Today’s Big Find came courtesy of the Computing at School mailing list, where Alan Stinchcombe gave the list a heads-up to a Scratch derivative called Enchanting.  It interfaces with an NXT brick and allows the user to program in Scratch, running programs on the brick.  What fun.  Already today me and the Boy have created a steerable buggy and a theremin and it’s only been installed for an hour or so.  It’s been great watching the Boy flipping between modes of finding solutions, judging whether he needs to alter the software or the hardware to accommodate a change in configuration.  Watching his thought processes take shape in the rapid development of alternative solutions has been amazing.

And there’s the Really Useful thing about it IMHO.  Enchanting is derived from BYOB, a derivative of Scratch that extended it’s usefulness by allowing programmers to build their own blocks so that they can rise above the English NC Level 5 and start using efficiency in the guise of reusable code. So from initial forays into Scratch, a young learner can progress with the same interface and environment to develop more complex programming structures and computational thinking which can be transferred to other situations and languages.

I think that’s a Good Thing.

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Money flows. That\’s what it does.

(This torture is what I do in some of my spare time.  Just so I can keep ahead of the kids).

It’s left me speechless.  Pictures to follow.

I eagerly awaited the pack of Bugs.  When they arrived they were the usual excellent standard of Top Trumps cards, but a few of them had AR markers on the back.  Hardly able to contain the excitement of the children (ahem, not my excitement of course) I downloaded the software and installed it. 

Then started to smell a rat.  The first AR card started the software, and each brought up a question that could be answered from on of the other cards.  OK, nice idea, I’ll buy that.  But the only one with an actual BUG on it was the last one, which could be made to dance, jump, tickle and various other non-buglike activities.  The children were interested for about a minute but then wandered off leaving me to suspect that Top Trumps have missed a trick here.  One lousy spider?  Give me a break.  I hope Ben 10 Alien Force is better than that when it comes out.

Scratch is a great programming/sequencing environment, intuitive and fun to use. Yet it’s made much more fun with the addition of a pico board.

A pico board is an interface with a load of sensors on it. Scratch can be programmed to read these sensors and their values, and then to take actions dependent on what the readings are. There is a slider, a button, a light sensor, a sound sensor and four other sensors that can read resistance ( so could have many different sensors, home-made or otherwise, attached).

The possibilities are endless. With my usual amount of creativity (zero) and the help of two small children, we managed to design the world’s first sound-operated multi-colour light-sensing etch-a-sketch. We revised the number of degrees in a circle, and the number of times we need to turn to draw a square. We even took in some astrophysics (about 360 days for the earth to go round the sun and it’s nearly a circle, yes?).

Program written, the fun begins.

The slider sensor was programmed to make the sprite move up and down, and if you shouted at it the sound sensor made it move left or right dependent on the slider value (using AND statements). Dimming the light made the colour of the sprite change and also changed the colour of the pen. Presto, a rudimentary etch-a-sketch. And nearly an hour of fun screaming at the computer, finding things out and making things happen.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The great thing for me is that the story is told through ever-changing pictures, yet the pictures are all dramatic and presented with impacty and enough time is left to absorb them. And she does it so quickly too – flowing from one to the next.