Step 1

• Plug in your Buzzer to Pin0, making sure the positive lead is connected to the yellow signal pin and the negative lead is connected to the black ground pin on the breakout board.

• Plug in the ADKeypad to Pin1, match the colours of the wires to the ones on the breakout board!

Step 3

• We want to set up the game so that when you press the A button on the ADKeypad, a pancake-flipping animation will play on the micro:bit!

• To do this, we’re going to create a function. A function is a piece of code that performs a specific task every single time it’s called. In this case, that task is to display the pancake-flipping animation.

• To create your own function, click on the Functions category and click the ‘Make a Function’ button. I named my function ‘flipPancake’

• When you do this, a new block will be added to your screen called ‘function flipPancake.’ This is where we define our function, i.e. what will happen whenever we run the function block!

• In this case, we’re going to add multiple LED blocks inside our flipPancake function so it appears as though our pancake is being tossed into the air and is wobbling as it falls back down.

• Once you have your function defined, you can run it anytime by using the new ‘call function flipPancake’ block inside the Functions category.

• Feel free to customise your own pancake-flipping animation. This is just one example!

Step 5

• Now that we can sense button presses, let’s create the main code for the game! We need to calculate the time whenever a player presses the A button and figure out if the pancake is mushy, perfectly cooked, or burnt.

• We start off with a forever loop. Inside the forever loop we put an if-else statement that tests to see if button A is pressed. If-else statements test to see if a condition is true; if it is true, then they do something, else they do something else. Because this if-else statement is inside a forever loop, it will forever test to see if button A is pressed.

• To do this, we’re going to check the current running time of the micro:bit and subtract the value of our startTime variable. This gives us the total time the current game has been running. We store this in another variable called totalTime (you can create this in the Variables category).

• After calculating the totalTime, we call our flipPancake function! This will animate the pancake!

• Next, we need to to test the totalTime to determine if the pancake is mushy, perfect, or burnt. We use if-else statements again for this, but in this case, we’re going to link the if-else statements together to test multiple conditions back-to-back. When if-else statements are linked together, only one can be run – as soon as the micro:bit finds one that is true it skips testing all others that are linked. We can add linked if-else statements by clicking on the gear icon on the if-else block and dragging in more if-else blocks.

• In this case, we start by testing if totalTime is less than 7000 (keep in mind this is milliseconds! So 7000 milliseconds = 7 seconds). If totalTime is less than 7000, we determine that the pancake is mushy and display a frowny face and a MUSHY message. If this first condition is true, the micro:bit will skip testing all the following conditions!

• If totalTime is not less than 7000, we test if totalTime is less than 8000 milliseconds. We know at this point that totalTime is greater than 7000, so if it’s also less than 8000, we determine that the pancake is perfect and display a happy face and a PERFECT message.

• Finally, if neither of the previous two conditions have been true, then we know that totalTime must be greater than 8000, so we determine that the pancake is overcooked and display an angry face and a BURNT message.

Step 7

• Now our game is working (hopefully)! Let’s add some more fun to the game: we have a buzzer attached to the micro:bit but haven’t used it yet! Note: this adds onto your existing code – it’s not a brand new section!

• The micro:bit has lots of pre-programmed music melodies available for us to use. Let’s add in music to our game. Here we add a different melody to each outcome of the game. For mushy or burnt pancakes, we add sad melodies, but for perfect pancakes we play the nyan-cat melody!

• Note that we want to set these melodies to play ‘once in the background’ otherwise it could pause the entire game until the melody is finished playing!