Farnell, an Avnet Company, announced, in partnership with the Micro:bit Educational Foundation, that it has reached the significant milestone of manufacturing and distributing more than 10 million BBC micro:bit computers to help young people worldwide discover coding through physical computing.
Founded in 2016, following the initial UK micro:bit campaign by the BBC and a team of partners, the Micro:bit Educational Foundation is a non-profit organisation that supports educators to inspire young minds with digital creativity. For nearly a decade, Farnell’s operations have supported the Foundation’s work by manufacturing and distributing devices around the world. By doing so, more young people have been introduced to the possibilities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
One of those children is Josh Lowe, who started coding with micro:bit when he was 12 years’ old as part of the initial micro:bit rollout in 2016. He developed his own programming platform, named Edublocks, from block-based coding to text with the skills acquired from making coding fun. Now a young adult, Josh works for a major AI and data science platform, Anaconda, which acquired the programming platform he created when he was younger.
This is just one story from millions, and Farnell’s distribution of micro:bits has helped the Foundation reach an estimated 56 million students worldwide. With Farnell’s continued manufacturing and distribution support, the Foundation’s goal is to eventually reach more than 100 million children worldwide by 2028.
Nursel Dogar, Global Single Board Computing Business Development Manager at Farnell, said, “Children who received micro:bits back in 2016 are now engineering students, developers and entrepreneurs. This year we reached the 10 million milestone. Many of these children are girls and from disadvantaged backgrounds who will be the engineers of the future. We are very proud to make such a positive impact, and we will continue supporting the Micro:bit Educational Foundation on their mission to ‘inspire every child to create their best digital future’.
To appeal to students who might feel that high-tech is not for them, the BBC micro:bit is designed to be simple and physical, to inspire young people to learn digital skills. In particular, the Foundation’s aim is to provide opportunities to young people from diverse backgrounds, which could help to boost social equity and contribute to the creation of better technology.
As early as 2017, a survey of students who had received micro:bits showed that 90% said it helped to show them that anyone can code, and 88% said the micro:bit helped them to see that coding wasn’t as difficult as they thought.
Among teachers, 85% said the micro:bit had made ICT/Computer Science more enjoyable for their students, and half of the teachers who had used the micro:bit said they felt more confident as a teacher.
Farnell shares the Foundation’s aim to inspire every child to create a better digital future and is committed to achieving this aim through its continued partnership, as it works towards its next distribution milestone of the micro:bits.
