I’ve been playing with Minecraft, inevitably prompted by various and sundry nieces and nephews. My explorations do not, however, revolve around surviving first-night Creeper attacks: I’m more interested in the programming interface.
Continue reading The dawn of a new civilisation… in Minecraft
Yes, yes, I know I’m a stuck record about this, but: you only have a couple of hours left to back Mirobot. The Kickstarter hit its last stretch goal last night, so the full package now includes the line-drawing robot, obstacle detection, line following and a speaker.
I’m delighted for Mirobot’s creator Ben Pirt, and looking forward to the production run later in the year.
Our favourite Kickstarter of the moment, Mirobot, reached its second stretch goal overnight, which adds a line-following add-on to the dinky little educational robot. Still a few days to book your unit!
In the previous post I wrote about the challenge of catching and holding peoples’ attention with electronics and programming activities – if you’ve seen DEMO: The Movie you’ll know I’m quite big on attention.
The Arduino microcontroller platform is a terrific tool, but it’s hard to present a project which is both immediately appealing and instructive. Projects tend to be fun but complex, or useful-but-dry tutorials. As with many fields of life, I suspect the answer is: robots.
Frikkin’ robots.
Lots of robots.
Continue reading Is Mirobot the droid we’ve been looking for?
Pick a random stall at Maker Faire UK and there’s a fair chance it’ll have flashing LEDs. And where there’s a flashing LED, there’s usually a little blue circuitboard driving it. The blue board is the famous Arduino, a family of open-source microcontrollers designed to allow easy interaction between code you write and real-world sensors and actuators.
There’s a complex and ever-expanding ecosystem of Arduino-compatible boards and interface units, and to a novice it’s all a bit overwhelming. I am that novice. Indeed, the list of Arduino projects I’ve completed looks like this:
However, awareness of what’s possible expands one’s set of available tools, and Arduino feels like the sort of thing I might, at some point, find useful. So every now and then I tinker a little. My tentative, toe-in-the-water approach to Arduino goes like this:
