Damien George
Damien was born in Melbourne, Australia, and has been programming and playing with
electronic circuits since primary school. He completed a Bachelor of Engineering and
Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne, and then went on to complete a PhD in
theoretical physics.
During his studies he participated in the international Robocup competition, programming
autonomous robots to play soccer. He wrote embedded software for scripted behavioural
control and motion, as well as building parts of the hardware. He has since continued in this
area, building robots, a CNC machine, and writing embedded software for many
microcontrollers.
He worked professionally as a theoretical physicist for 6 years, on various topics including
cosmology and the Higgs boson. He then went on to develop MicroPython and ran two very
successful Kickstarter campaigns around this microcontroller language. He now works full-
time maintaining the MicroPython code-base and ecosystem.
Session
There are around 6,200 primary schools around Australia, and the curriculum has a requirement to teach Digital Technologies, which includes a coding portion. There are many challenges here, not least which is enabling the approximately 150,000 primary school teachers with the skills and resources to teach programming to young students. The AustSTEM foundation was set up to assist in this area, and developed a MicroPython based learning platform, which consists of a pocket-sized computing device that integrates with a web-based coding and teaching environment. The teaching material has many hands-on activities, with connections to nature and science. In this talk we will discuss this teaching platform, how it can help students transition from block-based programming to textual coding, and show some of the successes we have had so far in Australian classrooms.