This is fantastic. My wife and I run an after school technology club at the school where she teaches. The school/principle are very supportive of what we are doing, but we have limited funding so try to stretch every dollar as far as possible.
I've found that the students respond most enthusiastically to any kind of programming that involves making something happen outside of the computer they are working at. That could be anything from writing code to send text messages to building robots and writing code to control them.
Thus far I've kicked in some of my own money to buy some Arduinos/Beagle Bones and various motors, servos, etc. Those things don't end up costing that much, but there is quite a lot of work to be done before the students can see any results, so only the more advanced students maintain interest. I think having an inexpensive platform like this that is ready to program for is a huge win.
The one thing I'm not thrilled about is it seems like this robot is programmed via a drag and drop graphical environment. I find that the students are perfectly capable of understanding simple code instructions and obscuring the programming with graphical elements just complicates their understanding of what's really happening. From another article about this robot it seems to indicate that code is being generated in the background, so hopefully that is easily editable, or the graphical environment can be ignored completely.
Comments
This is fantastic. My wife and I run an after school technology club at the school where she teaches. The school/principle are very supportive of what we are doing, but we have limited funding so try to stretch every dollar as far as possible.
I've found that the students respond most enthusiastically to any kind of programming that involves making something happen outside of the computer they are working at. That could be anything from writing code to send text messages to building robots and writing code to control them.
Thus far I've kicked in some of my own money to buy some Arduinos/Beagle Bones and various motors, servos, etc. Those things don't end up costing that much, but there is quite a lot of work to be done before the students can see any results, so only the more advanced students maintain interest. I think having an inexpensive platform like this that is ready to program for is a huge win.
The one thing I'm not thrilled about is it seems like this robot is programmed via a drag and drop graphical environment. I find that the students are perfectly capable of understanding simple code instructions and obscuring the programming with graphical elements just complicates their understanding of what's really happening. From another article about this robot it seems to indicate that code is being generated in the background, so hopefully that is easily editable, or the graphical environment can be ignored completely.