shortages in the UK are varied, good project management, good marketing and sales people and so on. Here’s a bet – I won’t hear of the ‘Year of Sales’ in my lifetime.