One of the coolest things I’ve seen recently is the platform that the University of Kent uses to teach programming. It’s a little circuit board that looks like a gameboy, complete with LCD and buttons, powered by a microcontroller.

They start people off with MicroPython and can teach core programming concepts as well as things like 2D graphics, different algorithmic performance, and so on with the platform. Some of the students write moderately complex games.

We’re hoping to do a version with them using our CHERIoT chips so that they can teach sandboxing and other security concepts on the same device.

I was a bit nervous about the performance (including the overhead of a Python interpreter that is optimised for memory usage and not performance) until I saw this post. Our chips runs at 250 MHz and has DMA that can push pixels to the LCD, as well as a couple of orders of magnitude more code and data memory than the original. I think it will be fine.

(And, yes, one of our customers has already ported Doom to run on the FPGA development platform, which has less memory)

@fred

It looks really fun. You can program on a grown-up computer, but then run them on the small device. I think the extra constraints (two buttons and a d-pad for input) make it a bit more fun.

I did a lot of programming on my Psion Series 3, which had similar hardware restrictions but a keyboard that you could just about type on (I wrote a couple of 3,000-word essays on it!), but I think being able to use a real keyboard would be nice.