Pauline Maas
After her studies (Textile and Dutch educator) in Delft, Pauline worked in Information Technology (ICT) at a variety of companies, learning on the job, and often as the only woman employed in ICT. After twenty years she decided that “If I want more female colleagues, I have to teach them.” She started her own company 4PIP, teaching ICT and technology in schools and giving workshops for teachers. She noticed that there were not many coding books for children, and in 2008, her first book about GameMaker was published. More books followed about coding and how to implement coding in your school (CodeKlas). Since 2018 she has been the EU Coding Ambassador and is organizing CodeWeek in The Netherlands.
Two days a week she is an ICT teacher at Royal Visio (a school for visually impaired students where she is implementing the Coding Curriculum). The rest of the week she is writing, giving lectures and workshops, and having fun with making lots and lots of projects.
For her, the micro:bit is the best way to implement computational thinking at schools and is the perfect way for people of all ages to make, invent, learn, code, solve problems, work together, persevere—and have fun!
Peter Heldens
Peter graduated in 1993 with a MScs in Computing Science and has been working at Microsoft since 2007. In his spare time, he delivers Innovation workshops inspiring participants to build gadgets and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Leveraging open-source software and hardware, 3D design, 3D printing, and microcontrollers, he teaches everyone from 8 to 80 how to innovate!
In early 2010, Peter developed a conference call app with TouchDevelop (an experimental programming language developed by Microsoft Research). When his app went viral, he met Peli de Halleux, lead developer of TouchDevelop, the predecessor of what later evolved into MakeCode.
Peter’s life changed significantly after he received one of the first micro:bits from Peli in 2014. This enabled Peter to innovate much faster, creating even more cool projects in his workshop, such as high-pressure baseball machines, hockey games, NeoPixels attached to skis to teach parallel skiing, Milky Monsters, and many others. For more projects, see @peterheldens on Twitter.
Once Peter met Pauline in the summer of 2016, they created over 100 micro:bit projects, published on microbit101.nl website. In 2019 they presented the craziest projects at the BBC microbit:live event in Manchester. Many of these projects were the start of this book.
Let this book be the start of your innovation journey. The only limitation is your own inspiration!
Illustrator
Angelique Krijnen is a professional botanical artist. She contributed the unique illustrations for this book, drawing first in pen and filling them in with watercolors. (angeliquekrijnen.nl)