Member N9WXU Posted December 18, 2018 Member Share Posted December 18, 2018 Those of us with kids are always looking for fun ways to introduce them to the world of embedded systems. In addition to VEX IQ and VRC competitions, my kids have enjoyed the code bug and scratch. I will place a number of products I have used with the kids as separate replies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member N9WXU Posted December 18, 2018 Author Member Share Posted December 18, 2018 Codebug: http://www.codebug.org.uk I like this little gadget. It is cute. It programs in a variation on blocky (like scratch, mod kit, and others). The result is a unit that you drag onto the code bug. The code bug mounts on your filesystem so programing is simply a drag/drop operation. A simulator gives you a clear indication of what will happen for simple programs. The primary usage is to respond to buttons by lighting a matrix of LED's. Helper functions are available to scroll messages and draw pictures. It was the work of about 30 minutes for my 9yr old to compose a winking smiley face animation. A coin cell allows the child to "go show Grandma" with a standalone project. I don't like that you have to have a web account to use the tool. This requires the child to have an account. With multiple kids (I have 9) there is no support to have a master account with kid accounts where the "badges" and "accomplishments" can be kept separate. For those not familiar with CodeBug, this is what the interface looks like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member N9WXU Posted December 18, 2018 Author Member Share Posted December 18, 2018 Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu This environment is fantastic. Especially on a Raspberry PI or (as I have) a chrome box running Linux. One of my children (7 yrs old) LOVES scratch and is always doing little programs where some sprite is drawing lines across the screen or programming tunes with "play note" and "delay". The blocky environment is quite capable but it gets masochistic pretty fast. If all you want is the most extreme of imperative programming (do this, do that, do theOtherThing) this environment is perfect and simple for even very young kids. Perhaps this is a new paradigm to be called IMPERIAL programming. I think the accounts for each child is too simplistic. I may be an extreme case in the kid department but I don't think planning for 1 kid/student is reasonable either. I would love a parent/teacher view with dependent accounts so I can track progress on all of my children/students. Perhaps the accounts could be moved to other teachers or even graduated into independent accounts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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