Introduction to Physical Computing with micro:bit is a quarter-long, project-based course focused on building circuits and using physical devices. This course is meant for students who have experience with foundational programming topics (described in more detail below). This course is different than many CodeHS courses as it requires physical materials to be purchased and uses an outside platform (MakeCode) where students will develop and test their programs before pasting into the CodeHS editor to be graded by their teacher.

The Physical Computing with micro:bit course provides a highly interactive way for students to apply programming concepts to physical devices! The course uses a BBC micro:bit and is meant to refresh and apply basic programming concepts in a physical environment.

This course is meant to refresh programming concepts for Middle School students. Basic programming concepts, such as loops, functions, if/else statements, and variables will not be taught from scratch in this course. Students should have seen these concepts previously so they are already aware of how they work before using them with their micro:bit. There are quite a few CodeHS courses that provide this prerequisite information to students, as noted below:

There are a few ways prerequisites can be implemented.Students join your class after they have taken one of the courses listed. This could be with another teacher before they joined your class, completed as a summer assignment, or as the first semester of your course if it is a year long.Another option is to have students learn these foundational concepts concurrently as they take this course. This could be provided during another class period (if your students are lucky enough to have 2 periods of computer science!) or could be threaded into the intro programming course.
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Yes! Though this course was designed for middle school students, this does not mean that it can not be used in High Schools as well. For example, if you already have access to micro:bit devices, are thinking of bringing a physical computing course to younger high school students, such as freshman or sophomores, or have a shorter time frame to fit the content into, this course could be a great fit.

We wanted to have a strong discovery learning focus in our Physical Computing courses, so we encourage students to hypothesize and test what commands do on their own through the use of what we call Explorations. These step-by-step documents include diagrams, starter code, and questions to guide students to learn about new commands and how they are applied in their programs without being directly told by their teacher. Each lesson in the course contains an exploration so students are constantly exploring new commands to add to their physical computing toolbox.

No, autograders do not exist on any of the activities in this course due to programs being run in the MakeCode editor rather than on our site. It should be communicated to students that they must be able to test their own programs and should only copy and paste them into the CodeHS editor from MakeCode when they feel that each component of the exercise has been successfully completed. Problem guides will give a lot of additional information to teachers about each exercise so this should be the first resource they consult when grading student work.

Students should have a basic understanding of foundational programming concepts, including functions, variables, parameters, loops, and if/else statements. This background could be in any programming language.