Raspberry Pi Accessories - The Revolution Continues by Drew and Cabe

That's an excellent mission!  For younger kids, I really dig how PiFace integrates with Scratch.  And Python is a nice next step when a student is already familiar with programming logic from Scratch.  LEGO does already have the WeDo physical interface for Scratch: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/WeDo  But I believe it's pretty expensive ($130) and requires a computer (or I guess a Pi if the USB interface is supported).  I'm thinking PiFace+Pi would provide a cheaper route to do physical computing with graphical programming.

From the PiFace readme they link to Google Docs for a lot of nifty projects.  For example, a ButtonBox: https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B-UAZ9CyJCLGQjJ3RDlqa2pqaDg/edit?docId=0B-UAZ9CyJCLGaHI2T3NXOWlfLUE

I'd suggest shooting the maintainer an email, https://github.com/thomasmacpherson/piface, to see what more they have planned from an educational perspective.  You can also use their contact form:

http://pi.cs.man.ac.uk/contact.htm

And finally, the official Pi Education Manual looks great!

http://pi.cs.man.ac.uk/download/Raspberry_Pi_Education_Manual.pdf

Hi, yup, I agree.  The issue with Scratch is that the default Scratch "image" that comes on the Raspbian SD card image from RaspberryPi.org doesn't have Mesh enabled.  Mesh allows Scratch to communicate with the PiFace python handler over a local socket.

Those crazy menus I accessed were a way of digging down and allowing that Host Mesh option per these instructions:

http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Mesh#Mesh_by_Modification_of_Scratch

Scratch actually runs in a Squeak VM (it's based on Smalltalk).  Launching Scratch is actually running Squeak with the Scratch image file.  I believe I should be able to save the Scratch image file after making the Mesh modification so other's wouldn't have to do this (I took me a bit of head scratching to understand the odd system of menus and "shift-clicking").

I'll try to do that in next day or two and upload the Scratch image to Community and reply with a link here.

Thomas Preston has been quite helpful to me via email in getting it all to work.  He's one of the main committers for PiFace:

https://github.com/tompreston

He may have additional ideas for smoother Scratch setup.

Drew,

  Any chance that the PiFace can be more automated to setup the Scratch Enviornment GUI you showed off? 

As much as I would love to believe that people are going to use Linux to run all of this stuff, I found it very helpful to learn that the interface differed slightly when run and setup in Windows.  I pointed this out with a Twitter question and comment that if the target student age for scratch is defined as youth some of the issues during the webinar for RasPi to PiFace setup could be a stumbling point to youth using this independantly or at the least require setup by the instructor that kind of takes away time from more important things like curriculum dev that Joshua is interested in.

Is there a good way we could script this interfacing setup?  I don't use windows because I don't have to, so I don't know what in the world other than aversion to standards they provide these days... At the very least a remedy to divergent setup in the GUI frontend for the PiFace so the whole thing is more platform independent.  BTW I thought the webinar was great.

David

Thanks David and Drew.  I will plug away on those links!!  I am trying to get a cirriculum set up out here in California where we can introduce these technologies at private schools in my area (start with them first and then work my way to public schools).  I am currently teaching robotics (incorporating Lego NXTs), but this stuff is too cool to just keep to myself.  Thanks again for all your help and I look forward to more webinars in the future!!

I was just told the recording should be up in a couple days (there's some post-production processing that has to be done).  David's comment is accurate - we mostly just went through demos from the PiFace and Gertboard documentation (all linked in my previous comment).  The emphasis was on the PiFace with a quick demo of a GertBoard motor controller and ADC at the end.