Support whole class teaching with micro:bit classroom
Run whole class MakeCode or Python coding lessons, share code with students and save their progress with our new online tool - micro:bit classroom.
What is micro:bit classroom?
micro:bit classroom helps teachers with the practical challenges of teaching a class of students to code with the micro:bit. It makes it quick and easy for teachers to share code with students, track their progress and help students debug, then save progress for their records or to continue another day.
Key features
User testing and feedback from our community has helped us to provide features that really make a difference:
- Quickly get students started: share a single link with students or the classroom name and password and they are in - no logins to set up, no individual student passwords to remember.
- Easily share code with students: quickly set up the code you want your students to see when they join or share code with one or more students at any time during the session. You can also start a micro:bit classroom session from the code inside a micro:bit project or lesson. This imports the code students are aiming to create in the session for you to reference quickly in the setup menu during the session.
- Keep track of how they are getting on: see each student’s code from the teacher’s computer as they write it.
- Debug and support students: you can not only see a student’s code, to help with debugging, you can also edit a copy of it, run it in the simulator on your computer or download it to your micro:bit.
- Sharing learnings from one student with the whole class: being able to see, edit and run a student’s code means you can also show it to the whole class on the board to debug together as a class or share learnings.
- Lock students screens: to get students’ attention, teachers can lock and unlock micro:bit classroom on each students screen at the touch of a button.
- Saving progress: the session can be continued on another day - students get all their code back once they re-join.
- Saving work for records and assessment: teachers can also save a copy of students’ work in a word document for their records or assessment purposes.
- Continuing coding between lessons: micro:bit classroom sessions are only live while the teacher is active in the session, however students are now prompted to download their code to their local computer (and perhaps save it in cloud storage) before they leave so they can open their project in Microsoft MakeCode or the micro:bit Python Editor between sessions to keep working on it.
More to come in the future
micro:bit classroom has been in beta since 2020. Originally created with funding by Nominet, the UK domain name registry, the feature helped Micro:bit Educational Foundation gain award-winning recognition. Since then, we’ve continued to gather feedback to keep improving the design. Now it is even more user friendly and includes a range of highly requested features. There are even more features on our roadmap, which we’ll explore in the future. Suggestions include integration of MakeCode tutorials inside micro:bit classroom, support to join a classroom from within the iOS and Android apps and optional sign in with Google/Microsoft accounts. We’re proud to be able to provide such a valuable tool for classroom coding and hope teachers find it useful. Please do continue to let us know (via support or feedback option inside micro:bit classroom) what features you would like to see in the future so we can keep evolving it to support your requirements.
