Robots and Physical Computing

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...

I was fortunate to get a place at Picademy (#picademy) this week. It was a fantastic opportunity and great fun, especially as most of it was about Physical computing. In the screenshot above I was playing SonicPi ( http://sonic-pi.net/ ) programming music (or trying to create music in my case). If you haven't had a go at throughly recommend it. It is great that SonicPi is available on the Mac and PC as well.  Playing with connecting Python and Minecraft is very engaging and fun, but programming LEDs and Motors through either the the GPIO or using an HAT (see the images below) is just what I enjoy the most. In the above image was my attempt at a simple 'Dalek' - essentially a cup and straw, with a wheeled motor inside. Controlled using python,  Pi through an ExplorerHat. It essentially moved in a circle either clockwise or anti-clockwise. Rise of Rabbitsapien - A team of us put together a project of a robot with a rabbit (no other soft toys were ava...