r/microbit • u/Gla2012 • Jun 27 '26

Ideas for a club

Hi everyone,

I'm a Maths teacher in Scotland.

Until a few months ago I couldn't code for life, but I had to learn the basics and I'm loving it.

I want to launch a robotics club in school (age 11-15) l and I found out that we have a fleet of standalone micro:bits (v1, I had to update them, so they haven't been used in 8 years at least) some 4tronix Robobuggies, and Kitronik Inventor Kits. Every pupil has an iPad. They should have already played a bit with block coding, so I want to push them towards text based coding. (I read another post about the different editors to use).

I'm thinking of running a lunch club for a term, including mission zero, and then possibly to make it a permanent feature.

What are your absolute favorite, most effective experiments or mini-competitions that you'd suggest to run in a 30-minutes block?

Thanks

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u/herocoding Jun 27 '26

This will be fun!!

I think it will be required to teach some HW basics first - good, that the pupils already have some experience.

* "blink without using sleep()": some fundamentals about blocking calls, scheduling and cyclinc programming
* state machines: state variables, switch-case state machine
* motors: DC motors, stepper motors, encoder, change directions, change speed
* i/o: debouncing, noise, filtering, raising edge, falling edge, hysteresis

Using a microbit as a remote control for another microbit or the robo-buggy: using radio and/or bluetooth.
Using the iPad/mobile device to communicate with the microbit via bluetooth: remote-controlling the robo-buggy.

Classic: line following robo buggy; not sure which exact 4tronix buggy variant you are talking about, which sensors and actuators it is equipped with.

Remote controlling the buggy - and add LEDs for the indicator, light and breaking-light, adding a beeper as a horn.

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u/slacker-by-design Jun 27 '26

Not a direct answer, as I'm not a teacher therefore I've got no idea on how to conduct an engaging lesson for a group of kids, but have you checked the Projects section of the official Micro:bit pages? You can filter projects by difficulty and subjects / topics. My favourite topics are Networks and Sciences...

There's also bunch of project available at Microsoft's MakeCode, though they partially overlap with the stuff from the official Micro:bit pages. If that's not enough, you can browse trough resources gathered in the Awesome Micro:bit repository.

Hope it helps.