Plug-and-play for arduino
— November 4th, 2011
Here is a good news for the creative at heart non-programmers!
Minibloq is a graphical programming environment for Arduino™, Multiplo, physical computing devices and robots. One of it’s main goals is to bring closer physical computing and robotic platforms to primary schools, kids and beginneers.
It comes with a good documentation and is the outcome of a kickstarter campaign.
Source: minibloq
November 5th, 2011 at 19:37:22
The Lego-style programming environment is a pipe-dream that will NEVER become a reality. There are multiple reasons for that. I can go on and on and on about it, but the bottom line is – the visual language you will have to come up with – that is sufficiently flexible and expressive to have any practical usefulness – will resemble Chinese more than English and we all know that Chinese is MUCH harder to learn than English. Non-programmers are better off learning an easy, well supported, clean general purpose scripting language like Python. We’ll be doing a great disservice to creative non-programmer types by pushing them towards custom one-off hacks like Minibloq. No offense to the authors of the environment. THEY are probably having lots of fun with their project.
November 7th, 2011 at 07:16:25
I get your point of view. Being a programmer myself, I have grown-up to believe that there are no free lunches. But, I was thinking from the level of a child aged 6 or 7. This could prove to build the basic kind of logic inside the young minds. Just a friendly way to introduce people to the more exciting aspects of technology, rather than the deeply technical boring-to-kids stuff.
November 7th, 2011 at 14:09:51
We have been using Scratch 4 Arduino effectively in a 5th grade classroom. There is no way we could do this without a program like Minibloq! I applaud the effort. If you want it to do everything that you can do in the “real” programmers world then you are not the target audience!
I hope Minibloq does great!
December 3rd, 2011 at 09:49:09
This Minibloq is bot working in my 32-bit Windows7 Ultimate.
The Version I’ve downloaded is “Minibloq.v0.8.Beta(English)” EXE from http://blog.minibloq.org/p/donwload.html
Any help would be appreciated.
Please help me sorting out this.
December 3rd, 2011 at 10:35:35
Okay, now I got it working. I must have downloaded the zip file, not the executable merely.