Development of hard SKILLS and soft skills through competitive complex projects using BBC micro:bit

Hard Skills. Soft Skills. Programming. Project. Microcontroller. Microbit.

Hard skills competencies that referred to proficiency in any complex task, focused on practical abilities are acquired through education and practice. Soft skills competencies focused on behaviours and personalities are less tangible. The rules for how a programmer creates code is easy to teach, but how programmer may communicate effectively to other programmer, manager or customer is much harder to teach. We were interested how to effectively and encouragingly support the hard skills and soft skills teaching at primary and secondary school in computer science class. We decided to attend the competition with the goal to define, design, create, program, describe and promote the complex hardware project using microcontroller micro:bit. We realized that all students were able to find a practical problem that solved such as helping of people with blindness, keeping the water drinking regime under the control or even how to improve the health by playing the movement game. The research show that more than half students like this approach of teaching programming. More than 60% of them like the team work. The promote video creation was considered as the most enjoyable and easy part. The team discussion about the idea was considered as more demanding part even more than programming itself. The most difficult part of the project was the formulation of their results. All competition groups had a unique opportunity to presented their project as a talk or in the form of scientific fair at international conference. They practised the communication and language skills.