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!