It was recently BASIC’s 57th birthday, the programming language many of us first used to do any computer programming on computers from the 1970s and 1980s like the Commodore PET, Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Apple 2. Worth remembering too that part of the team that created BASIC was Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, the first woman and one of the first people in the US to get a PhD in computer science.

I’d known for a while that there was a Japanese port of TinyBASIC for the BBC micro:bit. To be honest I thought it was a bit of a novelty as you need a computer to connect to it that will be more powerful than the micro:bit and able itself to run proper BASIC, but it’s actually very, very clever. It will allow you to access features of the micro:bit itself, like the LED display, the buttons, GPIO pins and so on, meaning you can do real physical computing with the micro:bit in BASIC. You don’t need any special hardware, just a micro:bit and some sort of serial terminal on a computer connected to the micro:bit by USB.

Read more here and see the video above.