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 ...

Scratch 3 was launched on 2nd January 2019, so I wanted to know would Webcams still work with Scratch 3 as it did with Scratch 2. For example, in a previous post  Scratch, webcams, cats and explosions  the cat (Scratch) moved across the screen and a button burst when the object moved in the camera onto it.  Can the same thing be done in Scratch 3? The short answer is yes, but it is done slightly differently. The first change the video capture is not there in the blocks automatically; but is an extension that needs to be added. First, you need to add the extension blocks for video sensing. Go to the little icon at the bottom left of the screen (as shown below) this takes you to the extensions menu. Next, find the Video Sensing option and selected. The webcam, if enabled, with start automatically. A video sensing set of blocks is now in the list of block options.  The rest is very similar to doing this in Scratch 2. Moving ...