Blockly? Google? Google Blockly - wow!! How did I miss That!

RE: Blockly? Google? Google Blockly - wow!! How did I miss That!

shabaz — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 15:09:57 GMT

The thing that concerns me, is that the moment a bright 8-year-old wants to do something more than a trivial "hello-world", it gets complicated very fast.

Check out this convolution that was needed to build a binary clock. It was very hard scrolling around that small window trying to piece this together. I'm hoping that the children that I've given some to find them

useful, and definitely they were initially impressed with the way it looked. I think youngsters may get £12 of value out of it, i.e. about as much as any other toy, but it won't hold attention once they hit these usability issues.

CodeBug may claim they beat micro:bit to market, but at what cost.

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RE: Blockly? Google? Google Blockly - wow!! How did I miss That!

balearicdynamics — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 07:51:35 GMT

Hey Lucie !

that's all correct. Frankly as I saw the limits of the online programming system of the CodeBug - with some suspects in mind - I searched and found this Google project. That is open source. I don't remember where I read this sentence but if I am not totally wrong this is just the platform from where they started.

I think it is not so difficult to manage the CodeBug with blocky, the only issue I see is the compilation process; as it is done by remote (veeeery bad) a CodeBug hack pass through the creation of a new, known bootloader. Then probably all the unused features of the PIC micro con be enabled on the device itself.

Enrico

RE: Blockly? Google? Google Blockly - wow!! How did I miss That!

michaelkellett — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 07:39:18 GMT

Lucie - you've rambled a bit (in a nice way) so I can't quite understand why you are bothering with the Codebug and Blockly at all.

I totally agree that (good) programming is hard enough without being encapsulated in a jigsaw so I've a bit lost sight of where you are trying to take your Codebug. (Mine's in a drawer somewhere, all interest being lost once I had looked at the board and knew what the processor was and pretty much how it's connected up.)

I think you could easily program it using a cheapo PIC programmer and a real C compiler - but I'm sure you know that - hence the question ?