Looking at the current variety of educational robotics, you are glad that children have access to a huge number of designers, finished products, and that the “entrance” bar to the basics of programming has fallen quite low (up to kindergarten). Massively there is a tendency to join first to modular-block programming with the transition then to more advanced languages. But this was not always the case.
2009-2010. Russia began to massively get acquainted with Arduino and Scratch. Affordable electronics and programming are beginning to conquer the minds of both enthusiasts and teachers, and the idea to combine all this is already in full swing (and has been partially implemented) in the global information space.
In fact, Scratch in version 1.4, which was released at that time, already had support for external hardware. It included support for Lego WeDo (Motor blocks) and .
But I wanted Arduino and robots based on it, preferably working on the basic version. At the same time, one of the Japanese arduinists figured out how to combine the platforms and laid out the schematics (although not all of them had to be “thought out”) and firmware for public access (but, alas, not even in English). Taking this project as a basis, ScratchDuino was born in 2010 (at that time, together with my wife, I worked at the Linux Center company).
The concept of a "replaceable cartridge" (doesn't resemble Micro:bit ?), magnetic mounts for robot components and the use of Scratch's built-in capabilities in terms of processing sensors and controlling motors.
The robot was originally conceived to be Lego-compatible:
In 2011, the platform was released and (already after my wife and I left the project in 2013) lives and develops at the moment under the name ROBBO.
Someone may object that there were similar projects. Yes, around the same time, the S4A project began to develop, but they were aimed at programming exactly in the Arduino style (with its digital and analog outputs) from a modified Scratch, while my development could work with the "vanilla" version (although we also modified to display blocks specifically for sensors from 1 to 4).
Then Scratch 2.0 appeared, and with it plug-ins for both Arduino and popular robots began to appear, and Scratch 3.0 out of the box supports a large number of robotic platforms.
blocky. If you look at popular robots, such as MBot (which, by the way, also used a modified Scratch at first), then they are programmed in a block language, but this is not Scratch, but a modified Blockly from Google. I don’t know if mine influenced its development, but I can say for sure that when we showed the Scratchduino platform to Blockly developers in 2013 in London, there was still “no smell” of robots there.
Now Blockly modifications underlie many robotic designers and educational robots, and this is another story, since recently a huge number of projects have appeared (and also sunk into oblivion) both in Russia and in the world. But in the Russian Federation, we were the first in the Scratch-implementation and “opposition” to Lego 🙂
What happened after 2013. In 2014, my wife and I founded our project PROSTOROBOT (aka SIMPLEROBOT) and went into the development of board games. But Scratch won't let us go.
We've got some interesting robot modeling work in Scratch and its descendant Snap!
PDF file with description can be downloaded and used freely , and finished projects . Everything works in version 3 of Scratch.
We also returned to programming robots on Scratch in our new educational board game Golem Battle. Card League of Parobots "and we will be glad if .
When you stand at the origins of something and “feel” the trends before their mass appearance, and it’s joyful that you were the first and essentially created the market, and it’s sad that you didn’t get the laurels of the winner. But I can proudly say that the fusion of Scratch and Arduino in RF robotics appeared thanks to my efforts.
Source: habr.com