Robots and Physical Computing

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...

Kamibot was a recent kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kamibot/kamibot-teach-your-kids-to-code ) from the interesting named, Korean company, 3.14 Co., Ltd as a robot you can dress up in paper outfits. It is actually quite a nice little kit that can be controlled via Android, IOS or PC (available at  http://www.kamibot.com/default.php along with some of the plans for paper outfits). The software is a simple Scratch/Blockly style interface and programming is simple. Connecting the robot to the, in my case, an iPad was relatively easy. I would welcome a Mac version of the KamiBlock software but apart from that nice robot kit, that allows you to get programming quickly if you have used Scratch, Blockly or Crumble.  They have recently twitted about new piece of software for Android device - using cards on the screen in combination with their paper mapboard. Kamicard, now available for download to Android users! Who says you ...