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Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors

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Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors

#31
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily now we have Arduino that hides all the nasty stuff from users. There are 2 basic blocks: unit and loop. Adding repeating code blocks into loop block isn’t that hard. Jumping from Mindstorms to Arduino shouldn’t be a big difference.

My 9 year old son gets this so for any adult it shouldn't be a huge hurdle. Arduino is a very nice little platform.

IMO: It's slightly easier for small children to learn to program than adults. I'd imagine anyone here shouldn't have an issue but saying a kid gets it isn't quite right.

Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors

#33
post #21
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more about teaching kids/newbies to think in a programming way. That can be language agnostic. You're essentially trying to achieve something "complex" using simple instructions. At a basic level that's a great way to learn programming. As the problems get more complex it becomes obvious why paradigms & architectures exist, and your programming skills can improve.

I think that's the thing? Block programming languages come from folks who write "CS education" literature as opposed to the "new programming languages" literature. They're turing complete, because curriculums require teaching the use of if statements and for loops, but that's about it. If I actually wanted to use a block language at my day job I'd want affordances for larger, more complex programs. Compiler or JIT, c…

Whilst it was never completed, as funding for the program was diverted elsewhere, I worked on a team at a university using Blockly [0] compiling it to Lua, and parsing from Lua back into our specific runtime set of Blockly functions.

It could do absolutely everything that Lua could do. We also added a kind of multifile support, using tabbed views to reimplement libraries on the browser side of things (compiling into separate Lua files).

The idea was that educators at both ends of the spectrum could convert to and from the same visual representations. The primary school classes the uni were running could use blocks, and slowly move to normal Lua, one feature at a time, all the way up to the first and second year ICT programs for higher ed.

Because it could compile to Lua, we could use git and a whole bunch of other tools that already exist. There was an experimental C/asm.js branch to add in FFI support, but that was deemed too time-costly whilst the rest still had a bunch of edge-cases.

And then, unfortunately, the whole program got yanked. But about that time it was close approaching what I would consider "useable" for actual real work.

[0] https://github.com/google/blockly

Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors

#37
Sadly, LEGO keeps discontinuing great and simple systems like this and replacing them with "smart" versions that you have to use a phone with, since they don't want to ship remotes anymore. Giving an 8 year old a phone to play with their LEGO sets kinda defeats the point(they'll want to play Minecraft instead, from personal experience).

There's not even any features like Mindstorms that offer customization/programming, it's literally just a clunky touchscreen remote that doesn't pair with the model half of the time. I guess phones on the box sell better.

Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors

#38
post #34

What would be the ideal age to start introducing my son to these kinds of projects? At what time can they start programming? I don't want to start too early.

Give him normal LEGO now if you haven't already.

He loves LEGO.

Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors

#39
post #29

Cute, but the Legos are crazy expensive. What you save by using a Pi, you lose by buying Legos.

The "Prime" set they reference in the article looks awesome but it's over £300! A motor alone seems to be about £50.For schools maybe this is reasonable, not so much for individuals.
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