Strongly disagree. People learned to program on the ZX81 because it was cool but essentially useless. It booted directly into a BASIC prompt and came with a fairly good introductory programming manual. The Spectrum was essentially a games console that a handful of nerds learned to program on.
Micro:bit is designed like the ZX81, using lessons learned from the Raspberry Pi. It's a useless toy, but it's a useless toy that is fantastically easy to program. Hook it up to a computer via USB, go to a URL and it Just Works. Type some code or drag some visual programming blocks, click "compile" and the program is running on your micro:bit. If you want to hook up a buzzer or a switch, you can do it with crocodile clips and one line of code. It's an incredibly slick onboarding process that is perfectly suited to education.
With a device like the Arduboy, it's too tempting to just play games. To program it you need to download the Arduino IDE, then install a bunch of libraries, then fiddle about with settings, then start reading through a bunch of documentation. With micro:bit you can go from unboxing to hello world in about five minutes, even if you've never written a line of code in your life.
Micro:bit is designed like the ZX81, using lessons learned from the Raspberry Pi. It's a useless toy, but it's a useless toy that is fantastically easy to program. Hook it up to a computer via USB, go to a URL and it Just Works. Type some code or drag some visual programming blocks, click "compile" and the program is running on your micro:bit. If you want to hook up a buzzer or a switch, you can do it with crocodile clips and one line of code. It's an incredibly slick onboarding process that is perfectly suited to education.
http://microbit.org/start/
With a device like the Arduboy, it's too tempting to just play games. To program it you need to download the Arduino IDE, then install a bunch of libraries, then fiddle about with settings, then start reading through a bunch of documentation. With micro:bit you can go from unboxing to hello world in about five minutes, even if you've never written a line of code in your life.