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

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.