Robots and Physical Computing

In a recent post ( First play with a SPOKE capacitive touch MIDI board ), I shared some first impressions of getting the SPOKE board connected, trying the web-based examples, and using it as drums in GarageBand. At the end of that post, I mentioned that the next thing I wanted to try was looking at the coding side of things., image taken from https://www.spokeboard.com/ Because the SPOKE board acts as a MIDI controller, my mind immediately went back to Sonic Pi . As I mentioned in an earlier post ( Spooky Hot-Cross Buns - Sonic Pi ), I have no musical ability at all, but I really enjoy creating with Sonic Pi—it is free, fun, and a brilliant bit of software. Putting the two together seemed like an obvious next step. For this experiment, I connected the SPOKE board as before, but instead of using an installed desktop app, I ran the web version of Sonic Pi ( https://sonic-pi.net/code.html ) straight in Chrome with no special set-up. This is a really useful option when you are working on a...

For a number of years, I have been playing with robots as a means of developing programming/coding skills with students. The problem is when classes get larger or it is used as part of an assessment there is very rarely enough robots to satisfy all the students  Turner and Hill (2008) . So therefore, the search has been on for a tool that allows robots to be simulated, programmed, ideally web-based, free and simple to use. Lately, a number of interesting tools have arisen. In this series of posts, I am going to look at experimenting with a few of them. In this post, starting by looking at VEXCode VR - available at  https://vr.vex.com/ . VEXcode VR  https://vr.vex.com/   from VEX Robotics ( https://www.vexrobotics.com/ ) is a simulator and programming tool for their Scratch-like programming tool VEXCode - at the time of writing is free. If you can do Scratch this is a nice next stage, consisting of the simulator (playground) and the programming environment (s...