Shadowing Practice: Microbit lesson 1 introduction - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Hello

and welcome this is Mr. Baumgarten back for the first of

a series of videos I'm going to do on the BBC micro bit this is the little box

that it comes in and the micro bit is a really great little device for beginner programmers wanting to learn Python.

You can also use it for a Blockly style interface but I'm going to be teaching Python today.

So inside the box what do you get?

So this is the micro bit go and it comes with a couple of cool little accessories.

You have your little micro bit you've got your usb to micro usb cable

and it comes with a little battery pack holder

even a couple of batteries

which i will quickly put together now on the front as

you can see we just had light up on us we

have five by five sets of leds on the front so little matrix of 25 leds

we have two buttons that you can program up to respond to presses

and we have a series of pins

that we can also program responses to on the back we have a compass a gyroscope

and accelerometer and a little reset button

and that's it it's a tiny cute little pack now software

that you are going to want to use is called the Moo Editor

that you can see I have up and running here.

This is where you can download the program from here.

This is my personal website and

if you scroll down to learning resources you'll see I've got a link for Python with micro bit.

This will be where I upload all my lessons and code samples

and lesson resources so if after watching the video you need some notes

or I'll have referred you to my website to download any particular code

or anything like that this will be where you can find it all right

but let's go back to Moo the first time you start Moo you will get a screen

that looks like this make sure you select the micro bit mode

and then click ok now these are the things I want to quickly go through in this particular video

so introducing the micro bit and the moo editor

which we've kind of just done and we'll talk about the import statement

that you're going to need on all of your python programs

that run on the microbit we'll run our first program

and we'll talk a little bit about how python works in terms of running programs

so without any further ado let's get underway from microbit that's what we want import star okay

and this basically means

that there is a section of code in a what's known

as a library over on the shelf somewhere there is some code

that we are wanting move to load up and bring into our program

and so from the microbit section bring in everything the star means everything

so bring it all into our program so that we can use it.

And so that gives us the micro bit functionality in Python.

And so the command that we're going to run is display.show.

And I'm going to open a set of round parentheses,

image with a capital I,

dot, happy, all in uppercase, close the brackets, enter.

get this program up and running on our micro bit first you want to save your program

and then you hit the little flash button

so presuming you are plugged in so this is the button

that will transfer the code from your laptop onto the micro bit

and you can see that the micro bit is flashing it's restarting

yellow light on the back is flashing indicating

that data has been transferred onto it

and now we have a little happy emoji so

that was obviously the program that I already had up

and running on it because it's now doing exactly the same thing

that it was done before because I've just reloaded the same thing onto it

but it is a fresh program

so how can I do something else with this maybe I

started out maybe I want to express my love for the microbit having gotten it working for the very first time.

So after showing the happy face,

let's put it in a sleep command.

Okay, and as I type sleep and I open the parentheses,

you'll see that Moo tells you a little bit of a hint as to what might go inside the brackets

and what the command does.

So here, this is telling us,

this will put the micro bit to sleep for some number of milliseconds.

One second is 1000 milliseconds worth of time.

And here's even an example.

So sleep2000 gives micro bit a two second nap.

So let's put 2000 in here and I'll close the brackets.

And then I am going to us display.show image,

again with the capital I,

dot, and this time let's express our gratitude with a heart.

heart.

Now close the brackets.

So I am going to show the happy face,

I'm going to wait for two seconds and then I'm going to show a heart.

So if I save this and then flash the microbit,

we will see the data transfer light flashing on us again

and in a few moments time we will get the happy face appear

and two seconds later it will transfer to a picture of a heart.

Ah, isn't that lovely now there are actually a whole bunch of images

that are already installed on the micro bit that we can use

so for example another one so if I go back to sleep

and then two seconds later I want to show a yes symbol and

then yeah let's run that one so save flash okay

and then we wait again it does the data load you

can see there the little orange glow of the data transfer

happy two seconds later heart two seconds later a big tick for yes Excellent.

So this brings us on to this fourth part of the lesson

that I wanted to draw out to you and that is

that when Python runs its commands unless we specify otherwise

when we use loop commands or run functions

and things later on by default Python will start from the top and run the first line

and then run the next line and then run the next line

and then run the next line okay

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so it starts statements are executed in order from the top working their way down

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if i didn't have this sleep command here then we the happy

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and the heart would have just flashed by so quickly

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that we may not have even noticed them in fact let's show what this would do

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so I'll save and I'll flash this onto the card all right

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and let's see if we can even notice the happy

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or the heart appear all right it just went looked as

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if it went straight to the tick and

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so this could be a source of frustration you might be

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I've asked it to show happy why is it not doing

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it why is it just going to the yes image

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and the reason is that programs are very fast

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so it is running through this at several thousand times per

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second all right that's how many lines it can execute several thousand per second

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so unless we tell it to go to sleep

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all right it's gonna it will do it it will show the happy image

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and the heart image but it will change

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and move on to the next line so quickly

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that we won't even notice it so that's why we've to put these sleep commands into place.

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The final thing I wanted to point out in this video is the importance of casing and spelling.

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This is always a challenge for beginner programmers.

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But if I had lowercase i on this,

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this program would not run.

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And in fact, Moo has a helpful little check button here.

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And if I click on that,

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it will say undefined name image because Python does not know what

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that is because the person who wrote the original programming for this image thing that we are using,

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they spelt it with an uppercase I,

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and so it will only work with an uppercase I.

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Same as for sleep, if I used uppercase S,

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it would not work undefined name sleep,

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uppercase D, undefined name display.

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all right if I didn't use the dot

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if I used a dash instead that would also generate

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that would generate errors telling me that there's not this thing called show all right

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because because show is a sub part I guess to describe it of display

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but by using the hyphen it's no longer saying

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that I want to run this thing that belongs to display

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so I need to run the dot and this needs to be a lowercase d

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and this needs to be a lowercase s if I check

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that now right it will work so make sure you are careful with your uppercases

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and lowercases make sure you're careful with your spelling

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and also your punctuation

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so what else do I want to quickly show you we can make up our own little images on this thing.

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We are not stuck with the images that are predefined and there's a big list that I will upload to my website,

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but we can create our own.

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And the way that we might go about doing that,

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so if I go to sleep here for 2,000 milliseconds,

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I can say display show image,

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and this time if I open a set of brackets Inside this image,

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I can create my own image.

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And the way that I do that is I will have a set of double quotes.

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And I want to give it a bunch of numbers.

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Actually, let's get it right.

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Five, five more, five more zeros.

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These are separated with a colon.

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Whoops, five more zeros and five more zeros.

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And what each of these zeros is,

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They correspond to the different LEDs on the micro bit.

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So the first five zeros are the top row.

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The second five zeros are the second row.

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Then we've got the middle row,

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then the fourth row and then the fifth row.

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So zero means off.

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Five means kind of turn the LED halfway on.

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And a nine, let's put some nines over here.

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The nine means turn the LED all the way on to full brightness.

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So if I was wanting to get creative and make my own piece of artwork,

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I might do something like this.

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Let's put in some fives.

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I have fives in the middle.

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And if I save and flash this,

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we will get our happy face for two seconds.

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Then we'll get our heart picture for two seconds.

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Then we'll get the yes tick for two seconds.

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And then we'll get kind of like a little bit of a picture of a boat.

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Two masts there and the boat.

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And you can see that the masts are not quite as bright as the boat itself.

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And you might need a little bit of imagination to see that it's a boat.

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We do only have a 5x5 grid after all.

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but for our purposes it is good enough.

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There's only one other thing I will quickly show you before I leave you to experiment on your own

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and that is how to write some text.

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Using the scroll command, again I use the double quotes and I can just write in here,

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hello from micro bit.

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and if I check my code good job no problems found

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so let's save let's flash it on to the micro bit

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and I will get my happy face for two seconds my

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heart emoji for two seconds the yes will appear for two

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seconds my little picture of a boat will appear for two seconds

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and then it will scroll and it will say hello from microbit.

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Hello from microbit.

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All right, that's more than enough for the first lesson.

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Why don't you experiment and see what you can create.

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All right, this is Mr. Baumgarten signing off.

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Shadowing Practice: Microbit lesson 1 introduction - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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