Robots and Physical Computing

  Dr Scott Turner   Director o f  Computing at Canterbury Christ Church University , Kent  and a Code Club Volunteer.     Age Range 10-14 years     Year Group 5-9 , Code Clubs .     Lesson Type:  Web programming     Objective   How to  use free  web technologies to create  Augmented Reality.     Requirements   A computer capable of accessing  the required software  and ideally has a webcam   Access to AR.JS Stu dio (free)   https://ar-js-org.github.io/studio/   Access to webhosting or  free webhosting sites such as Glitch.com or GitHub   A n image ( png , jpeg, gif), or video (mp4)    (optional) mobile device with a camera and internet access.         Augmented Reality (AR)  is becoming increasing  popular, but often means using proprietary packages such as   Blipp ar  to create  your  own , or ...

Spooky Hot-Cross Buns - Sonic Pi In a previous post on another blog I discussed quick play with Sonic Pi ( see  https://computingnorthampton.blogspot.com/2020/08/quick-play-... PS3 Controller to move a USB Robot Arm Guest Blogger Hiren Mistry, Nuffield Research Placement Student working at the University of Northampton. How to use a PS3 Controller to... 10 most read post (July 2020) on Robots and Physical Computing Blog Popular Posts Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour! The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming acti... Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour! The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , tha... Nuffield Foundation Researcher Placement Project: Further Development of Junkbots New blog  https://junkbotactivities.blogspot.com/  by  Muhammad Vadia on the Nuffield Foundation Researcher Placement Pr...

New blog  https://junkbotactivities.blogspot.com/  by  Muhammad Vadia on the Nuffield Foundation Researcher Placement Program has been working on developing a series of activities for the Junkbots project. These activities focus on using Scratch to develop coding skills by building up a simulation of the junkbot. These can be found at: What are Junkbots & intro to Scratch :  https://junkbotactivities.blogspot.com/2020/08/junkbots-introduction.html Activity 2 - Learning some new concepts:  https://junkbotactivities.blogspot.com/2020/08/junkbots-computational-concepts.html Junkbots - Understanding Scratch   https://junkbotactivities.blogspot.com/2020/08/junkbots-understanding-scratch.html Junkbots - Creating a sprite  https://junkbotactivities.blogspot.com/2020/08/junkbots-creating-sprite.html Junkbots - Moving the bot  https://junkbotactivities.blogspot.com/2020/08/junkbots-moving-bot.html Junkbots - Spawning some rocks  https://junkb...

In a previous post on another blog I discussed quick play with Sonic Pi ( see  https://computingnorthampton.blogspot.com/2020/08/quick-play-with-sonic-pi.html  ). In this post I am really just going to take it a bit further and some new features. The goal - spooky/moanful Hot-Cross Buns (the only bit of music I know the notes for), just so I can play a bit. So let us start with resources I have found useful, alongside Sonic Pi ( https://sonic-pi.net/ ); a really useful  webpage is  https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/notes.html  to turn the notes into the MIDI number (60, etc)  So by the end of the last post I going to adding a techno effect on top of the tune: use_synth :prophet with_fx :ixi_techno do   2.times do     play chord(:b4, :minor7)     sleep 0.5     play chord(:a4, :minor7)     sleep 0.5     play chord(:g4, :minor7)     sleep 0.5   end   4.times do     play ch...

Popular Posts Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour! The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , tha... Build your own Neuron in a Spreadsheet. Purpose:  To start to understand the basic idea behind how a Neural Network works by building the most basic unit a simple neuron using a sp... Dancing Kitronik's Game Zap - reacts to music You will glad to hear this is only a short post.   In an earlier post, Build a Disco Cube:bit that reacts to music ; the vibrations of music... Easy, Free and no markers Augmented Reality - location based AR For a few years, I have been a fan of Aframe and AR.js - these are fantastic tools for creating web-based Virtual and Augmented Reality.  No... WebVR 5 Playtime: Augmented Reality to display Videos In previous posts ( post 1 , post 2 ) I have raved over the brilliant combination of Mozilla's AFrame and Jero...

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 ...

You will glad to hear this is only a short post.   In an earlier post, Build a Disco Cube:bit that reacts to music ; the vibrations of music, makes the cube sitting on a speaker with the volume pushed to 11 (just to test it of course) react to the music. The accelerometers values in the micro:bit, in the three axis, are feedback to change the neopixels colour. Simple but good fun. With some very minor (and I do mean minor) changes it works on the Kitronik's Game Zap - eight pixels are altered at a time instead of five but apart from that nothing more. The code in python is shown below: from microbit import * import neopixel, random np = neopixel.NeoPixel(pin0, 64) while True:     for pxl in range (3,64, 8):         rd=int(abs(accelerometer.get_x())/20)         gr=int(abs(accelerometer.get_y())/20)         bl=int(abs(accelerometer.get_z())/20)         np[pxl] = (rd, gr, 0)   ...